Page 109 of The Wild Beneath

He had to find a new path.

Evan returned to the trailer, its corrugated metal walls and muddy carpeting, the stale smell of coffee. He didn’t look anyone in the eye. His armpits were sweaty. Ed’s gaze pierced through Evan’s skull.

Evan signed. He gripped the pen so hard it left indents in his fingertip.

Chapter 42

After visiting the beach that one time, Annie returns nearly every day.

She goes before work, after work, around the edges of her life.

The next time Annie gets her blood checked, her hemoglobin levels are up. Tessa wonders how it happened so quickly.

“A single iron infusion wouldn’t help that much,” she says. “What are you doing differently?”

Annie walks the shore. The sand is polka-dotted with shells—­purples and whites. Seagulls scout for remains among broken crab shells. She steps between long lines of seaweed, collects misshapen pieces of sea glass in her pockets.

One night, she wears a bathing suit under her clothes. Maybe it’s crazy to swim in eight degree Celsius water in the middle of winter, but the idea is unrelenting. She works up the courage to shed her clothes, folds them neatly, and leaves them behind on the driftwood.

Her toes touch the edge of the water. It feels illogically warm. She takes another step, up to her ankles. The waves froth against her shins. She wades until the water is past her knees, her thighs. Then she’s up to her waist. Her fear has eased.

Annie pushes off, free-floating.

She rolls onto her back, buoyant. Her skin feels loose. Her ears are under, filled with seawater. Her eyes close and visionscome in waves: ivory coral walls, rainbow fish, the twirl of an octopus exiting its den. Anemones with their jets of seawater and their soft pushing-and-pulling tendrils. A million wild stories she can’t quite touch.

If she could have slept here, she would. If she could merge into the sound, she would.

It’s a long time before she emerges, dries herself, and heads home in the dark.

High

High tide is completion. At its peak, the water is clearer as the advancing tide brings in clean water from deeper offshore. Waves lap at the highest marks on the beach, erasing human footprints.

Chapter 43

Forty years before

Aiden MacLeod takes his fishing boat out before dawn.

He is eighteen years old. This is his favourite hour, mist in the air, alone with the tide pools. He starts the engine and shoves off the jetty.

It’s the end of August. Hale’s Landing lies five kilometres to his east. The storefronts and cedar-shingled houses are visible in the faint light from the wharf.

This town has been Aiden’s centre of gravity since he was born, but this morning is different. Everything is set in motion. He packed a black suitcase last night and hauled it out from his bedroom to the front hall. It waits there to be loaded in the back of Ruth’s beat-up Honda.

Today, he’ll board the ferry. Its engines will leave a foamy wake behind as it chugs out to the Pacific. He’ll watch his hometown fade, its potholed grid of roads, tall cedars, and swooping eagles, until he can’t see it past the rocky elbows of the channel.

He tries to imagine the new life ahead of him: the university auditoriums filled with students, their pencils and pens scratching in notebooks. Ruth has been leaning on him. Medicine would be a good choice, she says. Practical. Ruth lovesthe mending of flesh, pulling fish hooks out of palms and tetanus booster shots.

He wants to make her proud.

But out here, he doesn’t have to answer to anyone, except himself and the sea. The water stretches before him into what feels like infinity.

He pours a cup of coffee from his thermos and perches himself at the helm. Opening his ledger to the correct page, he makes a quick note of the date, the weather, and his coordinates. A colony of sleeping cormorants roosts in the scrubby pines on his starboard side, nests of sticks and seaweed. He drives on. The running lights pool in the flat water ahead until he’s well down the channel. When he slows, waves fall away from the engine.

Hale’s Landing is now only specks of light in the distance.

Aiden roots around in the drawer under the helm. His Uncle Henry’s cigars, a few receipts from selling catch at Rosie’s. Pencil stubs with shavings, a bungee cord, dusty charts of coastal British Columbia. Then he finds his harmonica in a suede case, wedged at the back. He slides it out. It’s heavy and cool in his palm.