Page 34 of The Wild Beneath

At twenty-five, she’d been working at the nursing station in Hale’s Landing, checking blood pressures and cleaning out chainsaw gashes. She fell for Paul, a lumberjack from Edmonton. He was charming, charismatic, with dark eyes and a deep laugh. He spent his off weeks at the wharf, chasing Ruth, collecting wildflowers for her. They would stare at the basket of stars at night, and he promised her everything.

Until she unexpectedly got pregnant, and he disappeared without a trace, leaving her to learn the hard way how strong she really was.

The pain is still remarkably fresh. But it was then she made the decision: She could only trust herself. She swallowed the shame of it all in one hard gulp. She would raise Aiden on her own, with all her ingenuity and grit. He’d always be ready to take care of himself. For a rare second now, she thinks about herself: that hummingbird of a girl who had preceded this stoic version. Where is she now?

What haunts Ruth most is the agony of not knowing what happened to Aiden and Mara. Where wasAmphitriteduring the tsunami? Was her son sucked under the black waves? She never trusted the ocean, even if Henry always has. She should have fought harder against the sea life Mara demanded. She shouldhave kept Aiden safer. Whenever Ruth starts to think about it, she has to stop herself. It would be her undoing.

And it’s Annie she’s also worrying about—­she stayed on the beach after they rowed back, and she’s still down there. Far below on the flat sand, Ruth can see that Annie has taken off her shoes and is standing at the water’s edge. She looks like she might put her feet in the waves.

Ruth’s heart aches like a muscle she’s overworked.

Walker—­with his eccentric mannerisms, his sparse speech—­for whatever reason is like a balm to Annie. She seems more settled when she’s with him. He’s an illogical but familiar kind of puzzle, and she has the sensation of history repeating itself.

Ruth never figured Mara out. And she’s unsure if Aiden did, either. Is Aiden dead because he let himself be strung along into a dangerous life by an unknown woman? Is Ruth putting Annie at risk now, too?

When Mara showed up all those years ago, Aiden latched on to her with a tenacity Ruth couldn’t comprehend. She was unnerved by Mara’s mystery, by this woman without a backstory. She heard what people said about Mara: In those early days, they called her crazy. She was almost violent in the hospital; she kept screaming, asking where she was and why she was there. After she hurt herself trying to climb out a window, they had to restrain her, for her own good.

They never told Annie any of it, especially not the original story of the night Aiden found Mara. She’s too young, they said. It would only confuse her. Ruth herself was confused. They concocted a story about Mara’s estranged family being off-gridders in the Aleutians.

“If we tell her the truth now, she’ll have questions I can’t answer,” Mara said.

Did Mara even know the truth? Ruth was never sure and didn’t like their decisions or the secrecy.

When Aiden quit his hospital job and boughtAmphitrite,Ruth tallied off all her parenting mistakes, each thing she must have done wrong. Otherwise, why would Aiden be so hasty, impractical, throwing away everything he’d achieved?

It wasn’t that Aiden was unhappy. Henry reminded her of this on repeat: Aiden was happiest on the water. He looked vital. But she saw no stability, and definitely no future, in their ocean-going existence. When Annie was born, Ruth was worried about what kind of life her granddaughter would have, sailing around on that boat.

Ruth always hoped that, despite her wild, rootless childhood, Annie might make something of herself—­a life that didn’t depend on the whims of the sea. But now Ruth sees things unrolling before her: Annie latching on to this shifty boy, who seems to have come from the sea himself.

She turns again to watch Annie below, taking baby steps toward the water, this girl who only a few weeks before had everything taken from her.

Maybe the water is more healing than Ruth thinks. Maybe Aiden made the right choices and sacrifices for what he loved most. After all, things can be taken away in a single beat, no matter how much you prepare, or how much you worry in advance.

Has she focused on the wrong things?

Ruth isn’t sure.

For now, it’s better to keep Walker and Annie apart as much as possible.

The other pressing issue is that Ruth is sliding toward anemia again. She can feel it. She’d been managing for two months between blood transfusions before the tsunami, ferrying to and from the hospital. Now she feels the tug of fatigue on her bones, sooner than expected. She’s winded more easily.

But Ruth isn’t about to leave Annie alone in all this uncertainty, not yet. She rallies herself, willing her body to keep going for a while longer.

Galeneis far off in Annie’s peripheral vision, heading steadily toward the open ocean.

Walker’s sound grows quieter. All the noise she’s almost forgotten roils back up, and her ears sear with pain again. Even the waves crashing are painful, water thundering over rock.

It doesn’t make any sense.

She stands at the edge of the water, her feet heavy as anchors. It’s all so familiar: gulls diving after herring, the sapphire-coloured mussel shells clinging to the boulders. Piles of driftwood and seaweed. But it’s all too loud. Louder than ever.

She could have said yes to Henry. Forced herself. Maybe then she’d morph back into a version she recognizes; rewind time and sink into the Annie from weeks ago, before everything hurt so badly. Fill the hours with what she knows how to do: swim, sail, gut fish. She’s angry at herself for not pulling it together. Everyone else is making themselves useful. Instead, she’s stuck here like a pile of wet laundry.

Would getting under the water help? It might blunt the sting in her ears, at least. She recalls the exact feeling of waves hitting her legs, cold and fast, foam curling over her ankles. The fading divide between water and skin.

But now swimming in the sea feels like a betrayal. Is she allowed to love the thing that took her parents?

But maybe theyarealive.