Page 19 of The Wild Beneath

“It won’t be long. I’ll bring Mom home,” he promises.

Rosie feeds her animal crackers and lets her watch cartoons behind the counter all afternoon. Annie doesn’t like the hollow blare of the TV. Hunched on a stool, she covers her ears. She swings between embarrassment over Mara’s actions and anger at the men and their axes.

Mara cries the whole next day. Aiden shepherds her aroundAmphitrite, gets her to change her clothes, eat a meal. She manages two bites. Annie tries to pull her from bed, attentive to even the smallest parts of her. The grey wool of her sweater sleeve. The caves around her clavicles. The stark white skin of her hands. Annie fills a glass with water, tries to get her to drink. But Mara is vacant.

Annie thinks about that first day at school. Liam’s jagged words:Your mom is a freak.She can’t reconcile what he said with the size of her mother’s heart. Her tenderness. The way she cares about the sea and its creatures, and why so many of those men with axes did not seem to care at all.

The next morning, the Hale Timber bulldozer lumbers onto the beach. Annie watches from the bow with her binoculars. Men push the remains down to the south end to bury it. Garbage pours from the whale’s stomach as they move it: a spray can, PVC piping, a coat hanger. She was eating the wrong things. A purple fishing net with a long wooden handle, a glittering plastic pinwheel.

Aiden asks the workers for a piece of the whale’s broken jawbone and carves Mara three round beads from it. One for each member of their family, he says. Mara refuses to wear it. Instead, Aiden puts it around Annie’s neck. On a fine leather cord, the beads sit in the notch of Annie’s sternum.

The whale changes everything. Mara disconnects. She stops singing, no more nighttime duets while they gut fish or sort crabs. She stops humming while she swims, eats, washes dishes, and stares at the stars. She won’t tolerate the harmonica.

Beyond the songs, something deeper inside Mara goes quiet. Annie can’t hear her anymore.

Chapter 9

Now

A sprinkle of raindrops turns to a downpour on the way back to the cabin.

A hard rain sloshes under Annie’s boots. It washes away the dust of the excavator, kills the smells, dampens the bonfires of refuse on the beach. The coming week brings even more: a deluge of summer rain that keeps them inside.

Evan does not visit. Annie circles her missing pieces—­wondering why he is not here, watching any hope that her parents are alive drain out of her. She can only tend to her grief in shallow ways, like rotating two whelk shells over and over in her pocket, and by wearing one of Aiden’s undershirts as her pyjamas. She wants to not dwell on them, but it’s impossible. She thinks of them constantly.

In the middle of this, Walker seems to emerge from himself. He has a certain lightness about him.

“What’s this?” It’s the first thing he says, shortly after they return home, as he examines the jars in the kitchen cupboard. He unscrews a lid and pours short-grain brown rice into his palm.

“You can talk.” Annie is shocked to hear him speak. “It’s rice. You eat it.”

He puts a piece in his mouth and chews.

“You have to cook it first,” she says.

He doesn’t respond. He opens other lids, pours each thing into his waiting palm: flakes of red pepper, filaments of saffron Ruth bought in Vancouver, a ribbed seed of nutmeg.

Annie offers him a plate of halibut and boiled beets. After watching her eat at the counter, he tries out his own cutlery, moving each finger into the right spot, angling his fork slowly, following her example. He manages to get a bite into his mouth but then gives up on the fork. By this time, Annie has already finished her meal. She tucks her hands under her thighs and watches him as he slowly devours the rest of his food with his hands.

The next morning, Annie collects a bowl of wild raspberries from the mountainside above the cabin. He eats the entire thing in minutes.

“They taste like the sun,” he says, eyes lit up.

“Do you remember what happened to you?” Annie asks.

He puts the last one into his mouth. “They’re warm.”

“Did you get washed out to sea by the tsunami?”

“You can’t force it,” Ruth says. She’s on her hands and knees, twirling a bolt into the table leg with a screwdriver. “The chicken coop needs shovelling out, honey. I’ll find him something to do, too.”

Walker’s face brightens with each new morning. He no longer fixates on everyday things. He stays close to Annie. Sometimes she turns around to find him only inches away, while she’s sweeping sand off the floors or lugging buckets of water into the cabin. She doesn’t mind his proximity, but Ruth seems to. She’s always sending him off in the other direction, to wash clothes by hand, to turn the compost, or bring soggy triangles of wood into the cabin to dry out by the stove.

The chores are endless, but he picks them up easily.

“All of this is seawater?” he asks, salt on his fingertips, while Annie scrubs white lines left by the wave off the cabin walls.

“It almost swallowed us.”