Page 6 of The Wild Beneath

“It sounds like humming. It comes and goes.” Annie looks at her feet and the water-warped planks of Ruth’s floor, then upward, at the light bulbs that won’t turn on anymore. It’s not coming from there.

It’s a low-pitched violin chord. Or murmuring starlings—­their glossy black wings fluttering in unison.

All the usual noise has receded.

From nowhere, her dad’s voice reverberates through Annie’s memory. “Elephants hear through their feet.” He’d always beenfascinated by the way animals communicate: seismically, triangulating through space and time. He loved to talk about it whenever his feet hit dry land. “They eavesdrop on each other’s footsteps. It’s how they reach one another over vast distances. Ground vibration.”

His voice fades; the soothing, back-and-forth undertone remains. Annie touches her earplugs in her pocket, nestled with the spoon and the soap. It’s the first time in days that she doesn’t feel the need to wear them.

“Let’s lift him onto the couch,” Ruth says. She’s already collected more medical equipment from the bathroom: IV tubing, a needle, a rubber tourniquet she wraps around his bicep while Annie retucks the blanket in place. Ruth tears the alcohol swab open with her teeth and swipes the boy’s inner arm before poking him. He doesn’t flinch.

The blood flash into the needle is bluish.

“Shouldn’t it be red?” Annie asks.

Ruth keeps working, her brow furrowed, her cheeks still not their usual colour. She tapes the IV tubing to his forearm, hangs the bag of Ringer’s Lactate solution to a lamp stand. Adjusts the flow, then shakes her head. “Deoxygenated blood is blue... I don’t have oxygen for him, anyway. But the probe still says ninety-eight percent.”

“What do we do?” Annie asks.

“This is all we can do,” Ruth says. She stands and walks to the kitchen, then rattles around in the pots. “Can you bring your clams up?”

“What?”

“From the beach.”

How can she make dinner at a time like this? Ruth has always been matter-of-fact, but everything is changed now, can’t she feel it? This unconscious boy on the couch. The blue blood. The potent hum-breathing sound. Her parents. It seems wrong to start making dinner.

But Ruth has a cast-iron pot in her hands. She raises her eyebrows and looks at Annie until she’s compelled to move.

Outside, the clouds are clearing. The wind threads through the porch rafters, between the faded buoys that have hung there for decades. They bump each other in the breeze. Annie retrieves the bucket from the beach and carries it to the manual pump on the grass, another relic Ruth couldn’t part with, even though she didn’t expect to need it again.

Annie has to use her entire weight to crank the pump handle until the bucket is full. Using a stiff-bristled brush, she cleans the sand and barnacles from the clam shells. If she focuses on the movement of her hands, then she can do this. Meaning: She can keep existing. Intense focus on small things, moment-to-moment. Don’t think about Mom and Dad, don’t think about inky water swallowing boats. Watch the bristles unlatch the barnacles. Watch the sand sink to the bottom of the bucket.

But the hum reaches for her again, reeling her back in.

She’s momentarily lost inside it. Indigo waves rock her side to side as she breathes in the scent of wind. A new warmth envelops her ribcage.

“Annie?” Ruth’s voice rings out from the kitchen.

“Coming,” she calls back automatically. But what is happening to her? She picks up the bucket. The porch steps creak in their usual way. She clacks back through the screen door.

“You can throw them in.” Ruth points to the rolling boil of the water in the pot on the wood stove. Rogue droplets sizzle on the burner.

They move around one another. Ruth rechecks the boy’s pulse and flicks the IV tubing to mobilize a trapped air bubble, then chops onions and a head of garlic from the now defunct refrigerator. Annie warms a second pan to fry them. In the bubbling water, the clams start to crack open. When everything is cooked, Annie scoops it all together into chipped ceramic bowls from the hutch.

They eat sitting next to each other on the floor. The trestle dining table is sideways in the corner, where Ruth has been repairing its broken legs and scrubbing off the remains of seawater.

The boy hasn’t roused.

“Maybe he hit his head in the tsunami,” Annie offers.

Ruth runs her tongue over her bottom lip. “Maybe, but the timing is off. It’s been four days.”

“What do you think happened?”

“He’s not about to wake up, is what I think. We should put some clothes on him. It’s going to get cooler overnight.” She gets an old pair of athletic shorts and a blue long-sleeve T-shirt from the trunk. Annie lifts his limbs, threading the IV bag through the shirt sleeve, while Ruth tugs the clothes into place. “People must be washing up like this all down the coast this week.”

“Their bodies, you mean,” Annie says before stopping herself.