Page 39 of The Wild Beneath

“Jesus, Annie. Were you drinking?” Evan’s voice is slurry. He’s some floppy version of Evan; the way he reaches for her is messy and off balance. He smells of alcohol.

“Courtney gave me some wine,” she says, or at least she thinks that’s what she says.

“Did one of you give her the seashell wine?” Evan looks around.

“I want to stay here,” Annie says.

“That wasn’t just wine you had.” Evan tries to pull her up. “Come on. You could drown.”

She refuses. It would be better to stay with the songs. That would be best. “Leave me here.”

“You need to get out, Annie.” His voice and the laughter pull her from where she wants to be, inside the sea music, the dreamy ocean-radio.

Evan tries again to lift her to standing. “I’m such an idiot,” he mutters. “This is all my fault.”

Thunderous laughter around them. Annie gives up and lets Evan carry her back to the boat, back onto the sticky leather seat. He wraps a towel around her. But she doesn’t want it, or him. She wants to be back inside the music, away from all of them. Away from the noise.

Chapter 15

Before

Aiden stands at the helm early the next morning.

His fingers trace the carved names on Amphitrite’s wooden helm: Annie, Mara, Aiden. As if the three of them are inside the safety of his palm every time he steers.

After they left Annie ashore with Evan, they sailed through the night, as they typically do. Referencing his chart, they are forty nautical miles from Hale’s already. In front of him sits his thick, leather-bound ledger, closed with a black string around the cover. He undoes the string and opens the ledger to the correct page.

He drinks his usual coffee, strong and black. It steams into the morning breeze. Using a felt-tipped pen, he notes in neat lettering on a dated line that Annie is not aboard.

As he’s done since he was a teenager, methodical and regular, he still tracks everything on his checklists and tables. He captures the stories of the tides. Turning to his chart again, he checks the bearing and jots down their northerly direction. They’re making good time. Mara’s soft footsteps come up the companionway. She always makes him turn off the radio. She doesn’t like the static or the chatter. And she doesn’t like to look at the GPS.

Mara is beside him. She wraps her arm around his waist and rests her cheek against his shoulder. Her warmth transfuses through the knit of his shirt.

She’s always needed this—­affection and closeness, to have as little space between them as possible. He loves this about her. Even after all these years, Aiden feels the same pull to her that he always has.

Mara runs her fingertips over the words in the ledger. She pauses in the middle of the line about Annie.

“Something’s not right,” she says quietly.

At that same moment in the morning, Annie sits on the tall bluff beside Ruth’s cabin, Evan beside her, their feet dangling over the rocky ledge of the bluff. The horizon is empty.

Around midnight after the party, Evan had carried her off the boat. After making her drink a tall glass of iced water with two ibuprofen tablets, he tucked her into her bed, then slept on the couch. Her head had finally stopped spinning around 3:00 a.m. The ferns are now normal ferns again, not ones that breathe.

But the noise didn’t stop, nor her intolerance for it. When she woke up in a cold sweat an hour ago, she got up and changed, dug a pair of foam earplugs out of Ruth’s bedside table, and dove back into bed. Under the crisp white sheets and thick cotton comforter, she felt like a sinking ship. She stared at the wall, bunching the blanket around her ears. It didn’t help. The overhead fan rumbled, the clock ticked loudly on the bedside table, electrical buzzing continued nonstop. Like vertigo, she felt an awful oscillation inside her. Her legs rocked.

“It’ll pass,” Evan says now. He has not mentioned the earplugs, which she’s still wearing.

“What will?”

“The mushrooms from the wine. The hangover.” He leans one hand back on the granite behind him. “I should never have taken you there.”

“I think I have sea legs,” Annie says, but she doesn’t know what it is. It’s not a hangover. It’s quicksand, fast and devouring her, and she can’t crawl out of it. She tries to imagine where her parents are. Even now, she can feel the current pulling them along. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she says finally. She presses her fingers into her temples.

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” he says. “I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

She weighs possible responses: It’s no big deal. It’s all your fault. What was all of that? Do people actually like any of it?

She goes with: “It’s not your fault.”