Page 88 of The Wild Beneath

“One GCS 3, we’re bagging him. One compound fracture.It’s a femur and probably needs blood. Pressure 80/60. Two others with hypothermia. Ten minutes out, over.”

She hands the radio back to Armstrong and jogs through the sliding doors of the nursing station, into the fluorescent lights and smell of sanitizer. She pulls off her rain gear and runs a hand over the taut braid of her hair.

Annie circles the resuscitation room methodically: clicks on the warmer and the ventilator, types in settings while tuning out the shrill beeps of the machines. She pulls medications out of vials into plastic syringes while watching the clock. Ten minutes out. She needs blood from the freezer in the back lab.

Armstrong is suddenly next to her, priming an IV bag.

“Can you prime a second line? Do you know how to use a level one infuser?” She hauls it out of the equipment chest.

“Think I was born yesterday?” Armstrong replies.

“I’m going to get blood.”

The lab is down a narrow hallway at the back of the station. The door is locked, four numbers written in faded pencil on the doorframe beside the keypad. She crosses her fingers and clicks the numbers in sequence. A flash of green light and it opens. She closes the door behind her.

And stops.

A different tone. It’s hushed and barely even there. It vanishes, then returns a few seconds later. She stands still and listens. It must be the fans, or the ventilation system.

But it’s more familiar than that.

Annie kneels on the floor next to the freezer. She tries to open it with the key she found hanging from an orange thumbtack on the bulletin board. The lock jams, grinds, will not yield. She tries to force it at a different angle.

The sound persists.

The key finally turns. She retrieves the icy O-negative blood bag in its thick plastic packaging. Using the stubby pencil hanging from a long white string, she records the blood on the inventory clipboard.

Trying to ignore the sound, she fixes her thoughts on sedation protocols, dosing parameters. A rate for the Levophed drip and whether she saw a kit for a central line somewhere. She wipes her hands on her pants. The sound gets much stronger as she closes up the lab.

She takes a pair of earplugs out of her back pocket and shoves them into her ears, presses them as far as they’ll go, waiting for her left brain to kick in, to spit out a logical explanation.

Maybe she’s too close to the water. Too far from home.

She was home, in Vancouver—­only hours ago—­and it was quieter. She and Evan had woken early, when it was still dark, and spent a long period saying nothing, lying in bed the way they do: bodies entwined. She’d heard of some couples that sleep separately, on opposite sides of a king bed, or even in different rooms.

This is not how they sleep. It is not how they’ve ever slept.

Even as kids on the deck ofAmphitrite, they’d wake up with some body part attached—­hands holding, arms interlocked, legs tangled. Their backs up against one another. Even when her mom and dad put them to bed in different places on the boat, Annie would sleepwalk to him.

Does she actually sleep when she’s not touching Evan? Certainly it is harder; she usually takes an extra dose of melatonin or half a zopiclone if he’s on shift or away for coast guard work. She cannot have the covers separating them. She loves the smell of his armpits and listening to his steady heart.

She doesn’t feel steady now. This sound is growing to the size of a fist inside her low belly. Was it a mistake to come up here, so much closer to Hale’s Landing?

They’d decided to come together. Around 7:30 a.m., Evan’s cell rang. A sinking freighter, west of Port Alice. They were in the middle of coffee: his black, hers with a lot of half-and-half.He said it was time to go. They drove through gridlocked traffic to the coast guard station and held hands after strapping into their helicopter seat belts. As they flew north, Annie looked out the window at the twisty strands of water hugging the shore, those sandy deltas of brackish current. It was the first time she’d deliberately looked at it since leaving Hale’s. Was this the same ocean as before?

“You don’t have to look,” Evan said, and she heard him, even though she was wearing earplugs underneath the helicopter headphones.

Strangely, staring at the water was exactly what she needed to do. She didn’t cry when she saw it. Her heart rate did not skyrocket.

But here with this sound in the nursing station hallway, her pulse races up into her neck, with this penetrating hum she had tried so hard to forget.

Annie crouches near the floor in a ball. Her vision narrows: Silt collects where the floor meets the wall; a black scuff marks the linoleum. The sour smell of her own sweat. She closes her eyes again.

How is this happening? The sound slingshots her back to that slice of summer when Walker was with her. Inside her. The indescribable vibration of him; moving up through her chest, pouring down her arms and through her fingertips.

The helicopter arrives with its thundering roar overhead.

She opens her eyes. Water dots the floor. She’s been crying without realizing it. The blood bag is freezing in her palm. The rotors thunk loudly through the ceiling. There is no space in her world for this. Not now. She stands shakily and wipes the tears away with her shoes.