Page 7 of The Wild Beneath

“People who got stranded, who somehow survived.”

“Do you think help’s coming soon?”

“We’re a long way out,” Ruth says, as if it’s an explanation, and there’s nothing else to say about it.

The daylight fades into the shadows. Annie wants to curl up on the floor next to the boy, beside the couch. The sound is clearer around him, close to him—­braids of it, some stronger, some softer, curving near where they sit.

Somehow, when she listens to the humming, everything inside her stops aching.

“He’ll be here in the morning,” Ruth says, as if she knows what Annie is thinking. “I’ll check his vitals overnight.”

Eventually, Annie goes to her bedroom down the hall. She digs the spoon with its moon phases and the packaged soap out of her pocket and puts them onto an empty shelf in the closet. Then she gets in bed. She hasn’t slept for days. Grief stalks her in the darkest hours; when she closes her eyes, the black wave is there, consuming everything.

Annie inspects the dark corners of the room. The caulking is cracked and peeling. A knee-high salt line—­the height the wave reached—­disrupts the wallpaper. The air is muggy with the musty scent of mould, and the damp sheets cling to her. She still isn’t used to sleeping on land. She misses being rocked to sleep onAmphitrite, misses being a few feet from her parents.

Annie picks up a pink conch shell from the floor beside the mattress. Part of Ruth’s collection, it had been a bathroom counter decoration, until Annie found it in a silty corner behind the toilet after the tsunami.

“I can hear you whispering,” her mom used to say when she listened to shells.

How long does the seashell sound last? As a child, Annie believed that if the shell was away from the water too long, the sound would gradually leak out until she could no longer hear it. Annie couldn’t bear the idea that the song would drain away, like the gas in their outboard motor. So she would routinely gather Ruth’s shells in a basket and cart them down to the shore, in order to amplify their inner oceans. That way they’d never run out of song.

Annie rolls on her back and puts the pink conch beside her on the pillow. She can’t bear to listen to it now.

The pulse sound is still with her, even when the boy is down the hallway. Is he awake? Does he have enough blankets? Annie wants to go look at him again. Her eyelids are unusually heavy, though. Her mind empties itself. Why is it not spinning the way it has been?

She relaxes into the mattress, wading between asleep and awake.

The pulsing is underneath her now.

Chapter 4

Before

When Annie is six, in early September, Aiden rents a slip at the Hale’s Landing wharf.

Annie grips the lines securing Amphitriteto the wharf planks. She’s used to being anchored off a mooring ball in Ruth’s cove, free to move as she wants, not leashed in this way. The fenders thump against the slip.

Curled in the aft berth later, she overhears her parents debating about school.

“It’s about what’s best for her,” Aiden says. “We can moor here during the year. Let her put down some roots.”

“I’d rather keep her with us,” Mara hesitates, “on the water.”

“We can’t keep her secluded forever.”

“But for now.”

Ruth comes aboard for a late dinner of barbecued salmon. Annie is meant to be sleeping, but she hears Aiden persisting. Ruth chimes in between bites: “She needs teachers.”

“I don’t want her to forget all of this,” Mara says.

“She’ll learn other useful things—­” Ruth cajoles.

“She won’t forget this,” Aiden says.

Then a long silence.

Eventually, Mara says: “We can try.” She sounds half-hearted.