Page 122 of The Wild Beneath

Henry stations himself over the aft cleat. “Trappings, I think they call those. But it was only a matter of time.”

“You thought I’d come back?”

“I always thought they were right, the superstitions around here.” He unties the knot methodically. “That we can turn into seawater if we stay out there long enough.”

“Why taste it?”

He keeps his eyes on his hands. “I always hoped they’d be right. That one day I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between me and the sea. And then I’d know.”

“Know what?”

He looks out toward the ocean. His forehead is unfurrowed, and his eyes soften. “Everything about her.”

After Henry grills her a few more times on the equipment, does triple-checks of her double-checks, hugs her for a long minute, and steps back across onto the dock, Annie starts the motor.

Reversing, she navigates out of the slip and then into the harbour.

She can’t believe she’s about to sail on her own and blinks several times to make sure it’s not imaginary. But the helm is cold under her gloved hands and the water rocks under her feet. It’s real.

Henry follows along for a while in his skiff, like he’s testing her, making sure she isn’t about to sink, making sure she can still hoist a sail. But she does, she can. Her muscles remember. The mainsail unfurls, filling its large belly.

Satisfied, Henry gives her a final wave.

Annie’s on her own. She still knows this rocky channel and every narrowing; she can sense the sea bottom, the ocean bed.

It takes the rest of the day to sail out the channel. When she arrives to open water, the horizon is gigantic. Its categorical smoothness empties her mind, shaking her free.

Annie needs to set a real bearing. She closes her eyes and tries to latch on to something. A brief disorientation settles over her, as if she’s driven up to a four-way stop but has no idea which way to turn. She’s stuck in the middle of the intersection. She focuses on Walker’s low sound, tuning in.

“Where are you?” Annie says it out loud, as if her voice might enter the sound.

She waits.

Annie feels an unmistakable pull.Here. A moment of righting herself, orienting to a direction. She opens her eyes.

He is north.

Chapter 49

Before

The sun rises as Aiden delivers the unconscious woman to his own hospital, one hundred kilometres away.

Against the whop-whop-whopof the helicopter rotors, he tracks her pulse under his fingers. They land with a clunk. He wheels her across the landing pad and through the sliding doors into the emergency department.

Doctors descend. They’re his friends, his colleagues, and they pat him on the back like he’s a hero. Blood draws, an oxygen mask covering her face, a papery hospital wristband. Her heart beats across the telemetry screen in a faint green tracing. Her lab results unspool from the printer.

“This woman is either very sick or a medical marvel,” Sally, a senior nurse, says. Her reading glasses look as if they’re about to fall off the tip of her nose. “Her hemoglobin is off the charts.”

Aiden sits beside her in a plastic chair. Her skin is pale and hot. She’s running a fever. More nurses come and go. A chest X-ray film is pinned on the light board behind him. Her heart is bigger than normal.

“She needs an ICU bed,” Aiden’s colleague, Dr. Chris Calhoun, says. He wedges the phone between his ear and shoulder. “Get critical care on the line. We need to transfer.”

Another airlift. They move her to a bigger city hospital before she wakes up. Aiden goes along, because otherwise, there would be no one with her. That feels intolerable to him for a reason he can’t pinpoint. He doesn’t leave her side, can’t extract himself. She is beautiful, alone, and he feels responsible.

When she does wake up briefly the following day, Aiden’s busy looking at every detail of her face. The soft curve of her jaw and her porcelain skin. So he’s the first one she sees when she opens her eyes. She smiles at him as if she’s relieved. Faint lines gather beside her twinkly eyes.

“Who are you?” he asks. He hadn’t planned what to say. His question feels strangely anticlimactic. She looks at him for just a moment, before falling back asleep.