Page 1 of The Wild Beneath

Prologue

She begins with a lullaby that sends coyotes fleeing up mountains. Honeybees abandon their hives to the shrill calls of songbirds and barking dogs. Beneath the seafloor, the tectonic plates loosen and rearrange.

The radio waves will say:All stations, this is not a drill.A magnitude 9.0 earthquake has been detected off the coast of British Columbia approximately 150kilometreswest of Tofino. Evacuate all coastal areas immediately. Do not approach shorelines. Follow evacuation routes. Repeat, this is not a drill.

A liquid mountain rises in the Pacific Northwest.

When the wave makes landfall, it slices through houses. Lights fall out of their ceiling tiles while furniture shunts across living rooms. Fridges disgorge their contents into surging black whirlpools. Mailboxes, front doors, and slabs of driveway asphalt sail away in the foamy whitewash.

Things from her belly that do not belong are hurled back ashore: tangles of Christmas lights, milk jugs, broken microwaves. The innards of sunken container ships. Lawn chairs and pastel-coloured birthday candles, uninstalled car radios and alarm clocks with twist-tied cords.

Her haunting chorus crescendos. Overturned office buildings disintegrate into rushing river water. Glass shatters. Traffic lights creak and buckle inside tentacles of ocean. Sucking mud overtakes the ground floors of hospitals.

Floating bodies. Human beings with broken bones, eyes stinging from salt, inhaling seawater into their lungs while trapped underwater, beneath overturned cars and downed tree branches. People on their hands and knees.

The nationwide news will report:A catastrophic earthquake struck the Cascadia Subduction Zone at 10:50 a.m. today, triggering tsunami waves along the outer coast. This is the big one we’ve long feared.

The ocean will call it a song.

Hours pass before she drains away, taking what she wants, leaving behind her low tide.

Coastal towns go silent. Gaping shells of buildings remain, puddles of water on their roofs. A shoreline scattered with dead jellyfish, plastic piping. Bird feathers and the bones of whales.

Low

The lowest tide requires resilience. The seafloor is exposed. Tide pool inhabitants—barnacles, mussels, anemones, and small fish—­must weather exposure to sun, air, and temperature fluctuations and survive until the water returns.

Chapter 1

Now

Annie MacLeod can’t hear the sea.

She drags a shovel and a white plastic bucket under a blanket of clouds that refuses to leave. Wind-whipped, hair unwashed, a smear of sand on her cheek. She’s digging for clams. She hasn’t gone near the water yet, even though it’s been four days since it happened. Even though her body craves that cold shock on her skin, to submerge so deep she dissolves. The waves curl out and back, a heartbeat she ignores by squishing bright orange earplugs deeper into her ears.

The beach is a junkyard. The surf picks up stray flip-flops, pebbles mixed with Plexiglas shards, waxed juice boxes with straws still attached, floaty aluminum cans, and plastic barrettes. She eyes the glint of a silver spoon—­its handle engraved with the delicate pattern of moon phases—­and puts it in her back pocket next to a cake of soap still in its wrapper.

Each day, her grandmother Ruth tells her to work harder. To get her tears out with a shovel. “Maybe they’re not dead,” she says.

Sand is everywhere now: up on the hill where it doesn’t belong, lodged between cedar shingles, filling up eavestroughs. Lumps of it, with rainwater, will gradually rinse out the downspouts, making new piles. Some of it is stuck inside the helices of Annie’s ears, glued to her scalp, wedged under her nails. They cannot find a nail clipper anywhere, and Annie thinks about biting her nails but then the sand would even be inside her.

No matter how hard she tries to get it all out, she finds more still, in the sink drain, embedded in the seams of the mattress, in the plastic utensil divider in the kitchen drawer, in the thumb of Ruth’s oven mitt.

Her grief is like this.

Sprinkles of it in what she manages to eat, gritty against her teeth even when the food tastes fine. She’s already swept the floor, but it’s silty again.

Annie wonders if she’ll ever escape it; if the places sand and grief should not be will ever be free of them again.

The horizon remains empty and haunting. Only the swoop of seabirds, the smell of decaying seaweed, and all the debris at the wrack line. The ground is disorienting and overly flat.

How long has she been out here? It must be hours. The wind burns her eyes, her stomach growls, and her shoulders ache. She’s after another clam, her arm down a hole, when she’s distracted by movement in her peripheral vision. The clam gets away and burrows further into the muck.

She sits down next to an upside-down picnic table and hugs her knees—­not long enough to start dwelling on everything or start crying again. Just for a minute. The backs of her pants are soaked through and sticking to her skin and the spoon and soap are bulky in her pocket. For an instant, the clouds part. The sand glimmers.

Athwump-thwumprises beneath her.

Each beat lasts a few languid seconds. Each thwumpsinks her down, as if her bones go slack against each other, as if her muscles give themselves up to her scooped-out insides.