Page 2 of The Wild Beneath

A shape forms in the distance and moves along the stretches of sand. Annie stands up for a better look. It’s a person walking. But no one’s been out this far from Hale’s Landing since the tsunami, and there’s hardly anyone left.

Annie removes her earplugs and looks up for a helicopter, looks around for a speedboat hopping over waves. Anything else to explain the thwumping.

Nothing.

She leaves the shovel and the bucket where they are and walks toward the person, then jogs, with the faint hope that it’s her mom or dad. That they’ve made it back.

But it’s not them. It’s a boy, or a man. She isn’t sure. He’s stark naked, she can tell that much.

Annie calls out: “Hello?”

He doesn’t respond.

She moves closer, until he’s right in front of her. He can’t be more than twenty years old, close to her own age, but well over six feet tall, with soaked blond hair that shines like the water.

“Where did you come from?”

His unfreckled skin makes her squeamish. It feels too translucent. He doesn’t look injured. She would have expected cuts and scrapes or broken limbs. She would have expected him to be wearing clothes if he’d been pulled out and stranded by the wave.

“Are you okay?” she tries again.

He doesn’t say anything. Unnerved by his nakedness, his silence, his lack of urgency and explanation, she tries not to stare at his pale flesh. He has a startling vacancy about him, not fully there, looking past her. His irises are sea-urchin grey with streaks of silver.

His eyes roll backward as he caves sideways onto the sand into a fetal position.

Annie crouches and shakes him hard by the shoulder. His skin is too hot. The thwumping sound from earlier pours up through her palms. She shakes him again and checks his wrist for a pulse. It’s there: a too-slow beat at her fingertips. A wavebreaks up into his face and even that doesn’t wake him. She turns him by his knees onto his back. She’ll have to drag him, even if the plastic shards and cracked shells and crab legs and bottle caps will scrape his jelly-skin.

No choice.

She wraps her hands tight around his forearms. He’s heavier than he looks, and his skin is spongy and slimy and gives too much. She pulls hard and manages to move him a few feet, looks over her shoulder to gauge how far they are from the dry sand, then pulls again, clears debris from under him, pulls. Growls. Drags him, as her thoughts get more and more clunky. This hypnotic beat in her body.

The sound climbs up and surrounds them; Annie and this boy, marooned on the edge of nowhere.

Chapter 2

Twenty years before

Dr. Aiden MacLeod cannot see land.

The Pacific Ocean stretches in all directions from where he stands barefoot in the cockpit. It’s midafternoon and a light wind flutters the mainsail. The ocean ripples, a patchwork of sequins.

“You’re overthinking it,” Mara says with her paring knife poised. She’s eight months pregnant, cross-legged behind him, wearing one of his old T-shirts and a bathing suit bottom. A glistening salmon rests on the wooden cutting board in front of her.

“You can’t predict this.” Aiden grips the helm. He’s said it before, and even to his own ears it sounds repetitive. “What about operating rooms? Oxygen tanks?”

“I want to be sailing.” Mara looks at him.

He imagines it all going wrong out here when the baby is born: a breech delivery, shoulder dystocia, a massive hemorrhage. He’s transported back in time to all-nighters in hospital hallways that smelled like iodine, the sensation of running to catch up with something.

“I’m not going back to a hospital.” She stands up, nearly afoot shorter than him. On her tiptoes she intertwines her fingersat the back of his neck. He inhales the scent of her sun-warmed skin. “We’ve talked about this.”

“I need you to be okay.”

“We’ll be fine.” Mara’s voice is an anchor. She kisses him and nuzzles against the stubble of his jaw. Then she sits back down, delicately slipping the edge of her knife under the scales to release pink shimmering flesh and the smell of salt.

Aiden’s mother, Ruth, did not think they’d be fine. Fifty kilometres east is his hometown, Hale’s Landing, with its pine-needled roads and cedars dripping in endless rain. He recalls the exact tone of Ruth’s voice as it echoes in the cathedral of his forehead.

When he tied off the stern at Hale’s Wharf last Tuesday, Ruth gave him a quick peck on the cheek and lectured him briefly about his boat’s peeling bottom paint. Then she whisked herself off to the clinic in her pressed nursing scrubs. She’s probably weighing a baby right now under those bright fluorescent lights, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking over the scrubbed linoleum. Even though Aiden doesn’t work there, his medical degree hangs in her waiting room above the aquarium of tropical fish, the air bubbles surging up and bursting under the edge of the thick, black frame.