Page 85 of The Wild Beneath

A bubbly voice greets her on the other end. “Hello! I’m Lori Schnell from the new accelerated coastal medical school program. Is this Annie MacLeod?”

“It is.”

“We read your entrance exams,” she says. “We’ve been skimming from the top results. You scored in the ninety-seventh percentile. We think our program is a good fit for you.”

As Lori’s pace ramps up, Annie only catches bits and pieces. “I’m sorry? Could you please repeat that?”

“. . . Six years for general practice. We should’ve done this ages ago, right? Shortened it like the European model,” shegoes on. “The province was short on medical personnel to begin with. Now, look at us...”

“You’re saying I got into medical school?”

“We need to backfill. A sustainable plan, you know? I realize it’s a lot to take in.” Lori’s voice is tinny.

Annie agrees to nothing, thanks the woman politely, and hangs up.

“What an incredible opportunity,” Ruth says later, her voice scratchy, a cough deep in her lungs. She’s still on the eighth floor, still in the same bed. “Just like your dad, honey.”

“Did Dad really like it?”

“He was incredible at it.”

The room is too small, a matchbox penning them in. Annie wants to get Ruth out of here. Is medical school the way to do it? Besides, her dad had chosen it for good reason. To help people.

What else is she going to do?

Evan helps her through the endless pages of registration forms. He sits beside her until they are done, folded, tucked into a large, brown envelope; stamped and slid into the mail slot.

It’s only been ten weeks since they arrived in Vancouver. Annie’s been washing and wearing the same clothes: a rotation of torn jeans, one light grey hoodie, and a few T-shirts and pairs of underwear she retrieved from the top of the bag Evan packed.

But now she stands in front of the duffle and unzips it properly.

Inside she finds an array of her usual clothes and an extra rain jacket that smells like the beach. The laces are still tied on her running shoes and there’s a ring of crumbly salt around the soles. She pulls out a woollen hat, a plastic bag of extra hair elastics, then a piece of soft cloth wrapped around five of Mara’s serving spoons, one with a starfish etched onto the handle, another with a clamshell. Evan must have collected them from the hutch for her. They feel ice-cold in her hands.

The last thing in the bag is a strawberry jam jar. It’s full of water and sand, flecks of seaweed. Evan’s handwriting across a strip of masking tape:Hale’s Landing.

Annie unpacks all the items, arranging them with surgical precision on the melamine shelves of her closet.

Chapter 31

After months of drifting along, Annie has to start school with a sprint.

With prerequisite subjects to complete before September, she buys three-ringed binders, loose-leaf paper, a set of pens, and stacks her textbooks on the desk in her room. Pages of cell cycles, organic chemistry equations, ethical cases. It all feels vitally important to memorize.

Annie has an improbable—­almost photographic—­memory for it all. She reads it once and knows it, like everything she learned so easily in sailboat school. She likes A+ grades and how gruelling the work is, the way it orders her mind when nothing else in her life computes. She studies late every night, attempts to sleep, does it all again. The rigour is keeping her sane.

Except for when she derails. Today, at the bathroom sink, she’s lost: A soapy trail runs off her forearm and pools on the floor, and she doesn’t notice until her socks are wet. How long has she been standing here, missing him? Her eyes are filling again. She shuts the tap off, shakes her whole body like a dog getting rid of water.

“You feeling okay?” Evan asks from her bedroom doorway, after she dried the floor with trembling hands and changed socks and failed to concentrate on schoolwork again. He’s wearing his new coast guard training uniform.

Annie dog-ears the page and flips her textbook closed. “I don’t think I can get through the rest of this.”

“I have something to show you,” he says. “It might help.”

Three blocks away, Evan leads her into a glass-walled building and pays the admission. They pass through a steel carousel, walk through separate men’s and women’s change rooms, out onto a sea of faded blue tiles.

A public swimming pool.

The ceiling is full of skylights. A clutch of elderly women swim breaststroke in swimming lanes divided by floating ropes. The room echoes with splashing sounds. A teenaged lifeguard sits on a lookout at one side of the pool, her elbows leaning on her knees, a shiny silver whistle around her neck.