Page 40 of The Wild Beneath

He opens his mouth to reply, but they’re interrupted by Ruth, who has a garden hoe in her right hand and a sun hat tied snugly around her chin. A reassuring pink blooms in her cheeks.

“So?” Her eyebrows are raised.

Annie takes out her earplugs and puts them in her pocket.

“What’s going on with those?” Ruth says.

“Wore them overnight, is all.”

“And still wearing them?”

“The party was loud.” Annie doesn’t elaborate. But the earplugs were helping, muffling the noise, as if she were dunking her head underwater. She gets to her feet and brushes pine needles off the back of her shorts.

Ruth stands over Evan and taps the top of his head. “You watched out for her?”

“We shouldn’t have gone.” Evan looks guilty. “It’s not worth talking about.”

Annie feels a new flush of shame.

“Well... everyone needs to grow up sometime.” Ruth seems to be treading lightly. “Annie can’t stay onAmphitriteforever.”

Annie leans her head onto Ruth’s shoulder, inhaling the clean scent of her laundry soap. “I might have to.”

“Have you been thinking about school, like I asked?” Ruthwould like nothing more than to send Annie and Evan off to university in a flurry of pencils, notebooks, and tinned fish.

“Mom wants me to stay. And I’ve never done anything else...” Annie trails off. Does she want to do something else? The sea, fishing, migrating the coast has been the sum total of her experience; everything else feels foreign. But where is her life going? Her head hurts.

The earth trembles under her feet.

Annie looks at Ruth and Evan, who do not seem to notice anything amiss.

“You need to figure out what you want,” Evan says.

“What about you?” she asks. “Is working at Hale Timber what you want to do with the rest of your life?”

Evan pushes himself up off the granite. “If I can make it better, I should stay. Right?”

A stiff breeze picks up. Another tremor passes through Annie’s feet.

“Did you feel that?” she asks.

“Feel what?” he says.

Ruth looks at the ground.

A low-pitched drone starts up. Annie feels as if she’s tilting over, but when she looks around, nothing is moving. She swears the land is sliding away, a carpet pulled out from under her.

“Do you feel it now?” Annie asks.

Evan leans over the edge of the bluff and looks down at the sea. He stares for a long time, frozen there, until Annie and Ruth join him.

Over a halting minute, a long strip of land reveals itself. Sand appears where they’ve never seen sand before. The sea has pulled away from the shore and the seaweed-covered plain of the channel stretches out bare beneath them.

Annie can’t look away.

Evan takes her hand.

“We have to get higher,” Ruth says, as she grabs them bothby the arms.