Page 66 of The Wild Beneath
“What way?”
“Ignoring who he is. This doesn’t feel like the real him.”
Annie thinks about when they were seven years old, and Evan pressed his face into the bark of the grandmother arbutus tree.
“No,” she says, keeping her eyes on the boat. “He hasn’t always been this way.”
Evan pulls up the anchor, but it turns out it isn’t a real anchor at all. It’s a heavy cinder block on a blackened, fraying rope. The tug eventually motors out into the channel and the booms trail behind them.
Chapter 24
Walker and Annie are quiet on the hike back.
Her mind churns like a cement mixer, torturing her with what-ifs and unanswered questions. Will she and Evan find their way back together? Or is Walker leading her down a different path? His hum drifts around them as they walk. She wants to fold herself into it and stay there.
It’s Friday. The week stretches out, alone and together in the cabin. Walker bends to straighten the mat inside the doorway. As his spine arches, a strip of skin reveals itself around his lower back. Annie tries to distract herself with Ruth’s list of chores on the counter.
“I know you’re worried about her,” Walker says, coming over.
“You’d think I’d come to terms with her being sick.”
He says nothing, in that way that he does when there is nothing to say.
She can’t help staring at him—at the soft bow of his upper lip, the muscles of his neck—until she realizes she’s doing it and abruptly looks back down. How is he so beautiful?
Ruth has delegated a range of chores—a long and individualized list for each of them—as if she wanted to keep them fully and separately occupied in her absence. And alongside “water the chickens” and “get more propane from the coast guard supply,” she’s written “pack for October.” Annie traces her fingers over the words. Then she folds the paper in halfand sticks it in the drawer next to the car keys and Ruth’s measuring tape.
“Should we do chores?” she asks.
“Is that what you want?”
His sound feels more tactile than usual. Butterfly wings at the back of her neck, across her fingertips. All she wants is to get closer, and she’s scared of how badly she wants it.
“We should tackle them before it’s too late,” she says instead, not sure how to ask for more sound.
He looks at her briefly, then he grabs the compost bucket from under the sink. “Chores it is.”
Walker scrubs the last of the laundry and hangs it on the line. Annie collects eggs from the chickens. Her desire builds up. But is it desire for the sound, or desire for Walker? Or are they the same thing? And why is it so potent and demanding?
She buzzes with nerves.
More work: She cleans out the kitchen drawers for Ruth, scrubs sand and crumbs and rogue peppercorns from the corners. Walker goes to the beach to collect mussels off the rocks.
From the window, she watches his lanky body, his long strides.
It’s the end of the day by the time they’ve done all the chores and eaten. When they sit down on the couch, the sun is heading toward the horizon. Annie sinks onto the cushions. Walker readsBirds of the North Pacific.
“You want to hear this?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Albatrosses. They can go years without touching ground. They sleep in flight.”
Annie has seen the white-winged birds aloft in the sky, off the bow ofAmphitriteon the open seas. Alone in the middle of nowhere. Her dad used to say they were primordial.
“Their heart rate is the same sleeping and flying,” he finishes.
“Do you think they’re lonely?”
