The Music of the Deep: A Novel

by Elizabeth Hall

  Emmie sat down on the edge of a rocking chair, all her air escaping in one thick rush. There were no tears. She had been expecting him to go—but not like this. She had not expected this. Her shock at the news kept her quiet and still for a very long stretch, and Kate Taylor, feeling the discomfort in every inch of her ample bosom, leaned forward and patted Emmie on the knee. “Shall I call someone?”

  Emmie looked up at her, totally lost for an answer. She did not even know his next of kin—had no idea who or where his family might be or if they even existed. She would have to leave it to the sheriff’s office to track down his mother, wherever she was.

  “What about you?” Ms. Taylor continued. “I imagine you’ll want to be going home yourself, given your . . . situation?”

  The question snapped her back into real time. How had the woman known? Emmie had only recently discovered that she was pregnant; she had not yet shared the news with Dusty. The last thing she wanted was for Dusty to stay with her out of guilt or obligation.

  From the moment she first suspected she was pregnant, Emmie had sensed that the baby was a girl. She had imagined scenes of mother and daughter; she could see herself caring for that child.

  What she could not imagine was heading back to Montana to do it.

  Emmie sat gazing at the intense green grass of this little spread, at the blanket of silver-gray clouds hiding the tops of the trees. She tried to picture packing her things and going back to the ranch. She knew that her father would forgive her, that he would take her in, along with the child she carried. She would have a roof over her head, and food on the table, and would not have to be on her feet for hours every day, working at the café.

  There had been moments in the past few months when she had missed them—her family, the ranch, her mother’s biscuits. The soft noises of the horses in the early morning. It was the life she knew, the life she’d grown up with, the only life she had ever known until recently. She had even called her mother a few times, to let her know where she was and how she was doing.

  But living there? Raising a child there? She sat on the edge of the chair, dry-eyed despite the fact that her hormones were completely awash with new-baby chemicals and the horrifying news about Dusty. She just couldn’t picture going back. With Dusty, with this move to the far west, her life had expanded, had burst out of the tight seams that had bound her. She could not imagine trying to shrink it back to what it had been just a few months before. When he’d showed up at her father’s ranch barely a half year ago, she had glimpsed, for the first time, a life outside.

  Her thoughts fell into place, lining up like clean dishes in the drying rack. She had no idea how she was going to do it, how she was going to support this baby on her own. But she knew she had to find a way. She turned to the woman sitting beside her.

  “Actually, Ms. Taylor, I think I’d like to stay.”

  It was around that same time that the rumors about Emmie started to circulate in the town of Copper Cove. Emmie did not know what was being said, and she sure didn’t know the reasons why, but she sensed something. People looked at her, just a fraction of a second too long. She walked into the general store or the post office, and could hear the change of tone in the room, the sudden dead spaces in conversation, as if everyone had been talking about her. It was a little unnerving.

  She mentioned it to Kate Taylor one evening, when Kate had come to the cottage bearing potato soup and homemade bread. “I made too much for just me and John,” she told Emmie when she walked in the door.

  Emmie was collapsed in a rocking chair, staring out into the gray, rainy evening. She was five months along in the pregnancy, enough that even with her tall, slender frame, it was obvious that she carried a child. She sat with her hand on her belly, absentmindedly stroking that baby bump. She turned to Kate Taylor, tears in her eyes. “I’m not sure what’s wrong with me lately. I cry at just about anything.”

  Kate moved to the footstool at Emmie’s feet. She unlaced and removed the girl’s shoes, and then began to slowly rub her feet. “I’d say you’ve got all kinds of reasons to cry. Baby hormones. Boyfriend de . . . gone.” Kate modified her words, but they both felt the reverberation of the word dead in the air, as if it had actually been spoken. “Having a baby is difficult in the best of circumstances. It can’t be easy, trying to do all this by yourself.”

  Emmie nodded. “This is going to sound crazy,” she continued. “But it feels like everyone is talking about me.”

  “They are,” Kate replied flatly.

  Emmie’s eyes went wide.

  “This is a small town, honey. They talk about everybody. And you’ve given them a few things to chew on since you got here.”

  “The baby?” Emmie asked, rubbing her stomach.

  “The baby is part of it. And Dusty’s . . . accident.” Kate continued to rub the bottoms of the girl’s feet. She didn’t say it, but by now everyone knew that Dusty had been packed to leave when he had that accident. Clothes strewn all over the highway suggested much more than a trip to Sea Rose Harbor. “But the main thing that got their attention?”

  Emmie shrugged.

  “You’re pretty. Too pretty by half. Men look. The women notice. Causes all kinds of trouble, especially if you’re pretty and the quiet type.” Kate picked up Emmie’s left foot. “Quiet gets reshaped into arrogant. Stuck-up. Pretty and quiet and a boyfriend who gets killed? All kinds of possibilities in that story.”

  Emmie took a deep breath. “I thought I was just being too sensitive.”

  “Too sensitive? Is there something wrong with that?” Kate responded. “Because I happen to think that being sensitive is the most valuable form of intelligence there is.”

  Emmie’s shoulders went back against the cushions of the chair. That was an opinion she’d never heard on the ranch in Montana.

  “I’ve been watching the animals my entire life,” Kate continued. “They have to be sensitive—to everything around them. Survival depends on it. It used to be the same for humans. The only ones who survived were the ones who were sensitive enough to pick up on all the dangers. Every noise, every smell, every flicker of movement. And even more than that . . . something deeper. A feeling. The way the animals seem to know before there is an earthquake. They feel something.”

  Emmie was completely still. She had never thought of it like this, had spent her entire nineteen years on the planet trying to ignore all those signals that were going off in her brain.

  Kate looked up at Emmie and repeated her statement. “There’s no such thing as too sensitive.

  “Most people have learned to turn it off, to tune it out. Little kids, some of them anyway, still have that. But as they get older, they learn that it’s not okay. Somebody, somewhere along the line, tells them to buck up. Quit being such a crybaby. Quit being so sensitive.” She put Emmie’s foot down and took a breath. “So they block it out. Quit listening to their senses. Quit trusting their own feelings.”

  Emmie could barely breathe. It was as if Kate were describing her own life on the ranch, the way she had learned to look away from the pain.

  “There’s a reason why you’re here, you know. On this island at the end of nowhere. Here on the ranch with me and John.”

  Emmie waited.

  “John works on the physical side of things. He knows what to do for infection or cuts and scrapes. Broken bones. Foals or calves that are turned the wrong way.”

  Unconsciously, Emmie put her hand on the mound of her baby.

  Kate stopped, her face composed. “But most of the real wounds in the world, most of the real sickness, isn’t caused by the physical.” She waited, as if gauging Emmie’s reaction.

  “We all seem to think that once the bone has mended, or the infection is gone, or the physical wound has healed . . . then everything is great, right? All fixed up, back to work. But emotional trauma, emotional wounds . . . they may not be visible, but the effects can last a lifetime. And they can be lethal.”

  Emmie swallowed. �
��Lethal?”

  “Have you ever seen a married couple, together a long time, and one partner dies, and then just a few months . . . maybe a year . . . later, the other one dies, too?”

  Emmie nodded.

  “That’s not physical. They may develop some kind of physical ailment, but it started with emotion. It started with sadness, or loss, or fear. Sometimes I’ll see a woman in a bad marriage, and she has back pain. From feeling unsupported.” Kate looked outside for a moment, and then brought her eyes back to Emmie. “Our bodies keep score. Every grief, every heartache, every fear, every trauma. They’re just as severe as a knife wound. Just as bad, maybe worse, as being stabbed. The body remembers, even when the mind blocks it out.”

  Emmie stared at the woman. She had never met anyone who talked like that, who held opinions like that.

  Kate pressed her lips together. “I can feel it. Those places where energy is stuck. Those places where emotion is getting in the way of health. It gives off . . . heat. And sometimes, I can see it. Like a ball of colored light.”

  She waited a long beat. “And I think you can, too.”

  Emmie took a huge breath and started to shake her head. “I—”

  Kate held up her hand. “You don’t have to agree with me. I just want you to pay attention. Tomorrow, when you go to the café, just watch. Let yourself really see the people who are coming in. Let yourself really see the animals that cross your path. That’s all you have to do right now. Just let yourself see. Let yourself feel the energy that’s out there.”

  Kate stood up and smoothed her skirt. “Better eat before it’s cold.”

  After that night, Emmie felt as if she had been awakened from a deep sleep. She remembered those times as a young girl, when she could feel what the horses were feeling. As soon as she focused on it again, as soon as Kate gave her permission to be sensitive, she found that it returned, only even larger and more powerful than anything she had sensed as a child. Almost as if the act of carrying her own baby was helping to magnify the sensitivity.

  It happened the very next day, waiting tables at the café. “Morning, Mr. Griffith,” she said when an elderly gentleman slipped into his booth by the window. She knew a few of the locals, and he was a regular, especially since his wife had died eight months before. That morning, after her talk with Kate, she brought his coffee, and she looked at him, really looked at him. It hit her so hard she inhaled sharply and nearly stumbled.

  “Something wrong, Emmie?” He looked her in the eye.

  For a moment she just stared, her mouth slightly open. Loneliness radiated from his body, like morning mist on the water. Even through the denim jacket that he wore, she could see red light, glowing right over his heart. She felt a stab in her own chest, as if her heart might explode; her left arm was throbbing with pain right down to the fingers.

  She swallowed hard and shook her head. “No. I’m fine.” Subconsciously, she was pressing her hand against her chest. “How are you feeling, Mr. Griffith?”

  He nodded and tried to give her a weak smile. “Pretty good for an old man.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it.” She tried not to focus on that bright red energy in his chest, tried not to give in to the pain she was feeling in her own body. “The usual?” she croaked.

  He nodded. “Biscuits and gravy. Egg on top. How about you scramble it today?”

  “Will do,” she said and turned toward the kitchen.

  The two women who worked the general store were sitting at the long bar of the café, finishing their coffee. But they had noted every movement she made when talking to Ben Griffith. They had noticed the way she grabbed her own chest, the way she had shaken her left arm as she walked away from him.

  Not four hours later, the old man was dead from a massive heart attack. And what the two women had witnessed went rabid.

  A week later, Emmie was walking home from the café, passing the yard of the house that belonged to the Thomas family. Their dog was a curly, ragged-haired gray mutt, and it was out in the yard now, barking as Emmie walked past. She stopped and gazed at the dog. There was a brownish-red glow, near the stomach and the hips. As if the dog had been kicked repeatedly.

  Emmie looked up at the Thomas’ youngest son, Chester. He was eight years old, generally unkempt, and usually moving a million miles an hour. At that moment, he was in the crotch of a black locust tree, climbing to the next branch. “Shame on you, Chester,” Emmie hissed. “Stop kicking that dog.”

  He glared at her, his mouth hanging open.

  “It comes back to you, you know,” she whispered. “Someday you will get kicked yourself.”

  She turned to continue her walk home and nearly bumped into Agnes Pettigrew, the postmistress, who had heard the whole exchange.

  Those stories got around, and the next time she walked into the general store, there was no mistaking the energy. The whole room went quiet. She could hear the click of her boots on the wood floor; she could feel the stares of the people standing near the woodstove and the clerk behind the counter, like the barrels of guns, all aimed at her back. When she walked out the door, she knew they were talking about her. She knew they were spreading the stories. And this time, their talk included the word witch.

  ELEVEN

  Alex bolted up in bed, her heart bursting out of her chest like the sudden boom of a firecracker. Someone was pounding on the front door. Her first reaction was panic; she had to force herself to breathe. The green hands of the alarm clock by the bed showed her it was not quite seven in the morning. The sky outside was still completely dark. She waited a moment, wondering if she had only dreamt the sound. The pounding returned, loud and insistent.

  “Alex, open up. It’s Maggie.”

  Alex exhaled, threw back the covers, and grabbed her sweater. She hurried to the front door and opened the dead bolt. Maggie stormed in, as if there were nothing at all unusual about walking in on your employee at seven in the morning the Sunday after Christmas. She turned and looked at Alex, standing by the door.

  “Get dressed. We’re going out.” Maggie’s voice was commanding.

  “Out?” Alex blinked. She had not bothered to grab her glasses when she jumped out of bed.

  Maggie was dressed in a puffy Carhartt coverall, a wool hat pulled low on her forehead. “Here. You can wear these. They’re not as long as mine; maybe you won’t trip over them.” She held out a similar pair of coveralls.

  Alex took them in her hand, on autopilot, but she was not quite fully awake, and she continued to stare at Maggie’s face.

  Maggie caught her eye. “Get moving. They’ll be here soon.”

  For one brief, crazy second, Alex felt a wave of panic start to tip her off her feet. Dizziness swarmed upward, and she focused all her energies on staying upright. “They?” Her voice croaked.

  “Orcas.” Maggie walked over to the front window and stared out at the dark water. “I heard them on the hydrophone. Part of J Pod is out there, headed this way, I think. You might as well get a look at the creatures, since they are the reason you’re here. Come on, snap to.”

  “J Pod.” She repeated the words, her mind still fighting to understand.

  “Let’s go! Hustle.”

  Alex headed toward the bedroom and began to dress.

  “Do you have any long underwear?” Maggie called from the front window.

  “I’m from Albuquerque.”

  “That’s not an answer.” Maggie humphed impatiently. “They have winter in Albuquerque, don’t they?”

  “Not winter that would require spending money on long underwear.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t expect you would be prepared for this. I stuffed a pair into the leg of that jumpsuit. You need to layer up. It’s pretty chilly on the water. And hurry.”

  The screen door slammed behind them, and Alex followed Maggie as she headed down a path behind the house. It plunged into thick woods, and Alex was certain that Maggie was about to lead her right over a cliff. The path was steep; Alex struggled to maintain
her footing and keep up. Maggie wore a camping headlight clamped on her forehead; the light bounced off rocks and trees on their way down the slope. Alex felt bulky and uncoordinated in her layers of clothing, like the Abominable Snowman. The path took them directly to the water of the cove, down to a small dock. A boat moved against the pilings in the near dark. They reached it just as the sky began to pale, a deep purple gray over black water.

  Alex sucked in air, her heart racing at the sight of the small boat. It had an undersized cover, just over the middle of the boat where the steering wheel and driver’s seat were located, but for the most part, the boat was open to the elements. “We’re going out in that?”

  “Would you prefer to swim?” Maggie had already dropped a duffel bag of equipment on the floor of the boat and was untying one of the mooring ropes. “This thing is older than you are, I’m certain. But it still floats. Montauk. Seventeen-footer. Almost unsinkable.” She held a rope in one hand. “They are known for being very stable in the water.”

  She looked at Alex, standing like a zombie on the dock. “Get in.”

  Alex met her eyes and forced herself to take a breath. She lifted one overclad leg and stepped into the boat. It lurched slightly; she reached to grab the sides. She heard the slap of water against the hull of the vessel. Her stomach dropped and her throat constricted.

  Alex hated water; she had avoided it her entire life. She stayed away from swimming pools, refused to join the rafting trips of her coworkers at the University. She never even put her face under the water when she stood in the shower. And here she was, about to head out in a seventeen-foot piece of wood, or maybe fiberglass, heading into the dark, cold waters of Haro Strait, on a freezing cold day in late December. This boat could only be considered a splinter of protection in the whole huge scheme of things.