Page 14 of The Wild Beneath

It’s the first time Annie has seen Isaac up close. He’s bearded, nearly bald, and has a booming voice. He feels like hard edges, but then he rubs Evan’s hair. Evan talks with his hands, already telling Isaac how many seals they counted in the cove this morning. And how long he was able to hold his breath underwater. Isaac leaves his hand at the back of Evan’s neck.

“Bye, Annie.” Evan waves as they walk away. “Thanks for having me.” Isaac leads him by the shoulder up the dock and toward a Hale Timber pickup truck waiting on the bluff. He’s left the engine running, belching clouds of black smoke from the exhaust.

Annie wants to keep Evan with her.

She doesn’t trust Isaac, and his scarred patch of mountain she can see in the distance where trees had once been.

Chapter 7

Now

Ruth leads the way off the bluff where her house is perched, into town, with Walker in between them.

“We’ll see if anyone knows him,” she suggested. “Maybe put a call out on the radio.”

Annie shoulders blackberry branches out of the way. Rubble and garbage cover the ground. Downed telephone cabling winds through the debris while bright green shoots keep their upward trajectory, despite everything.

Walker looks at Annie every couple of minutes, as if she might disappear. He trips over a washed-up vacuum cleaner hose, stumbles and scrapes his left elbow. He’s fascinated for several moments by the tiny breaks in his skin, but then his attention is absorbed by a dandelion puffball, pulling the seeds from the stem, letting them drift away in the breeze.

Ruth gives him a curious once-over. “Let’s get a move on,” she says.

The black wave of water is a memory Annie can’t shake. She hangs back as they get closer, not wanting to see the town. Walker slows to match her pace. They pass the washed-out gas station and its crumbling pavement. A cement post remains, minus its sign. Her spine stiffens.

Annie knows every part of Hale’s Landing—­the shade of the storefronts, or at least how they looked from the bow ofAmphitriteat summer sunset. The roads, even if she’s rarely walked them. Now the landscape has been redrawn, in the crunch of digested metal and tile under her shoes, the uprooted trees and strips of carpeting they climb over. Shattered windows. A maze of fallen branches, a new geography.

Above the well-defined line where the wave stopped its assault, houses sit untouched between the green crowns of trees.

But down by where the wharf used to be, it smells like dead things and rotting fish. Annie wants to hear the chatter at the gas pumps, the plunk of logs dropping into the water, kids shrieking as they run on the beach. Instead, it’s the sound of an excavator scraping the sand, and the megaphone voice of Isaac Hale, who stands in his white dress shirt, belted khakis, and loafers on top of an overturned vending machine a few feet away. The candy inside still hangs from the inner coils, the sunlight refracts off shiny wrappers. Evan, arms crossed, stands a few feet behind him.

Annie has the urge to go straight to him—­a lightning-bolt feeling—­even if she’s angry at him. As she debates whether to call out his name, Isaac yells to the excavator driver: “Take that tree out!”

Evan hasn’t seen her yet. He appears to be arguing with Isaac. Judging by the solemn trench between Evan’s eyebrows, Isaac seems to be winning. Evan takes a step backward and his chin sinks to his chest.

In their height and upright posture, Isaac and Evan are almost replicas of one another. But inside they’re different. Evan secretly feels everything. His feelings dominate him. Isaac appears chronically stoic and unfazed. Ruth said it wasn’t always this way; Isaac used to be more receptive and open before Celeste died. “He had nasturtiums planted at the library every spring. He’d bring ice cream sandwiches to the school on the last day before summer break.”

There’s no ice cream left. All that remains at the grocery store is wilting fruit and vegetables, picked-over cans, fabric softener for washing machines that no longer function. Dried kibble for dogs that ran away before the wave hit.

The ice cream sandwich version of Isaac isn’t here on the beach, if he exists at all now. Annie has the familiar instinct to grab Evan’s hand and pry him away from his father, so he doesn’t morph into him. As if she could reach across the debris with her heart and touch his, she wills him to look up at her. To see her.

But he does not.

Annie scans for anything else recognizable. Great Uncle Henry, Ruth’s older brother, stands on the far side of the beach beside a table of fish under a flimsy white tent, distributing the fish to a short line of people. He’s a solid, rectangular sort of man. His fishing vest has a collection of pockets; some zippered, some snapped. His white hair blows in the wind. He’d been far enough up Hecate Strait in his gillnetter to survive the wave. He prefers not to talk; Annie feels relief around him because of it. Henry loves solitude on the deck of his boat. She wants to go over to him and continue not talking.

Walker is beside her, kneeling behind a sideways chest freezer draped with bull kelp. He is still, not a muscle twitches. As far as Annie can tell, he’s not even breathing.

Eventually, it’s not Evan who sees Annie; it’s Isaac.

“Your sailboat girl is here,” Isaac says gruffly, patting his shirt pocket for cigarettes.

Annie looks better than Evan expected. Her eyes are clear and bright. She looks composed, even in the chaos on the beach.

He’s been lying awake worrying about her every night since the tsunami.

If he’s honest, there have been few nights in the last decade he hasn’t lain awake thinking about her. She’s the most alluringperson he knows: that honey-brown hair with a mind of its own; unruly, long waves that get tangled up. The way she finds it unimportant to straighten them out. The freckles he wants to kiss, under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. Her slender frame and deceptively strong muscles, often stronger than his, and those crooked bottom teeth that only show when she smiles her real smile. Her beauty arrests him. But also, she’s always been a little untethered, some pervasive wildness that worries him sick, sometimes.

Isaac waves the unlit cigarette between his fingers. “We need to clear this out so we can get the logs shipped.”

“But we can’t stay here,” Evan responds, not looking away from Annie. The excavator interrupts him with itsbeep-beep-beep. “There’s no running water. Electricity.”