Whose Waves These Are

by Amanda Dykes

  There’s a man more courageous than this Bob buried somewhere in him, trying to break out of this covering of ice to grasp that hand, comfort that voice.

  But this Bob—numb, broken, sapped of hope—cannot rise.

  And in the morning, William has gone.

  thirty-four

  JUNE 2001

  Emptiness burrows deep into Annie this night, replaying the story she has pieced together from her own experience and Bess’s tale of her father’s time in Ansel and the years afterward. The fire. The chasm that years pushed wider, the longer that silence dwelled between Bob and Dad. Months and years given to Eva as she learned to live life from a wheelchair. Bob spent every moment he could at her side, caring for her, carrying her, turning her wheelchair in a slow dance upon their dock every evening until God took her home fifteen years later.

  Bob had written letters to William that he’d had no way to send, not without an address. Those years her father had been outrunning his past, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. And when he’d returned, time had stretched the chasm between the men so wide, neither knew how to bridge it.

  Annie’s mother had eventually gotten in touch with Bob, sending a birth announcement Bob’s way when Annie was born. And he’d done the same, sending Eva’s obituary to Anneliese with four words scratched upon the news clipping: She loved you fierce. This, then, was how they communicated—through newsprint.

  Annie had asked her mother about it once. They’d been in the old green station wagon, packed with suitcases as Anneliese drove Annie up the coast to stay the summer with this man she’d never met. Why didn’t they write more, or speak? “It’s between your father and Bob,” Anneliese had said, sorrow in her voice. She’d looked as if she wanted to say so much more, but left it at a simple “I only send what—I hope—will mend.”

  Annie had thought she’d meant the newsprint and had modeled her own communication with Bob after that. It never occurred to her that what Anneliese was sending . . . was Annie. Right into a void Eva had left. Yet somehow that void had turned into a soft place for her to land when she needed it most.

  Annie wishes she’d known more, found a better way to bridge the gap. Thinking of each of them shouldering loss upon loss, it shamed her. If Bob would but wake, she might be able to make up for that lost time, somehow. The doctors were beginning a protocol to bring him out of his induced coma, and the next few days would tell much.

  Jeremiah had happened upon Bess and Annie halfway through the tale—right when Bob had shown William the tower. He’d sat as rapt as she, listening to Bess’s account. The way he had watched her—as if catching every word right along with her and wrapping it into safety in that rugged endless place inside him—left her with a comfort beyond description.

  So here in the dark she sits, peering out of the bay window of Sailor’s Rest, up into starlight so vibrant it feels like heaven is reaching right down to her.

  But what does heaven want with her, after all her years of distance?

  The thoughts turn her toward the anchor she feels inside. There is no change in Bob’s condition. Margie Lillian has decided there isn’t enough time to implement the ferry to the lighthouse for this week’s festival. Perhaps she’s caught wind of Annie’s failed small-town-saving schemes. Perhaps Alpenzell had warned her. It’s probably for the best. Chicago is emailing with projects to keep her busy while here, but with every calculation and report she generates, something dries up inside her.

  Where do you want me? Her eyes shut around the prayer. Where do I belong?

  A knock sounds at the front door, and she jolts, looking to the clock in the corner. Eleven fifteen. A quick look out the window shows Jeremiah, unruly hair sticking out from underneath his baseball cap. He looks disheveled, as if he’s been up for two nights straight.

  Pulse quickening, she opens the door.

  “Hey,” he says, the word easy but his voice roughened. “Can you . . .” He looks over his shoulder to where Annie realizes there’s a second boat bobbing at the end of the dock, small next to the Glad Tidings.

  “Jeremiah.” A smile spreads across her face, her voice. “You finished Roy’s boat?”

  His lopsided grin answers her question. “Get your shawl thing.” His eyes widen, as if realizing his abrupt tone. “If you want to come, I mean.”

  “Come where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  There’s no way she’s saying no to his veiled excitement. There’s a boyish charm there, an invitation to something sacred.

  She grabs the knit blanket from its place on the couch, slips on her saltwater boots, and dashes back across the sitting room. Sliding to a stop in front of the small porthole mirror on the wall, she gives her ponytail a tug in a hopeless attempt to add some sort of polish to her near-midnight appearance in jeans and a rustic flannel shirt, procured from Joe’s Landing.

  Not that Jeremiah will care what she looks like. And not that she should, either.

  He’s waiting for her out at the dock and offers his hand to help her aboard the Glad Tidings.

  She wants to ask, to say something about how she thought they were taking the canoe. But something stops her, and as they leave the dock, she sees he’s towing the canoe behind.

  They pass the harbor, where the school’s field lights blaze as vendors work late into the night raising their white peaked tents for tomorrow’s festival amid bunting and hanging flower baskets, air laced with cinnamon from someone’s test run of funnel cakes. On the green, a bright light shines on Spencer T. Ripley pacing the gazebo, seemingly practicing a speech for the twenty white empty chairs before him.

  They pass Everlea Estate and Sully’s wind chimes, with their soft lullaby. She feels as if Jeremiah has stretched his hand out to her and they’ve stepped right out onto the waves on some secret dance floor, while the rest of the world slumbers and toils. It occurs to her that, for the first time, she did not tremble when boarding his boat from the dock.

  He takes her north, following the Bold Coast and its rugged cliffs at a safe distance. At length, he cuts the engine, dropping anchor. The moon is high and new, and its pale sliver of light slips into the vertical crevices of the cliffs like liquid silver.

  Out here they could shout and not a soul would hear them. A hush has settled about them. Wordlessly, Jeremiah clambers down into the canoe, gesturing for Annie to follow and holding up his hand to help her in, eyes shining.

  Once seated, he grabs two paddles. He hands one to her, a question in his eyes. They trade a conspiratorial glance, and although she has no idea where they’re going, she feels a part of something grand.

  The sound of water rippling around their oars settles into a rhythm, their bodies leaning forward and back in tandem, guiding the vessel.

  They slip around a ledge of cliff, into a haven Annie hadn’t noticed before. It lay in such a way that at nearly every angle, the cliff appears solid, when in reality one arm of the cliff slips directly behind the other, overlapping to create a corridor of sorts. And that corridor opens into a perfect alcove. A hidden, tiny harbor, like a room in the sea that only they hold the key to. Shallow waters, embraced by sun-heated granite all the day long so that even in the middle of the night, the effect is that of a pool with little water escaping or entering. Stillness and warmth, right there where a cold sea churns just on the other side of these walls.

  “Oh,” Annie breathes, and cannot find more words.

  As she turns to face him, Jeremiah’s grin is unbridled. She’s never seen it so wide, and it thrills her heart.

  “Just wait,” he whispers, as they place their paddles across their laps.

  There’s a sacred hush, and then, boat drifting ever so slowly toward the walls of this fortress, Jeremiah leans forward. “Dip your hand in.”

  Annie eyes the dark water. “What, so the piranhas can bite my fingers off? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I couldn’t pester you with all my note-taking and question-asking, then.”

  Jeremiah’s laug
h rolls low and smooth, wrapping itself around her. “Yeah, those tropical Maine piranhas.” He holds her gaze and tips his head toward the water. “Trust me.” He holds his hand out and waits.

  At those words, and at the sight of the hand that dumped sand on the deck of his boat for her, and battled storms just to bring letters that might brighten a soul’s day . . . she knows, without a doubt, that she can trust this man. Would trust him a thousand times over.

  Eyes fixed on his, she gives him her hand. He hesitates only a moment. Something plays across his face. Regret? Fear? Whatever it is, the look is gone in an instant, determination in its place as he sets his jaw.

  He crosses his thumb over her palm, cradling the back of her hand. He stretches his arm out over the water, guiding hers. And then, in a sudden arc of motion, runs their hands, fingers entwined, through the water.

  It’s like chilled velvet, fierce and soft all at once. Instantly, the liquid darkness ignites. From pitch-black, the water beams a pure Tahitian blue.

  Annie gasps and pulls her hand back, holding it to her heart. The night air is cool against widened eyes. She points at the ripples, the bright flicker dying down into a sparse web, like spiderweb lightning.

  “What just happened?”

  Jeremiah’s eyes are laughing. “Do it again.”

  Annie shakes her head. “Not until you explain that . . . that”—she swirls her finger emphatically—“water electricity.”

  “Some things are better lived than explained,” he says, taking up his paddle. He dips it in, and the outline of the boat and paddle in the water lights in the same way. He paddles closer to the cliffs rising ahead of them, and the small waves that form as a result break against those cliffs. They lighten as they crash, then fade into darkness. He paddles faster, turning their boat in a small circuit until those waves are hitting all the cliff walls circled around them, scattered lights like bright blue fireflies.

  He stills his paddling again and lets his fingers comb through the waters, stirring up the light threading through his hands.

  It is magic. Pure magic, the kind she hadn’t felt since the fairy tales of her youth, or the first time she’d caught her breath and her heart skipped a beat at the sight of a shooting star. Magic, and wonder, and fairy tales, and—

  “Microbes,” Jeremiah says.

  Annie feels cosmic confusion freeze upon her face.

  “Microorganisms,” he says again, and his voice bears a boyish delight that does not match this laboratory-worthy word. Not out here in the night, where the sea has found a way to hold the stars.

  She tilts her head, clears her throat. “Do tell.”

  “They’re like these tiny torchbearers, billions of them. And when something disturbs the water”—he gestures at the illuminated boat outline—“this happens.”

  Annie releases a breath, her wonder audible. “It’s incredible, Jeremiah.”

  He’s grinning from ear to ear.

  He scoots forward on his seat and leans in. “Go ahead,” he says.

  Tentatively at first, she traces the water with her fingertips. A pinprick of light shows, and then a dusting of others. She clenches her fingers into a submerged fist, then releases her fingers suddenly. A cloud of light shines, plays about in ribbons around and through her fingers, summoning laughter from somewhere deep inside.

  Soon, she’s on her knees in the hull of the canoe, dangling both arms over, tracing shapes and swirls, watching the light trail and surround her. Jeremiah slips to his knees beside her, leans one arm on the boat’s edge and dangles the other into the ripples with hers.

  She faces him, studies this foreign spark of life on his usually somber face. For reasons she cannot fathom, he’s inviting her into something special to him—it’s written in the gentle lines around his smile.

  “Thank you for showing me this.”

  He nods . . . and he’s pulling words back. Some kind of tug-of-war, until he speaks, finally.

  “You’re different here,” he says.

  She pulls one arm out of the water, drapes it over the edge of the boat to better face him.

  “Different?”

  “Yeah. Just . . .” He gives a small laugh. “Well, look at you. I couldn’t have paid you to touch this ocean a week ago.”

  Annie looks around. “This doesn’t feel like the same ocean,” she says. Not the same waves that nearly took her mother, carried her father away, buried her grandfather. She shivers and starts to pull her hand out of the water.

  But Jeremiah moves his hand beneath hers, light following it as he laces his fingers between hers. His touch anchors her.

  He swallows, serious. “Do you know how it works? The light, I mean.”

  She purses her lips, feigning deep thought. “You came here earlier and emptied a bunch of glow sticks out?” She knows as well as he that this is not the answer, that it’s something from that stack of books of his, and he’s about to explain how microbes work.

  “Close.” Jeremiah’s got a good poker face. “The microbes,” he says, “only have a single cell. And they use it to capture sunlight all day—their sole purpose. At night, when danger comes”—he swishes their hands quickly to light them up—“they don’t run. They don’t shrivel up or hide. They release that sunlight they’ve been storing up, right into the darkness. They fight it back by lighting it up.”

  A shiver runs through Annie as Jeremiah brings their hands up out of the water. He lets his gentle grip linger, studying their hands with brows creased . . . and then he lets her go.

  But just as she thinks he’ll reach for the paddle, take them away from this place—and an ache springs in her chest at the thought—he swings both his legs over the edge of the canoe, gives her a wink, and tipping the canoe precariously, plunges in.

  “Jeremiah!”

  Her heart’s slamming against her rib cage, sickness and panic bringing back the terror of when her eight-year-old self could not save her mother.

  The glow churns with bubbles and movement for too long—and then the sound of breaking water shatters her terror. He’s there, head bobbing and mouth grinning, a look of complete bliss on his face. Water dripping off his eyelashes, he swims over and crosses his arms casually over the edge of the canoe. “Well?”

  She’s furious, and she knows it’s unreasonable. Just her adrenaline, looking for a way out, aiming itself at him. “Well, if you think I’m helping you get out of there after a stunt like that, I—”

  “Well . . .” He slows the word, scoops it out like he’s building her a ramp down to the water with it. “You coming?”

  She scoots back, away from him, away from the edge.

  Ripples of water ring them, floating there beneath the dark, lit from down under. Everything about this moment is upside-down and inside out. Especially her.

  “Annie.” His voice is tender, serious. “You’re . . . a different kind of phenomenon. You know that?”

  Just what every girl wants to hear. But her heart’s beating harder against her chest, and she bites her tongue, listening.

  “I’ve never met anyone who loves people as much as you, who’s made it her job to study life.”

  Her shoulders ease, just a bit.

  “But for all that love of life . . . are you actually living it?”

  Her defenses try to rise, but the truth is pinning them down.

  “You float over it on the surface.” He palms the boat twice, letting it make his point for him. “Doing these incredible things. But something’s keeping you from plunging into it.”

  He lowers himself into the water, opens his arms wide, the light trailing him.

  “You don’t want to miss this, Annie.”

  She leans forward, looking at the water, heat pricking her eyes as the scene swims before her. She grips the canoe edge and leans out, just a little.

  And his hands are on her forearms, bracing them gently. Thumbs skimming over her skin, wrapping her in assurance and invitation.

  “I”—he holds he
r gaze—“don’t want to miss this.” He exhales. “With you.”

  She falters, looking for an excuse and half-hoping it will fail. “My clothes,” she says. “I’m not dressed for a swim.”

  “I don’t think you actually care about that.”

  Touché.

  “Plus, I hear phytoplankton don’t have a white-collar dress code,” he says.

  He’s treading water in shorts and a T-shirt. If he can do it . . .

  Gulping, she dips a hand back in the water. He releases her arm, makes room for her to jump in. And she knows, if she goes in, she’s saying yes to so much more than just a midnight swim. It’s a leaving behind of her safe distance to life. A dare to live it.

  Pressing her eyes shut, she reaches for a prayer, wraps her heart around it, and jumps.

  She’s engulfed. Skin tickled by the bubbles, senses jolted by the chill. It may be the warmest spot around, but it’s still northern Maine in the middle of the night. Not for the faint of heart.

  Do not be faint of heart.

  Water spins, tornado-like, around her. Twisting her hair into free-floating tendrils, lifting her back up until she emerges into clear dark air, its edges chiseled in contrast to the gentle muted world below.

  A rich sound rolls in and beckons her. Jeremiah Fletcher, laughter unleashed in a sea of its own.

  She’s gasping for air, breathless from the thrill of it. “I’m in the ocean. I’m . . .” She spins, feels something bubbling up from a deep well within her. Her own laughter, sprung from disbelief and delight all wrapped together. “I’m in the waves.”

  “And?” Jeremiah draws near. “How are you finding those waves?”

  A gentle breeze blows, rippling the water around her and lifting her, dropping her, again and again.

  “I think they’re finding me,” she murmurs.

  The world goes darker, a mass of clouds covering the moon. There’s a fresh life in the air, an imminent something . . . and then it comes. The sky, letting loose, drop by drop. And with each drop, a pinprick of light shines from below. And another, and another—until the whole cove is a shimmering blanket, a dance of water and light.