“It’s a good thing I learned how to canoe last vacation,” Gaëlle said. Dark-haired, with a sharp little face, she looked very credible except to people who had seen her in the wilds before. “Took to it like an expert. Trust me. I’m perfectly capable of doing this.”

Claudine must have considered no lengths too great to further our romance because she looked at Gaëlle a moment and then descended into the bow.

“Remember, don’t get out of the canoe!” the canoe-handler called after us.

Just in case we didn’t hear him, there was a sign to that effect as we rounded the first bend. Claudine noticed it particularly, because she ran straight into it and had to push at it with her paddle to get them turned around again.

“Tata, you have to steer!” Gaëlle called to her aunt from the stern.

“It’s not working!” Claudine said. “I don’t know what to do!”

I hesitated, wondering if I dared correct anyone’s belief that you could steer a canoe from the bow, or if I had best keep out of it. Keep out of it, I decided. After all, before my intervention with the Okefenokee idea, they had all been planning on spending a day at the beach. Perversely, I wanted to spend a day at the beach, too, but kept feeling they had to see more of America than that. It was my gift to them, for all the aspects of France and themselves that they had gifted me.

Jean-Charles and Justine started a race. Bruno and Titi plunged paddles in pursuit and clanged against Gaëlle and Claudine’s canoe, doing a slow eddy in the middle of the channel. I smacked my sandaled left foot and lifted a hand dripping with blood.

“And we thought the mosquitoes were bad,” Jean-Charles huffed, out-distancing us. “Do the yellow flies work in cohorts with the alligators or something? Once we lose enough blood to the insects, we don’t offer any resistance?”

At that, something plopped in the dark clear water up ahead, and everybody tensed, staring at the ripples, until a turtle poked its head out. It dived for cover again as Claudine and Gaëlle backed its way, Gaëlle still shrieking at Claudine to steer. Bruno and Titi tried to avoid them, but their canoes clanged together once again.

“I’m trying!” Claudine said. “But it doesn’t seem to make any difference what I do!”

“Well, yes, it does, clearly,” Gaëlle said, “that’s why we keep running into things. Tata, watch out!”

They grounded against a boggy island. Shallow water is a secret blessing in terms of steering, though. When Claudine used the old tried-and-true technique of pushing against the swamp bottom with her paddle, they were soon redirected, out in the middle of the channel again, and heading into the opposite bank.

“Tata!”