Page 45 of The Wild Beneath
Celeste’s ghost is busy knocking on his chest. She would have hated this: his chain-smoking after he’d quit. The insane workaholism he’s been using to cope without her, let alone the fact he’s still cutting down all the goddamn trees.
God, he misses her.
He met her twenty-two years ago. She was sitting on the concrete steps of his office, wearing cargo shorts and hiking boots, tortoiseshell sunglasses, and had her nose in aNational Geographicwith a stack of loose papers in her lap.
Instead of saying hello, he asked her what she was reading.
She held her sunglasses up to reveal her eyes. “Did you know the human body loses buoyancy thirty feet down in the water?”
“I did not.”
“If you dive that deep, you sink.” Her irises were strikingly dark and her pupils large, even though it was sunny. He’d never seen her before. He knew everyone in Hale’s Landing.
“You enter free fall,” she added.
“I’m Isaac.”
“I know.” She bundled up the papers and tried to stand. The pen holding her hair in a loose bun slipped out, and in grabbing for the pen, the papers also fell in a fluttery stack.
Isaac collected them while she collected herself, and for some reason, he already felt reverential toward her. Even when, over oysters at the dock, she came out with the fact that she knew all about Hale Timber, that she was there to oppose his clear-cutting practices, that she was a botanist from the University of British Columbia and logging issues were related to her PhD dissertation. Even then, he was lost in the soft fuzz on her earlobes and the way her hair—pulled back up into place—curled at the nape of her neck. She explained her research with a lot of hand movements, leafed through her papers to show him spreadsheets of calculations from a comparative logging firm, which had moved to selective cutting and still increased its revenues.
“Do you want to get dessert?” he asked, because it would have been unreasonable, that soon, to ask if she’d relocate to Hale’s Landing and maybe move in with him and keep having these conversations while he kissed her.
She agreed to sticky toffee pudding; eventually, she agreed to Hale’s, and him, and to finishing her PhD remotely. Isaac was willing to move on her ideas because they made financial sense and, in an indescribable way, Celeste ensuredlifemade sense. She was pregnant a year later and diagnosed with her first round of breast cancer after Evan was born.
Isaac now understands the buoyancy of the human body—the lack thereof—and the true meaning of free fall, the way pressure can compress the air in your lungs, how grief can squeeze you and reduce the space around your inner organs while you sink.
He let Evan down when Celeste died. He let everyone down.The company went into arrears and he lost some of his best employees because he failed to pay them while he was drinking and smoking himself into oblivion.
He can’t buckle now. Not again.
The demand for lumber is going to be unprecedented. They have to get the logs off the trucks, to start. Then cross the hundred kilometres between Hale’s Landing and the nearest functional mill. The coast guard isn’t going to help with that.
“The sawmill’s up and running in Dean Channel,” Isaac says. “Got word this morning.”
“There was a massive tsunami, for god’s sake.” Ed Hollingsworth isn’t one to mince words. He’s a tall string bean of a man with a receding hairline and a permanent frown. “Our loading equipment is toast. No barge.”
“Let’s see what the coast guard has to say,” Evan says.
The base of Isaac’s spine tweaks. “We can’t go into the red. Everyone will lose their jobs.”
“I know, Dad.”
“We have to be responsible.” Celeste would want him to go easy, but Isaac feels himself ratcheting. “It’s the legacy of this whole town. This isn’t just you and me. Look around.”
“So how are you going to deliver it?” Ed presses, eyebrows arched.
Isaac lets out a long sigh. “We have one truck we can use to get a load out on the backroads. What about a heavy-lift helicopter for the rest?”
“You can’t get a helicopter right now. All we’ve got is that one coast guard boat. Plus, it’s over twenty thousand board feet there,” Ed says. “It’s too much.”
“A log boom?” Isaac pushes. They haven’t used booms in years, since they cleared the mountainsides along the channel. They’ve used the barge instead. Isaac racks his brain about what they’d need to scrounge up to make it happen again: diesel, chains, cables.
“Tide and wind will destroy a boom on a good day,” Ed says. “You have a tug skipper up your sleeve?”
Beside them, the flat sea pulls the tide back out. Sedge grass arches in the breeze. Isaac doesn’t like the ocean anymore. It makes him feel tired in a way nothing else does. He doesn’t sail, doesn’t like to fish, hasn’t skippered a boat since his twenties. He doesn’t like the sway of it, the unpredictability.
“There’s an old tug in a yard off Juniper Street. And a side winder in the shipyard. I’ll bet we could tow a boom if the weather holds,” Evan says quietly.
