Page 28 of The Wild Beneath

Henry MacLeod stands at the far corner of the Hale’s shipyard.

It’s high enough to have been spared the full brunt of the tsunami. At least a dozen boats lie dormant here, in cradles, on their sides, in various states of disrepair. The tarps overtop of them sag with water. Henry runs a hand over his white beard. He wonders momentarily when he’ll manage to get another haircut and more coffee beans. Or how they’ll fish—­how they’re going to eat—­without any diesel for the gillnetter.

These are the types of big and mundane things you think about when the world falls apart.

He walks from boat to boat, stomping over sword ferns, running his calloused hands along the hulls. Eventually, he settles on what he’s come for: two sailboats.

One looks seaworthy—­up on bright yellow stilts in the middle of the yard with the nameGaleneon the transom. The other one Henry likes,Polaris, is a Dana 24 in a cradle inside the warehouse at the far end of the yard. It needs a lot of work on the dry, but Henry knows boats.

It was necessity, at first.

Henry and Ruth’s parents, Andy and Lynette MacLeod, moved to Hale’s Landing in the fifties to work the logging camp. Henry was only nine years old when a log rolled off a Hale Timber skidder and killed Andy instantly. Ruth was four. The company paid Lynette a small insurance claim.

Lynette stood for one thing after that: Her children would never work for Hale Timber. She started keeping vodka in the freezer under a hunk of ice. At first, she kept the drinking in check—­only at night, to go to sleep, she said. But by the time Henry was eleven, grief had woven its way so deep that the fridge was bare aside from vodka and a jug of cranberry juice. Henry took Ruth to the wharf with him on a Saturday morning and paid the girl behind the counter at the fish shop two dollars for a day of babysitting. He offered himself up as a deckhand for the fishing boats. He was the youngest deckhand they’d ever seen.

Henry was a solid worker, reliable, honest, even at age eleven. And deckhanding paid handsomely. He bought his first pickup truck at the age of sixteen. Later, he paid Ruth’s way through nursing college, because there was no way in hell he was letting her work on the boats.

Henry often wonders why he stays, why he hasn’t picked up and moved to a stable desk job somewhere on the lower mainland. But just as the tide ebbs and flows each day, Henry never leaves without returning. The familiar salt air, the way cedars push their scent into the wind. And as much as the fishing is hard work, he loves it. He loves being the one to fix the gauges when they’re finicky, check any loose electrical, tap on the engine with a wrench. He’s a fixer. And he craves the way a boatrocks in the water. He can’t remember the last time he slept on land, preferring a berth any day.

Henry may be a gruff man, a quiet man. But he knows a few things: how to take care of the people he loves, how the ocean can fill us up again when all seems lost. And how to fish. So that’s what he’ll do.

Annie pulls the dinghy through the wreckage toward the shallows, as if her body has agreed to do this before her mind has.

“You get in first,” she instructs Walker, who’s arrived on the beach.

The dinghy bobs innocently on the waves. He tentatively steps one foot in, then the other, shifting his weight left and right, teetering the boat like he’s learning to surf. After a few more rounds, he sits. As she gets in, Annie wills her brain to stay quiet and not give her any trouble. They sit across from each other on the two bench seats. She grips the oars tightly as they shove off and manoeuvre through threads of minnows.

“Let’s only stay a few minutes.” Annie focuses on the metronomic pat of the oars. “And not too far out.”

“But you love this.”

“I loved it.” Past tense. The water—­so serene and flat. It grates on her, how innocent it can seem. She won’t unwrap the sail. They’ll stay close to shore. She tells herself these things over and over.

“Ruth said you love to swim, too.”

Moon jellyfish float past them. White, frilly things pulsing in the water with tendrils reaching in all directions.

“Mmhm.” She rows harder. “I did.”

He studies her. “She said they had to haul you out of the water when you were little.”

“More or less.”

“You haven’t gone in at all since the tsunami?”

“No.” She needs to do something with her hands, so shereaches under the bench for the tackle box. “I get scared. It makes me think about my parents.” She connects the reel to her rod and starts stringing the line through the eyelets.

“Would they want you to stay away?”

Annie’s shoulders tighten again. Her mom would never abandon the sea. Even in the biggest storms, she was unafraid. “I know it’s weird. Even now... my mom would get me back in the water.”

She ties a fisherman’s knot around the lure. She sets the drag in case she hooks something big, then casts toward the shoreline. Fish are probably hiding under the trash to avoid the birds. Her line hits the water.

“What’s your mom like?” Walker asks.

Present tense. An image of Mara appears, luminous, in her mind. “She was beautiful. She had the most expressive eyes—­when she smiled her whole face smiled.”

Annie inhales and holds it. Will she ever see her mom’s face again?