Page 4 of The Wild Beneath

Her next moan is long and primal.

The scent of blood and seawater. Aiden feels a head, then a small shoulder. An arm. The rest of a warm body sliding into his waiting grasp. He does not breathe until the baby—­resting upon his trembling, numb hands—­reaches the water’s surface.

It’s a girl. She takes a breath of air, then wails.

Mara has tears in her eyes.

Annie is born to the sea. Aiden can breathe now. When he looks down at his daughter, he wonders if his entire reason for being has been poured into this one tiny body.

By the time Annie is three years old, it’s impossible for Aiden to keep hold of her.

They’ve managed through toddlerhood onAmphitrite. He installed netting around the lifelines and tethered a child safety harness to the mast. They keep a playpen up against the berth for when the seas are roughest.

But Annie won’t stay inside it; she wants the rush of wind and the spray of salt water. In a particularly strong gale that winter, she demands to stay topside. She belly-laughs and calls out for more as the sailboat rises and drops over the waves.

Her legs are strong and fast and always moving. Come spring, Aiden chases her along the shoreline, blue-green algae under their feet. She finds a pink-tipped sea anemone at the edge of a rocky tide pool. Its tentacles reach up as if it wants to betouched. Next, an itty-bitty octopus that Annie collects in the cup of her palms, its double row of suckers attached to her skin. All day she plays on the shore. Her bucket is full of ribbed limpet shells and sand dollars. The crabs do their sideways scuttles in the sand during her endless game of catch and release.

When she’s not running the beach, Annie swims. The first day of summer that year, brown pelicans swoop overhead as she and Mara float on their backs under an expanse of sky.

“Come back aboard!” Aiden calls, his voice carrying over the waves. “Dinner’s getting cold.”

But they do not. They splash him instead, grinning ear-to-ear. Water drips from their golden hair.

Aiden and Mara make ends meet selling catch to Rosie, the fishmonger at Hale’s Wharf. Installed behind the same wooden counter since Aiden was little, Rosie doesn’t seem to age. Her dyed-black hair is always pulled into a ponytail, shellacked in place. Perhaps her dirty apron used to be whiter, but she clicks away at her cash register like she always has. John, her husband, sells Aiden fish and chips out the back kitchen window: fried cod wrapped in newspaper with a plastic container of coleslaw slathered in mayonnaise.

Otherwise, they rarely come ashore. When they boughtAmphitrite, Aiden wondered if he’d find it unsettling to not have a home with a foundation and walls, or a reasonable square footage. Maybe they should’ve purchased a bigger boat? He sold his car, whittled down his mystery novel collection to the few that fit in the berth, and donated his spare clothing. He occasionally misses having a full-sized refrigerator and a flushing toilet. In the end, though,Amphitritefeels more like home than any house he’s had. With Mara and Annie inside, the boat is all he needs.

On a hot day midsummer, Aiden and Ruth stand on the beach at Hale’s Landing. The sun is directly overhead, burning the top of Aiden’s head. Annie has been swimming off thewharf for hours. Now she dives in again, this time to retrieve a spiny-skinned sea star from the bottom. Next, a rock covered in acorn barnacles.

Aiden and Ruth ooh and aah at her finds.

“Come get some goggles,” Ruth calls, holding out a neon-green pair. “You’ll see better!” They dangle from her fingers.

Annie looks over briefly, then bobs under again.

An elderly couple stroll by. They look like tourists, wearing matching windbreakers and bright white running shoes, ice cream cones in their hands.

“She swims so well. And so young!” the woman marvels. She licks the melting soft-serve from her fingers.

“She’s a little fish,” Aiden comments.

“I really wish you’d make her wear a life jacket,” Ruth says, as Annie ducks under the water’s surface and out of sight.

Aiden clears his throat, a habit of his when he doesn’t know what to say.

“The ocean’s wild,” Ruth pushes. “Better to keep her safe.”

Later, Aiden tries to put her in a life jacket, but Annie refuses. She dives back in. He chases her underwater through the forest of kelp, its emerald-green fronds dancing in the current. But she’s gone in a trail of bubbles, faster than he can swim, only popping her head up much further away than he could have managed. She can hold her breath far longer than he can.

Chapter 3

Now

Annie leaves the boy on the beach.

She’s back in a few minutes, accompanied by Ruth, in her muddy gumboots and bleached-out Vancouver Aquarium sweatshirt, a medical bag slung over one shoulder. They climb down the rope ladder they’ve rigged from the bluff to the beach. At the bottom, Ruth gives the boy a head-to-toe once-over, kneels beside him on the sand, and places two fingers on the side of his neck.

It feels awkward to stare at him, but Annie can’t stop. The fine hair on his arms... was it there before? His skin appears firmer, more assembled. More like skin and less like see-through rice paper. Her eyes find their way to the sharp angle of his jaw and the steep slant of his nose.