Page 83 of The Wild Beneath

It takes the whole day to get to Vancouver.

Everyone is loaded onto yellow school buses with squeaking vinyl seats. They drive past the wreckage still on the beach. It’s minor damage, comparatively. Garbage and mud, yes, but winking cellular antennae are still intact. Buildings are upright, with roofs still attached. Stores have their lights on through the windows. Recycling bins still wait for pickup at the end of driveways.

If she thought it was loud without Walker in the cabin or on the beach, she had not yet understood what it could be like in a city.

This is head-splitting.

“Temporary Housing” is scrawled on a billboard outside a mossy brick building. Weeds choke the entryway and the cracked concrete steps. The building is drafty. The hallways are windowless, and the walls and furniture are beige. Evan and Annie have rooms assigned next to each other. A broken toilet down the hall runs continuously, beside a dripping faucet that sounds like a jackhammer.

Annie heads straight for her room and locks her door—­not just the lock, but also the stainless-steel slide bolt above the handle—­and refuses to respond to Evan when he knocks. Not so much that she refuses, but she cannot organize a response anymore. She does not bother to take off her boots before falling into the hard single bed. The wool blanket under her is scratchy and stiff.

Her skin feels tingly, like it’s falling asleep or not getting enough oxygen. Sparks flare around the edges of her visual field.

Evan calls her name, knocks again, tries to soothe her from behind the door, tries to reassure her that she’s okay. She is not okay; in fact, she is certain she will never be okay again. He leaves for a bit, then comes back. Is she wailing? What’s this noise escaping her mouth? Her pillow is soaked. Her face is covered in what seems like seawater. It tastes of ocean. Ocean she does not want.

“Annie, you need to try to breathe slower,” Evan says through the door. “Take longer breaths.”

After some unbearably-long-but-probably-short amount of time, Evan’s asking around for a key. “I don’t know what’s happening, it sounds like she’s having a seizure or something,” she hears him say. “Does anyone have a screwdriver?”

Next, he’s rattling the handle, trying to pry the door open. He calls her name more insistently.

The pillow is still over her head, and her thoughts are looping: Why would Walker leave? Or how could he drown? He took with him the sound, and the explanations she needed about herself and her mother and the sea. How will she live with so many questions unanswered? He was such a good swimmer. How could the ocean take him, too? She coasts in and out of an awake-asleep-ness. She isn’t sure where she is and everything is dark.

“Make sure you’re out of the way of the door, Annie!” Evan shouts.

The ear-shattering sound of a drill going at the door hinges, one after the other. Her pillow is not thick enough, her hands over her ears not strong enough. The drill bit grinds against the screws, which finally give way. Only the sliding bolt still holds.

His voice again: “We can do this together. Just open the door.”

She cannot. She waits for the end, for more darkness, for everything to be over.

Evan pounds his body into the door—­once, twice, and a third time—­until the wood yields, cracking and falling inward onto the beige laminate flooring, landing with a smack.

He’s broken down the door.

And she is broken, too. She’s sure of it.

With Evan now lying on the narrow bed beside her, his hand over her ear, the darkness of night comes.

She barely sleeps, in and out of hallucinations: a large spider under a clear plastic cup. An aquarium of aquamarine seahorses.A whale jawbone dragged through a desert of sand. She holds onto the cord, the three whalebone beads warm against her throat.

Even if she doesn’t want it to, the sun returns. After a long period of Evan rubbing her back, miraculously finding her earplugs, telling her she will not die and she is not dying, despite how she feels, he manages to pull her from the bed.

They cook scrambled eggs for breakfast in a shared kitchen with a gas burner stove. He has to strike an entire book of matches before the flame catches. Annie has two bites.

“At least we’re here now,” he says. “We can see Ruth.”

They walk the neighbourhood, following a folded map. St. Paul’s Hospital is a dot within an expansive grid of narrow sidewalks that smell of rubber and gasoline. This part of Vancouver is completely unaffected by the tsunami—­no crumbling buildings, groaning bridges, unattended refuse piles. No clanks of generators in the background.

They might as well be on another planet.

Evan is filling the space, talking because she is not. Trying to comfort her, saying things like “it feels like regular life,” and “maybe we can start fresh,” and “I told Dad I wasn’t coming back.”

Press fast-forward, he seems to be saying. Move on.

The hospital is crowded. In the elevator, Annie feels like a caged animal, its slow ascent, dinging at every level, the in-and-out of strangers staring at their cell phones.

Ruth is a slip of herself under a thin white blanket on the eighth floor.