Page 23 of The Wild Beneath

She didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to Evan.

They’re long past Seattle now. The weather is forgiving, the sea is favouring them. Mara and Aiden swap out between four-hour watches.Amphitrite’s sails are full in the wind.

Time changes over these weeks at sea, morphing into a continuous river. Sleep is not only at night, sleep is between watches. Sleep is when the ocean sleeps, calm and smooth.

Annie falls into this new sense of time as the sea’s cycles encode themselves into her.

Mara and Annie lie on the deck and trace stars with their fingertips. They sit silently at the helm, mapping constellations through the mast spreaders, turning off the GPS, not needing its guidance.Amphitriteis on course.

“It’s call and response,” Mara says, holding her arms open to the sea. Her voice is hoarse from how little she’s spoken since they left Hale’s. “You can listen with your whole body, Annie.”

Aiden has brought stacks of books for Annie—math and science, folklore, and books in French and Spanish—all lined up on shelves, the pages damp from the salt water and mildew. Sailboat school, Aiden calls it. The alternative to the bricks-and-mortar school she will never attend. Finding she understands math effortlessly, Aiden teaches her algebra. He calls it: the reunion of broken parts, the science of restoring what is missing. Intense focus comes easy to her. Annie loves sharpening her pencil, working out the equations, the quiet completion of puzzle after puzzle.

Early one morning, Aiden drinks his coffee and turns through a geology book with Annie curled into his side. He stops at a thin chapter on earthquakes.

“What’s this?” Annie points to a yellow dotted line on the map. It reaches from northern Vancouver Island to California.

“The Cascadia Subduction Zone.” Aiden takes a sip. “It’s a thousand-kilometre fault line right underneath us.”

“An earthquake line?”

He nods. “The place where tectonic plates shift against each other. A suture line in the Earth’s crust.”

Annie considers other suture lines she’s learned about: on the skulls of babies with their pulsing fontanelles. The joinery in mollusc shells. When Evan cut his thumb, Aiden used a 4-0 suture thread to hold the skin together.

“Do the fish see the fault lines?” Annie asks.

Sunrise peeks through the porthole. Aiden raises his eyes to it. “I don’t know.”

“Do earthquakes happen for a reason?”

Aiden flips to the next page. “Stress builds up along a fault until the whole thing has to shift.”

They only go ashore when they need supplies.

Come San Diego, it’s a new exhaust manifold and some spare rubber hosing. They buy groceries: lima beans, peanut butter to stockpile. A line of lemons decorates the crook of Aiden’s elbow, a sack of whole wheat flour under his arm. Annie carries soap and storm candles in her small hands.

It’s amazing how little they need.

But they do need money. They sell albacore tuna they’ve caught to a cash buyer on a boat near La Jolla.

“Off a sailboat, is it?” the buyer says. “With catch this good?” His name is Germain. He has a twangy accent, an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt that flaps in the wind.

“Well, it is. Yes.” Aiden nods and takes the wad of cash.

Then they’re on their own again, the wide-open sea for days. They sail further south to warmer water. Finally, they moor off the coast of Baja.

Annie loves the rose colour of morning. The horizon feels like the edge of the world.

Aiden plays his harmonica for the first time since Hale’s. Mara tolerates it for only a few minutes before diving into the sea. She and Annie swim on and off the entire day, under a sky that’s clearer and bluer than Hale’s Landing.

Alone in this prolonged way with the ocean, things that should be strange become familiar. A pod of dolphins leaps around the boat, water shimmering off their backs. A family of sea lions barks and lazes in the sun on the shore.

Underwater, Annie swears she can hear the ocean pulse like her own blood.

Humpback whales visitAmphitritewith their breaches and dives, ellipses of breath that fill up the air. Their melodies linger in her body for hours with a dreamy homesickness.

Most mornings, the same whale calf noses up to the stern. Today, Annie climbs the swim ladder to reach him and rests her palms flat against his charcoal skin. He rolls, an enormous black eye peering into the centre of her.