Page 128 of The Wild Beneath

“Why?”

“There’s someone for you to see.”

Who is he talking about? Annie doesn’t know how to broach her thousand questions. Where has he been, and how is he alive if he died?

“We’re the singers,” he says, his voice light and springy. “But the sea is the song.”

Walker raises the anchor.

He does not set a bearing. He does not check the charts. Annie takes the helm as he lifts the mainsail and it catches the wind. It’s blustery. He doesn’t seem to mind. His heat radiates as he sits next to her in the cockpit.

Annie still can’t unscramble her thoughts. “Why were you away so long?” she tries.

“We don’t control the timing.” He smiles.

Annie shakes her head. “But where did you go?”

“You’ll see. She’s going to show you.”

“Can I go where you went?”

“You belong here.” He takes her hand. “The rest of us can’t stay without getting... disconnected. Sick, in a way. You remember when your mom stopped humming?”

Annie touches her whalebone necklace. The three beadson the leather cord. Did she tell Walker about this? It’s true—Mara did stop humming. Annie remembers every painful detail of that day; the whale dying on the beach, Mara’s sobs and the abyss of silence that followed. They left Hale’s to sail south right afterward.

“But you can connect to both,” Walker says. “Earth and sea. As long as you don’t get too far away.”

“Too far away from what?”

“From one or the other.”

Those rose-coloured mornings in Baja onAmphitrite, the weeks they did not go ashore. There was joy. But Annie was a little adrift, wasn’t she? Like if she wasn’t careful, she couldn’t come back.

Until they sailed back into Hale’s each fall, to that boy running down Ruth’s dock with earth under his fingernails.

Walker smiles again before letting go of her hand to steer. They rise and fall over tall waves. Annie’s questions dissolve; they seem too trivial, too far from where she is now, fitting perfectly inside the sound.

They sail like this, wordless, until they arrive.

“This is the spot.” Walker takes her hand again to show her: white-tipped waves and ocean beneath. It flows up through her arm in a flash. She blinks and it’s over.

“You keep doing that.”

His eyes are gentle. “Let’s swim.”

They anchor again and undress.

He pulls her to stand over the transom in their underwear. “And afterward, Annie? You have everything you need here on the boat. She’s all yours,” he says.

“Polaris?”

“Yes. Your home. Think about it as a maiden voyage.” He grins, then dives without a splash.

Annie climbs down one rung at a time. She tries not to think aboutGalene, and the last time she stood on a ladder over the sea.

Walker surfaces amid the waves. He sees her hovering there, almost naked, not getting in. He says: “You’re okay, Annie.”

She believes him. Annie edges down in a crouch and pushes off. It takes her breath away, how good it feels this time.