The Music of the Deep: A Novel

by Elizabeth Hall

  The kids at the small school in Copper Cove were another matter. Most women had returned to the kitchen after the men returned from the war. The girls at school were mostly interested in boys and babies and the matching sofa pillows they would have once they married and had their own homes. Maggie’s passion for marine life, for trying to figure out how things worked, was hers and hers alone.

  She learned to ignore them. She focused on science and math, and won a scholarship to the University of Washington, where she majored in marine biology, the lone female in that line of study. It was 1959; women who went to college at all majored in liberal arts, a fancy term for husband hunting. Few of them were looking for careers.

  Maggie was driven. She had a sense of doing something important, something that would help the world. When she graduated in 1962, she immediately began her postgraduate work. She had just finished her thesis when Uncle George died, in 1965, and she went back to Copper Cove for the funeral. She never left.

  Her mother was there, her life focused on gardening and reading and long walks in the rain. But the orcas were there, too, at least part of the year, and Maggie secured a part-time research grant. It didn’t pay much, but she didn’t need much. She moved into the cabin, up the hill from her mother, who was still in the main house, and Maggie continued her lifelong habit of watching the water at all times of the day or night.

  Dr. Donald Carter taught marine science at the University, and he came to the island to do field work the summer of 1968. Ten years older than Maggie, gray was beginning to mark his dark beard. He was gruff and rough and cursed like a sailor, but he knew the waters. She had to admire his knowledge, the way he handled every situation with such surety.

  She had studiously avoided all men at the University, if those tadpoles of male students could actually be called men. Their interests seemed to be centered on female anatomy, and they steered clear of anything approaching academics. But Donald Carter was different. He was definitely not a tadpole. There was no mistaking his keen intelligence, his dedication to his work.

  He kissed her one night, leaning up against the pier when they had finished unloading the boat, and her body responded, something that she was totally unprepared for, her mind having always been able to keep strict control of all systems.

  “So the great Maggie Edwards is human after all,” he whispered with a smile. And then he kissed her again. Maggie let herself be kissed.

  She let herself go much further than kissing.

  As the summer progressed, Maggie started to envision the two of them as the next Marie and Pierre Curie—a scientific team dedicated to the study of killer whales and their habitat. A partner seemed totally acceptable to her, if it allowed her to continue her work, and if she was working with someone of equal intellectual stature and mutual interest in marine life.

  What she hadn’t envisioned was a baby. She was completely bewildered when the local doctor told her that she was four months pregnant. She had never had normal cycles, and had been told as a teenager, by this very same doctor, that with those ovaries, she would never be able to have children.

  Dr. Carter thought it was quite entertaining. “A marine biologist who doesn’t know the signs that she’s pregnant,” he laughed.

  They went through a quick civil ceremony, one in which Maggie carried no flowers and did not want a ring, which would just get hung up on something when she was working on the boat. No sentiment for Maggie Edwards, not even under the influence of pregnancy hormones. And she kept her maiden name, preferring to answer to Dr. Edwards than to muddle through the confusion of two Dr. Carters in the same household.

  The baby arrived in February of 1969, looking a little like a fish, only with arms and legs. She did the best she could, but her maternal instincts were not as strong as her scientific interests. It wasn’t that Maggie didn’t love the boy. Her attention was on her work and always had been. She was easily distracted by the sea; there were moments out on the boat when she almost forgot that she had a son. Brian spent his first few years out on the water, learning to sleep and crawl and maneuver to the rocking of the waves and the sounds of marine life.

  She was relieved when he became old enough to fend for himself, and she no longer had to remember to feed him or change him. At the age of four, he made his own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, inventive enough to pull out the lowest drawer of the kitchen cabinets and use that to climb his way up to the countertop, where he had access to the toaster.

  She and Donald Carter managed to stay married for ten years, which was more than enough time for Maggie to see that she had married a man who wasn’t interested in being a partner. Donald Carter was more like a god, and he wanted everyone, including his wife, to worship at his feet. He had a fondness for scotch and young female interns, both of which were necessary for maintaining the god illusion.

  To Maggie’s credit, she had recognized a few of his inadequacies even before they tied the knot. He wasn’t particularly neat or punctual. His shoes were never shined. He liked more than one glass of scotch in the evenings, sometimes to the point where his eyelids hung at half-mast and his words turned to slush.

  But Maggie had seen her father whip his underlings into shape, and she felt certain that she could do the same with Donald Carter. She certainly did make strides; he did neaten up a little. But no matter how much whiskey she poured down the sink, he still managed to make it to the bedroom every night with his body listing to port.

  One night, after a hellacious fight in which she clearly enumerated his numerous shortcomings, he packed a bag and moved to his boat, his brain just sober enough to tell her, “Go command some other ship, Maggie. I’m leaving port.”

  He thought he was so clever.

  She was left in command of their son and the house, hers by inheritance after Uncle George, and then her mother, had passed away. She also commanded a string of interns from the University of Washington, normally much younger than that Alexandra Turner. And she’d kept it all afloat, running about as smoothly as any ship could properly expect to.

  Maggie turned away from the window and stood in front of the bookshelf, gazing at the pictures of her son. Brian Carter had dark eyes and a chiseled jaw, courtesy of Maggie and her own father. She’d done a fine job of raising him, and he’d turned out well, despite the lack of genetic material from his own father. Although she may have lacked the instinct for showing him love, she had no problem with issuing orders. Maggie had taken what there was in that young boy, and pushed and pulled and pummeled and formed that lump of clay, turning out a fine figure of a man. He lived back east, working in the field of sonar.

  Maggie swallowed, one tiny drop of emotion sliding down her throat, coated in the taste of abandonment. She forced it down and sighed, looking away from the photographs of Brian and his two boys, her grandsons, and out the window. It wasn’t his fault, really, that he no longer came back to the island for Christmas. His work kept him busy; his family was growing. She’d tried once, several years ago, to spend the holidays with Brian, but his wife didn’t appreciate Maggie’s efforts to help get their house in shipshape order, everything running smoothly. That chore list that she had drawn up for the children was only meant to help. Or the way she had tried to organize the hall closet. Maggie had not been invited back.

  She wasn’t being mean, at least not in her own eyes. She was just direct, forthright. She said what she thought. Some people just couldn’t handle that, preferring that polite old adage of “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” In Maggie’s book, that was just totally ineffectual, denoting a certain strain of weakness. Really, if a person can’t handle the truth, how could they expect to get along in life?

  It seemed that her advancing age only served to make her more irritated, more often. As if all the fools of the world were conspiring to make her later years an absolute headache. And she certainly didn’t trust this younger generation to take over when she left off with her work. On the downhill s
lide to eighty, and yet she was still working every day, partly because she didn’t see anyone else around who was as dedicated and thorough as she herself had always been. She was hardworking and meticulous and straightforward, with superb attention to detail. Practical. Intelligent.

  And Maggie was intelligent enough to have noticed that the facts about Alexandra Turner did not quite add up. The story she concocted about that black eye, for instance. Either a total fabrication or the woman was an absolute klutz. She’d parked that car with the New Mexico plates back in the trees, away from the street, and hadn’t started it since. It would be covered with moss by the time she left the island.

  And afraid of the water? The girl couldn’t swim and moved to an island, in the wettest part of the continental US, to work for a marine biologist? What had she been thinking? Ridiculous. Maggie had noticed the way she jumped at the slightest sound, the way her hands sometimes shook as she worked or when she poured herself a cup of coffee at the stove. So jumpy. With nerves like that, how had the woman been able to hold down a job?

  Maggie stood at the window, watching as Alex turned on the kitchen light in the house across the driveway. She took a swig of cold coffee from her cup. I don’t know what you’re up to, Alexandra Turner, she thought. But I know a liar when I see one.

  THIRTEEN

  Emmie’s baby was born in early May of 1970, on a perfect spring day when the sun was shining and the rhododendrons were wreaking havoc on the senses, blooms turning the landscape into a Persian carpet. Throughout her labor, she stayed in her own cottage, with Kate Taylor nearby and the doc on alert, should Emmie require transport to a real medical facility. Most of those hours, she focused on the robins outside her window, busy feeding their babies and singing about spring. So when Kate Taylor placed that little dark-haired girl in Emmie’s arms, she named her Robin.

  Emmie liked to say that the baby saved her. She filled all the holes in Emmie’s heart, all the wide-open spaces that had been torn apart with the death of her brother in 1968 and Dusty in 1969. All the yawning chasms of loneliness and isolation were filled by this tiny, dark-haired girl.

  Despite becoming a mother at the age of nineteen, Emmie took to the task as if she had been born to it. She was calm and patient, as serene as a much older woman might have been. She loved holding that little girl, every possible moment. Like all new parents, she marveled at the tiny fingers and toes and eyelashes, loved to watch the way the baby stretched her small arms over her head, hands in fists the size of walnuts. Emmie could watch her endlessly, and she was always tuned in to every sound the baby made. She woke in the night, holding her breath, listening for the soft exhalations of that tiny girl in the basket next to the bed, unable to take a breath in her own body until she heard the breaths of her little girl.

  With the birth of Robin, Emmie remembered how to smile and laugh; she reveled in the warmth of that small body next to hers. As she nursed, the child watched Emmie intently, one tiny hand reaching to grab the long braid of Emmie’s hair.

  “You have found your calling” was the way Doc Taylor described it. He and Kate had never had their own children, and they took to the baby as if she were their own granddaughter.

  Emmie learned how to match her own heartbeat and breath and rhythms with those of her daughter. And it wasn’t long before she was transferring that intense harmonic resonance to every other creature that she came in contact with.

  They started arriving shortly after she gave birth to Robin. In the middle of a midnight rainstorm, she heard the mewing of a kitten, so loud and insistent and scared that she got out of bed and pulled on her coat. She went out to find a bedraggled, tabby-colored creature, sitting on the front porch and crying. The kitten looked to be only a few weeks old.

  Emmie held out her hands, not saying a word, and the kitten climbed in, as if she’d been on this specific mission, when she set out from God-knew-where in the middle of a storm. As soon as Emmie touched her, she knew: the mother was dead, along with any other littermates. She could not say exactly how she knew that—if it had something to do with the touch or if she was tuning in to some other energetic force. Emmie carried the kitten inside and bathed her, fluffing the gray fur with a towel and introducing her to the wonders of warm cow’s milk.

  The dog showed up a month later, with what appeared to be a broken leg. Another gray and rainy afternoon, and the dog limped up the driveway and stood outside Emmie’s house as if he knew just where he was headed.

  “I’m on my way to Bellingham,” Doc Taylor told her when she went to get him. “I’ll have to look at him later.”

  She watched the doc pull away in his truck, and turned to the dog, his brown fur matted and his eyes swimming in longing. “Don’t look at me like that,” Emmie murmured. “I have a baby and a kitten, and I can barely support myself as it is.” She turned to walk back to her own house, and the dog followed, limping along on three legs. He managed, somehow, to follow her up the four steps to the porch.

  Emmie stood at the screen door and let out a long sigh. “I guess if you can make it up the steps, then you might as well come in,” she said. “It isn’t getting any warmer out here.”

  When she reached down to touch the dog’s shoulder, she felt a buzz of electricity shoot up her arm, and she jumped back, shocked by the intensity of that jolt. She sat down on the rag rug, next to the mangled mutt, and gingerly put her hand on the shoulder once again. She knew immediately. The leg wasn’t broken. But this dog had been kicked, several times, over several months. Emmie held her hand over that spot on his shoulder, and very gently began moving her palm in a circle, and then pushing her hand down the leg and out the foot. Over and over, she massaged that spot, feeling the trapped energy of all those kicks as it slowly loosened.

  The dog settled himself on the rag rug, lying on his side, and closed his eyes. She repeated that same massage a few times over the next two days. When Doc Taylor pulled up in his truck, exhausted after his trip up north, he did a double take. The dog was trotting along beside Emmie as she moved outside, hanging clean cloth diapers on the clothesline. Emmie smiled and waved.

  The doc just shook his head. “She’s like Snow White,” he murmured. “All the animals want to hang out with her.”

  Like his wife, Doc Taylor had a mind that was open to possibilities, and he asked Emmie to show him what she had done with the dog. He asked her to explain, as well as she could, what she saw and felt when she was working on an animal. And before long, Emmie was helping out, not on every animal that came in but on a few where the doc thought it might add to the treatments he provided. Emmie never went back to work as a waitress.

  One morning in October, the rain was coming down in a steady rhythm. The air was gray green, as if the rain and the cedars had melded together. The Taylors had left for Seattle, one of their rare trips to the University of Washington. Emmie was doing dishes when she heard the car pull up in the driveway, jerking to a halt in front of Doc Taylor’s office building. A woman got out of the car and pounded on the door to the office.

  “Where’s Doc Taylor?” she shouted, her voice frantic with fear when Emmie stepped out on her own porch.

  “He’s out teaching. Said not to expect him back until late tonight.”

  The woman took a big breath, fighting to control her emotions. “There’s something wrong with my horse.” The words whooshed out, as if learning that the doc was not around had just taken every bit of her hope.

  “Where?” Emmie dried her hands on a dish towel.

  “At my house, just up the road.”

  Emmie looked at the woman, at the cloud of emotion in her blue eyes. “Let me get my daughter. I’ll be right back.”

  She tied Robin into a baby sling around her body and headed back to the woman and her truck. The tires spun in the mud as the woman backed up and started down the driveway.

  “Name’s Grace Wheeler,” the woman said.

  “Emmie Porter. And this is Robin. She’s four months old.”


  “My daughter is four years old,” Grace said. She bit her lip. “You work for Doc Taylor? Don’t you need a medical bag or something?”

  Emmie swallowed. “I’m not exactly a vet tech. But I do help out a little with the animals.” She wasn’t sure just how much to say about the work she did.

  Grace nodded. “I hope you can help with mine. I’ve had that horse since I was a little girl. My father bought him for me when I was ten.”

  Emmie glanced at her. Grace had long blonde hair in a braid down her back and lake-blue eyes. Emmie guessed her age to be somewhere in the mid-twenties. Fear radiated from the woman’s body; it pulsed inside the cab of the truck.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the farm, a neat collection of buildings and barns. The house was yellow with white trim, and was circled by a large front porch that looked down toward town. Flowers filled almost every available space, a messy mix of roses and delphiniums, phlox and heather, most of them starting to show the change of the seasons. Green pastures ran down the gentle slope from the barn to the road, thick trees separating this farm from the next.

  “Over here,” the woman murmured when they got out of the truck.

  The horse was lying on his side, just inside the shelter of the barn. His eyes were closed, and it took a minute or two before Emmie could see that the animal was still breathing.

  “Would you mind holding the baby?” Emmie unwrapped her baby sling and handed Robin into Grace’s arms.