Page 12 of The Wild Beneath

Evan looks up.

“Your mom was Celeste,” she says to Evan. No hello.

Aiden, behind her, puts a palm to his chest. “He might not want to talk about it, Mar.”

Mara crouches down next to Evan. “Your mother was different.”

Evan places his cards beside him, face up. “She was?”

“I met her years ago at Rosie’s. She was holding you,” Mara continues, placing her hand on his knee.

Evan breathes. It’s as if his breath had been stuck in his collarbones; now it comes from his belly.

Mara goes on, “She was twirling her fingers through your hair while you slept against her shoulder. She sang to you.”

Evan has tears in his eyes. “She always sang me to sleep.”

“Your mother felt like love,” Mara says. “She sounded like love.”

“I have a hard time sleeping now.”

Mara watches him and listens and waits and the waves do their thing under the boat, soothing them all.

Aiden and Annie do not interrupt.

“Do you want to come with us?” Mara eventually asks.

Evan nods.

And so does Mara.

So it goes that summer.

Over a period of weeks, Evan emerges. He talks more. His smile is lopsided, the left side goes first, and there’s a dimple high in his left cheek when he laughs. Annie likes hearing him laugh.

Quickly, they’re inseparable. They sail and swing off the halyard with cannonballs into the sea, then catch shiners off Ruth’s dock. They gut fish and sell it at Rosie’s, eat Creamsicles from the freezer while she tells them not to drip pink juice all over her floor. They sail far out from Hale’s Landing for days, catch Chinook in the Pacific. When they sleep on the deck under the stars, Aiden cocoons them in blankets.

“Can we go ashore?” Evan asks Mara one late afternoon in July. He always wants to go ashore for adventures.

Mara is slow to acquiesce, but soon enough she’s wandering the beach with them, never letting them stray too far. Since the episode at school, she doesn’t like to let Annie out of her sight.

“Here’s the spot.” Evan smooths a swath of sand under his tanned feet.

“I want a magic kingdom,” Annie says.

“We’ll be king and queen.”

“I’ll be a queen octopus,” she says. “Let’s make me an octopus bed.”

They build the tallest sandcastle they’ve ever seen. Annie moulds a spiralling steeple and Evan digs deep, long moats—­fed by buckets of seawater—­all the way to the trees. The magic holds on to them until long past dinner. They have not eaten; they cannot stop. Mara checks on them periodically, but they don’t even notice her. She returns to the surf.

By late evening, Annie and Evan are covered head to toe in sand and mud.

Mid-August, they explore a different beach, closer to Hale’s Landing.

“I want to show you something.” Evan points to a trail up the mountainside, a path between salmonberry thickets and stinging nettles.

Down the beach, her mom is clamming with her shovel and bucket, too far to call out and ask for permission. Mara is still paranoid about Annie going off on her own. Annie knows this well, along with a handful of other things that seem slightly odd about her mother: her reclusive nature, her tendency to sit still for long periods, her near obsession with swimming. Her sensitivity to noise. The way she rarely speaks but loves to hum, loves music, loves Aiden’s harmonica.