Chapter 52
Now
It’s a wave that awakens her.
Annie knows without opening her eyes: She’s no longer drowning. She’s in a bed and wearing dry clothes. A soft cotton blanket
rests over her shoulders and down to her feet. But somehow, she’s moving—-floating—-as if the mattress underneath her might
give way to open water.
She opens her eyes. The sun is bright through a copper porthole. Tattered sailing books fill an overhead bookshelf.
Here’s what I know about the sea, Annie. It’s Walker’s baritone voice in her head. The taste of salt water lingers on her tongue. Her mind holds the image of indigo
water.
Is she still alive or is this some kind of afterlife? She probes the skin beneath the thin cotton of her shirt, surprised
to find everything there: fingers, toes. All warm and intact.
A whale was underneath her. Was a whale underneath her? Its sleek grey skin was against her palm, its solid body under her
legs. Didn’t water slide into her mouth, her lungs, her arteries?
People think she’s lots of different seas with different names. But she’s one sea with one song.
Annie’s eyes are drawn again to the porthole.
Morning light streams in and she somehow knows without seeing that she’s inside a boat anchored in a protected cove.
A green expanse of Douglas fir and Sitka spruce covers the mountainside.
Songbirds hum in the branches. It is the exact moment of highest tide, she is sure of it, a stilling of the water below.
This is the in-between moment.
She likes to tell stories, but she doesn’t tell them all at once. Her stories spread thousands of miles, borderless, folding
into each other, harmonizing. Expanding until they’re everywhere. She told us the story of you.
She remembers Aiden speaking about the movement of animals before a large earthquake: “No one could ever prove this,” he told
her at sailboat school, at the galley table. “But chickens stop laying eggs, bees flee their hives, dogs get restless, and
they often escape the wake area of tsunamis. They save themselves. It’s like they’re attached to the ground, to the sea. They
can feel what most people have forgotten how to feel.”
Annie is remembering.
She wants your story, too.
Walker is here, above her on deck. She can feel his exact proportions, as if she could touch him from here. The sound of his
footfalls patter above.
She props herself up on her elbows.
And then he’s here, he is right here, climbing down the companionway, walking across the galley and standing in front of her,
a concerned look on his face. He’s wearing dark jeans, a brown leather belt, and a blue cotton T-shirt. Bare feet.
Annie has difficulty keeping him in focus.
“Don’t get up too quickly,” he says.
Annie’s breath is shallow. “You had my clothes here.”
“I packed everything you need.” He sits on the edge of the bed.
She shakes her head. “I can hear you inside of me. It feels like a dream.”
He reaches over and touches her hand. Annie closes her eyes to a vision of water, clear blues and greens. A rocking sensation.
Annie opens her eyes and she is back in the berth, still under the blanket.
She wants to know everything he knows. “You tell me things without saying them.”
“It’s not me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s never been me. It’s the sea.”
This makes her hide her face in her hands. She’s not sure why. Her eyes are welling up. “Why couldn’t I hear it before?”
“You could always hear it. But now you’re ready to listen. Come up on deck?” he asks.
“Why?”
“There’s someone for you to see.”
Who is he talking about? Annie doesn’t know how to broach her thousand questions. Where has he been, and how is he alive if
he died?
“We’re the singers,” he says, his voice light and springy. “But the sea is the song.”
Walker raises the anchor.
He does not set a bearing. He does not check the charts. Annie takes the helm as he lifts the mainsail and it catches the
wind. It’s blustery. He doesn’t seem to mind. His heat radiates as he sits next to her in the cockpit.
Annie still can’t unscramble her thoughts. “Why were you away so long?” she tries.
“We don’t control the timing.” He smiles.
Annie shakes her head. “But where did you go?”
“You’ll see. She’s going to show you.”
“Can I go where you went?”
“You belong here.” He takes her hand. “The rest of us can’t stay without getting . . . disconnected. Sick, in a way. You remember
when your mom stopped humming?”
Annie touches her whalebone necklace. The three beads on the leather cord.
Did she tell Walker about this? It’s true—Mara did stop humming.
Annie remembers every painful detail of that day; the whale dying on the beach, Mara’s sobs and the abyss of silence that followed.
They left Hale’s to sail south right afterward.
“But you can connect to both,” Walker says. “Earth and sea. As long as you don’t get too far away.”
“Too far away from what?”
“From one or the other.”
Those rose-coloured mornings in Baja on Amphitrite, the weeks they did not go ashore. There was joy. But Annie was a little adrift, wasn’t she? Like if she wasn’t careful,
she couldn’t come back.
Until they sailed back into Hale’s each fall, to that boy running down Ruth’s dock with earth under his fingernails.
Walker smiles again before letting go of her hand to steer. They rise and fall over tall waves. Annie’s questions dissolve;
they seem too trivial, too far from where she is now, fitting perfectly inside the sound.
They sail like this, wordless, until they arrive.
“This is the spot.” Walker takes her hand again to show her: white-tipped waves and ocean beneath. It flows up through her
arm in a flash. She blinks and it’s over.
“You keep doing that.”
His eyes are gentle. “Let’s swim.”
They anchor again and undress.
He pulls her to stand over the transom in their underwear. “And afterward, Annie? You have everything you need here on the
boat. She’s all yours,” he says.
“Polaris?”
“Yes. Your home. Think about it as a maiden voyage.” He grins, then dives without a splash.
Annie climbs down one rung at a time. She tries not to think about Galene, and the last time she stood on a ladder over the sea.
Walker surfaces amid the waves. He sees her hovering there, almost naked, not getting in. He says: “You’re okay, Annie.”
She believes him. Annie edges down in a crouch and pushes off. It takes her breath away, how good it feels this time.
“She’s coming up,” he says.
Before Annie can ask who he means, a moan in the water, eerily familiar. She can’t be more than a few feet away as a humpback
surfaces beside her. The proximity is breathtaking.
Walker is here. He takes her hand again.
“Remember this?” Through his touch, a vision of runaway Galene in the far distance, Annie alone on the tabletop of the sea, nearly unconscious. She feels porous, permeable, as if there
is no divide between her hand, his, and the body of this creature in the water next to them.
A bridge forming.
“Come here.” He places Annie’s hand on the whale’s back. She is taken back to that place on the threshold of consciousness,
Mara’s voice and the sea and the whale beneath her body.
“You’ll need to let go,” Walker says.
The whale whistles and hums, hovers, as if asking permission. Annie’s belly is up against the back of the whale.
“Will you dive with her?”
Annie hesitates. The feeling is not fear . . . it’s an insatiable hunger she’s never felt before. Anticipation. Resting her
hands on the whale’s fins, she closes her eyes. A deep breath in. She holds it.
As if understanding, the whale submerges. The mood underwater is inviting. A delicious heartbeat, pacifying her, like she’s
a baby in the arms of a parent.
They go deeper. Annie opens her eyes to exquisite blue depths.
Let me go back to the beginning.
Annie knows this voice. She’d know it anywhere, from the lullabies in the berth of Amphitrite. Calling her to come for dinner. Whispering under the galley table, catching ladybugs in mason jars. Singsong fairy tales, bedtime stories.
Remember how to dive.
Fragments reach Annie from the beginning of her life, as far back as birth. The hot skin of Mara’s chest and the interface
between sea and air. Being cradled by her. Then, a vision of her fingers laced with Mara’s during her first steps across Amphitrite’s deck. Lying underneath the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of her berth.
You can listen with your whole body.
Battered buoys, channel markers, lighthouses. Aiden’s fingertips tracing a course along a worn chart. The taste of lemoned
salmon at dinner time. Mara’s easy laugh.
Let the sea tell you a story.
Annie’s a child again. Her knees are wet as she kneels in a tide pool. Two sand dollars look up from the water. She swims
among seahorses and the chirps of dolphins. Pulling halibut off a curved fishing hook. Sailing fast, cutting along the harshest
winds.
The depths erode space and time, moving Annie into the immediacy of one memory: Aiden clasps the whalebone necklace around
Annie’s neck. Mara sits empty-eyed in the berth.
“Why are we staying on the boat, Mom?” Annie asks.
Mara pulls Annie onto her lap, brushing the tip of her nose lightly. “This is where we belong.” Her voice is nearly musical.
“Here’s what I know about the sea: She’s full of stories. Let me tell you one about how whales turn themselves into other
creatures. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things.”
Mara hums. Inside it, there is everything.
The whale takes Annie even deeper. A pressure loads against her eardrums. Another vision emerges: the rogue wave, capsizing
Amphitrite during the earthquake. Mara is unconscious and sinking through a primal metamorphosis, reawakened to what she once had been.
Annie’s own stories spill out, one by one, everything she’s gathered. The skyscrapers and six-lane highways tumble off into
towering kelp forests. The TVs and cell phones, computers and keyboards disintegrate and reassemble into undulating manta
rays, basking in the current. Her inboxes drift off in a trail of jellyfish tentacles. The power cords and chargers and cables
and connectors tangle in the nooks and crannies of a coral reef. The hospital rooms, the machine-healing, the lines and tubes
and vials and masks turn boneless and fluid, pouring into the arms of a waiting octopus.
The sea takes all of it.
Annie realizes, somewhere in the wild beneath, she’s not alone anymore. A growing sense of many other whales. The fathoms
of water between them are only a thin membrane. A map of everyone inside the sound. The water is alive with presence. A deeper,
nearly inaudible oscillation, moving time even further backward. Back before there was time. Back when there was only story:
strands of it, electrically potent. Infinite.
The deepest water forces a kind of surrender. Annie forgets her body and her need for air. Her senses ignite inside of this
story. It feels thousands of feet deep and centuries long.
Their eventual ascent is like waking up. Annie remembers her body—-that she still has a body. That she has legs that walk
on the ground. Her lungs burn. The bumpy surface of fins returns under her fingertips as they break the surface.
For what duration she was under, she doesn’t know.
She scans the horizon, the waves, the boat deck.
Walker is gone.