Page 21 of The Wild Beneath

“Can I try it?” he asks.

The axe looks comfortable in his hands. He takes a swing and the wood splits smoothly in half. He’s wearing Aiden’s green rain slicker. For a moment, it’s as if Walker has always been here. The swing of the axe through the air, the thump, and the muddy footsteps back and forth. But she actually knows so little about him.

“Is there nothing else you remember?” Annie asks.

He splits one more piece of wood, then pauses. He always pauses for longer than she expects.

“Do you remember being a baby?” he finally asks.

“I do.” Annie remembers more about babyhood than anyone does, according to Evan.

“What do you remember?”

She pushes her hands deep in her pockets. It feels dangerous to haul up what she’s lost. “Crawling on the boat deck and my mom laughing... the smell of orange peels. Wet bathing suits drying on a line.”

He smiles at her. “Anything else?”

“It’s like pictures I can’t string together. Snapshots.”

“Like dreams?”

“A little. I remember how it all felt.” The warm embrace of her parents. A sturdy and durable ocean that slowed everything down. “What do you remember?”

“It’s like I remember dreams,” he says. He looks at her for a while longer. Wouldn’t anyone else be distressed by their own amnesia? At being lost? Rain dumps from the sky, drenching them again. He laughs at the rain. Annie is surprised how musical his laugh is.

“Annie!” Ruth interrupts from the porch. “Leave him to it. Come peel these potatoes.”

The next day, Annie wakes at sunrise.

The rain has eased off. Chickadees are deep in their songs. She feels the pull of the water, the familiar desire to look at the sea out her window.Drifting, her dad had called it. When the ocean makes you calm just by looking at it.

Not now. It’s been ten days since the tsunami and she’s sure she’ll never see the water the same way again.

Annie pushes it all down, swings her legs out of bed, and goes to the closet. She rearranges her growing collection of items: two matching zipper pulls, a thin gold bracelet, and dented bottle caps in a rainbow of colours. She shrugs into a Whidbey Island hoodie her dad bought her, that time theystopped in Langley for the farmer’s market. They ate tangerines and watched a pod of orca play in the harbour.

Eleven days since she hugged them goodbye.

Ruth says work is the antidote to pain; to take their minds off it. It’s not time yet, she says, to unravel. First, they have to survive.

Immediately after the tsunami, before Walker arrived, Ruth had gotten to work. She set broken bones and handed out antibiotics to the people coughing up seawater. She swept piles of silt from the cabin and scrubbed the soggy couch cushions. In her pragmatic way, she left Annie with a shovel and told her they needed to eat.

“There may not be any clam beds left,” Ruth said. “But if anyone can find them, it’s you.”

Annie collected what she could. Some shellfish beds were gone, but many remained, as if their own cove had been spared the worst, like Walker said. Ribbed cockles and moon snails, lime-green sea lettuce. She dug for clams and let the task consume her. Instead of screaming, she shovelled harder.

The week of heavy rain has kept her off the beach, and they’re living off jerky and canned beans from the back of the pantry.

Annie tiptoes around, gathering her clamming gear, then eats a piece of smoked halibut from the jar on the counter. Embers smoulder in the stove. By the meagre light they shed, she sees Walker moving across the living room toward her.

“I’ll come with you?” He doesn’t ask where she’s going; it never seems to matter. He wants to be alongside her, and she wants him along, too. It feels like being alone but together, at the same time.

A greyish haze pushes away the night. The sun smudges pink and orange at the horizon as they walk out on the bluff and down the ladder.

The tide is out.

Walker stops at the high-water line. He pokes a cracked Tupperware container with his shovel. A half-buried white crab scoots away under the other trash. “There’s so much junk,” he says.

“It’s everywhere,” she agrees.