Page 20 of The Wild Beneath

“Did she take things away with her?”

His questions are like this: non-linear and slanted.

“Everything,” Annie says. She doesn’t mean for her voice to sound angry, but it does.

“She spared you.”

Annie does not know what to say to this. “She took everything from me.”

He picks up a picture of Mara and Annie from the bookshelf and gently touches the image of Mara. “Does she still sing?”

“Who?” Annie shakes her head. “My mother?”

He looks into Annie’s eyes. His hum rises inside her neck and rests against her shoulder blades. “You love her singing,” he says.

“How would you know that?”

He does not answer, because he’s back to the salt: running his finger along the wall and collecting more of it, sticking his tongue out to taste it with raised eyebrows. The questions he doesn’t answer feel like a delicate bubble Annie does not want to pop.

She leaves him be.

He’s both strange and familiar, and easy to be with. In his presence, Annie doesn’t need her earplugs. She puts them on the shelf in the closet, next to the spoon, the soap, and the ticking watch.

Walker is captivated by Ruth’s books, her battered romance novels and shiny textbooks. He presses his fingers against the embossing on their spines and runs his hands over the weathered pages.

“This one.” He pulls out an anatomy atlas and sits on the floor, all legs and arms, the book in his lap.

“Did you go to school?” Annie asks. “Can you read?”

He’s engrossed in the pictures. She sits next to him and folds her legs underneath her.

“Walker?”

“There are so many bones, Annie. These tiny ones at the tips of our fingers,” he says. “Look how many there are.” Heexamines his own hand, mesmerized, then picks up Annie’s and brings it close to his eyes.

She wants to touch him more. Why does she want this?

“Are you making that humming sound?” she asks.

“It’s not mine.” His thumb presses into the centre of her palm.

Her vision tunnels. For a split second, Annie can see the seafloor, its sandy bottom of crushed shells and coral. She blinks twice, and it’s gone.

“What was that?”

“Everything makes sound,” he says.

Walker turns back to the anatomy book and flips the pages until he finds an image of the human ear: the auricle and tympanic membrane, the bony labyrinth within.

“There are bones even here,” he says, as he touches his own ear. “Three of them. Ossicles, it says.”

He’s still holding her hand.

They head for the woodshed during a break in the downpour.

Their boots submerge in the mud with each step. Damp clothes hang across the porch on lines, waiting for the sun. Smoke billows from the chimney.

Annie swings the axe, but it only makes it halfway through the large stump of wood.