Page 129 of The Wild Beneath

“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 runawayGalenein 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 ofAmphitrite. 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 acrossAmphitrite’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, capsizingAmphitriteduring 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.