Page 89 of The Wild Beneath

Annie pushes her fingertips into her scalp so hard it hurts and manages to walk with some autopilot ability of her legs. She drops the blood on a table in the resuscitation room, then heads back to the tarmac as the helicopter touches down. A blast of air hits her face.

Evan opens the door.

Before the rotors have stopped, he jumps out to unload the first stretcher. Rain beads on his bright red coast guard jacket. His curls are compressed by the padded edge of his helmet. The second stretcher follows the first, as he gives her updated vital signs in rapid succession. His voice carries into the wind.

Close to her now. His steady hand on her shoulder brings her back to earth. She needs him to keep holding on.

“All yours,” he says.

Hours later, the well-practised and nearly mechanical movements of her hands have carried her through splinting bones, setting lines, attaching telemetry wires, and strapping ventilators. A conveyor belt of work. Walker’s sound has paced underneath all of it. Persistent. The sky clears up. Night comes with the pink set of the sun and the helicopter ride to Vancouver.

She sits alongside the more unstable of the two patients, tracking the rise and fall of his respirations, his heart rate, and end-tidal CO2 readings. She writes it all down in the damp medical records on her lap.

“When did you get so good at this?” Evan asks her through the headset.

Annie tucks in a stray blanket corner on the gurney. “It’s all algorithms.”

“It’s more than that,” he goes on. “Those killer hours in residency gave you superpowers.”

She thinks of the drawn-out midnight stretches. The thirty-hour on-call shifts. They were a gift, absorbing her so fully that all the memories of what happened were corralled behind closed doors.

“I wish I could talk to my dad about it,” Annie says.

“I bet he was amazing at this.”

They slip back into silence.

The patients make it back to Vancouver alive.

Somewhere between the work, the helicopter ride, and the drive back to their apartment, the sound fades. By the time she and Evan arrive home, only a trace of it remains.

Annie strips off her clothes into a messy pile and gets straight into the shower. Her legs quake and refuse to hold her up. She gets out of the shower and vomits into the toilet, then sits on the cold tiles with her head between her legs until she can stand again.

Then she gets back in the shower.

“You alright?” Evan’s voice carries through the closed bathroom door.

She wants to say: I heard Walker up there.

But that would involve explaining everything she’s never explained. It’s late.

“I’m fine,” she says. She lets the water pour over her, watching it escape down the drain, through holes leading to darkness beneath. She turns the temperature as hot as it will go.

Afterward, at the bathroom counter, Annie avoids her reflection. She can only catch faint echoes of Walker’s sound. She must have been making it all up. It can’t be real.

“Hey, Annie?” It’s Evan again on the other side of the locked door. “Come to bed.”

She wants to understand how and why this impossible thing is happening to her.

“In a sec,” she responds.

She stays stuck in the bathroom for so much longer that he gives up and goes to bed without her. When she finally opens the door, the apartment is dark, except for the light on the range hood. The wood flooring creaks as she tiptoes into the bedroom. Evan is already asleep—­on his front, one arm over his head, the other wrapped under the pillow.

She crawls into the soft flannel sheets and curves into his side, plugging into him like an electrical outlet.

He wakes and pulls her tightly into his chest. Settling her face against his neck, in that place between his collarbone and jaw that belongs to her, she smells sleep in him and tries to forget.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asks into her hair, half awake.