Page 57 of The Wild Beneath

“The water’s lit up, Annie.” He dries himself. “You need to see it. It’s sparkling.” He sits down next to her, his arm against hers.

“It’s called bioluminescence. Dinoflagellates. My mom wouldwake me up to see it. We used to stir it up off the bow to watch it shimmer.”

“Come in the water with me?” he asks. “We can swim inside it.”

A lump in her throat. She swallows hard to get rid of it. “I still can’t.”

His voice is light but definitive. “You’ll swim again, Annie.”

“You don’t know that.” Her eyes sting. She’s not going to cry, again, for the second time today. She presses her shirtsleeves against her eye sockets.

“I promise.” Walker puts his arm around her.

He’s so warm. It feels different from when Evan holds her—­more gentle?—­and his skin vibrates hers, almost. She closes her eyes and is flooded with vivid images: a whorled shell, a clay shelf thousands of feet deep, swirls of octopus legs, and a cloud of black ink. Annie opens her eyes, expecting to find herself underwater, but she’s here on the rippled sand.

“Did you feel that?” Walker asks.

Did she just imagine it—­the clarity of that sudden watery vision?

“I closed my eyes and I was in the water.”

“Because the ocean is inside us,” he says.

Annie cocks her head. “You’re always saying things that don’t make sense, Walker.”

He laughs. “Maybe you’re not hearing it the way I’m saying it, yet.”

Yet.As if he’s speaking of something predestined. “Why does it feel like you know the future?”

“Because sometimes I can hear what’s going to happen.” He unwinds himself from her and uses his fingertip to draw a wavy line through the sand. It looks like a mountain chain. “It shows us where we’re going.” He turns to look into her eyes again. “Where we’re supposed to go.”

Annie can still feel the buzz of him, even though they’re not touching. “You can hear the future?”

Walker rubs the sand with his hand until it’s smooth and clear again. “Can’t you hear her, too?” he asks.

“I can hearyou. I love how you sound...” She’s treading into dangerous territory but cannot stop. “I think about you all the time.”

Walker looks at her and pauses.

“Did I do something wrong?” Annie asks.

“Nothing.” Walker shakes his head and a vertical crease forms between his eyebrows. She hasn’t seen it before. “You’re doing everything right, Annie.” He looks away from her, off to the left, and seems to travel somewhere she cannot follow.

As they walk back to the cabin in the dark—­up the ladder, across the yard, over piles of pine needles, under the ghosts of the cedar trees—­he reaches for her hand, and she lets him. The forest stays asleep.

He’s quiet again, in that way that he gets. Would it be possible to live without words? Maybe that would be better. She wants to keep holding his hand, lie in his bed, curl into him and say nothing at all. Stay in the sound.

But when they open the door, Ruth is in the kitchen, sitting over flickering beeswax candles, a frayed polishing rag in her hand, a dozen spoons laid out across the table.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

“I couldn’t sleep either and needed some air,” Annie says. “What are you doing?”

“These were all mixed up in the hutch. I’d been meaning to sort them out.”

“These handles are beautiful.” Walker picks up a heavy serving spoon etched with grapevines.

“They’re hard to polish, is what they are,” Ruth says. “And each one is different. They don’t make a set.”