Anouk eases herself out of her chair and spreads the blanket on the dock. She has to manoeuvre around the delicate tubing that runs from the oxygen canister to the cannula in her nose, and lies down on the blanket and presses her cheek into the cedar. The cedar, still warm from the day’s sun, the smell of it, fills her. It topples her. It’s in her blood, this smell, this river. She reaches over the edge of the dock and dips her fingers, caresses the cold water. She wants to swim but can’t. She wants to immerse herself. Maybe she could just float, holding on to the edge of the dock, but she can’t risk getting sick. The dock moves again and here is Nora, poking Anouk’s bum with the tip of her sneaker.

‘Skinny ass,’ Nora says. ‘Skinny, skinny ass.’

The echo of the loon is like air in her wasted lungs.

4

Anouk

Ottawa River, 1987

That sky of Anouk’s youth, that sky over the Ottawa River Valley, over the river, over fields of corn and sunflowers, flax and blueberry – that sky stretched on for ever. Her house was on the river and the closest town was called Pembroke, where she went to school and where, deeply gouged into the weed-cracked sidewalk in front of the school, were the words: Mr Morton is a azz-licker. There was an IGA grocery store, a Canadian Tire, a movie theatre. In the summer, the roads were jammed with people from southern Ontario with canoes and kayaks strapped to the tops of their cars, bikes on racks with wheels spinning in the air. In the early months of winter, the snow banks that lined the streets, snow thrown up by 4 a.m. ploughing, were white and loafy; by February they were dark grey and ice-shiny. In the gas station you could buy fishing worms and leeches in neat, Styrofoam boxes, and next to the gas station there was a boutique that sold prettily painted mailboxes and scented candles and beaded wind chimes.

The Ottawa River was wide open for long stretches, then channelled and split by islands and arms of land that connected together to make a warren of small ponds and passages. Where the water ran wide, the current was slow. Early in the morning, the river, in some parts, was so calm and covered in mist that it disappeared. If it weren’t for the striders skating to and fro, their fine legs bending the surface tension of the water, you’d scarcely know the river was there.

A few kilometres upriver from where its course squeezed and buckled over boulders and falls, where the water rushed white and frothy and deadly, there was a quiet pocket in the southern bank. A horseshoe bend in the land, a tiny bay. Not even a bay; a dimple. In the middle of this pocket there was a small island that, if viewed from the bank, looked like a tall ship. One lofty, spindled pine at the bow. At the other end of the island, the stern, a tapered deck of Canadian Shield igneous rock.