On the Friday evening news, the day before, Nora and Anouk watched a clip of Carolina Cho’s departure from Niagara, the other side of the lake. The girl, strong bare legs showing from under a large winter coat, red cap on her head, stood next to her father, who gave a short speech about the years of hard work that led to this one day. He expected the fifty-plus-kilometre swim, a distance that would vary depending on the wind and waves, would take approximately twenty-four hours, and he explained how the support team on the accompanying boat would feed his daughter every thirty minutes by passing food out on a cup attached to a pole. The water temperature, he said, out in the middle of the lake, would be about seventeen or eighteen degrees.

‘Do you think she’s worried about the eels?’ Anouk asked.

‘I’d be more worried about having to swim for twenty-four hours. Jesus.’

Carolina Cho, on the TV, kicked off her flip-flops and carefully removed her jacket, folded it and passed it along with her shoes to her father. She whipped her arms in wide circles and slapped her lateral muscles, slapped the backs of her solid thighs. She bent over and hung her arms loosely, shook them out, right down to the fingertips. Nobody so young had accomplished this swim before, the newscaster explained. The first person to do the crossing had been a swimmer called Marilyn Bell, thirty-five years before, who at the time was sixteen.

‘Go, girl!’ Nora yelled at the TV.

‘Shh,’ said Anouk.

Carolina Cho stood where the water was just past her ankles and looked out to the horizon. Her chest heaved. She adjusted her goggles, pushing them tightly into her eye sockets, and ran her fingers within the rubber strap at the back of her head and, with a snap, adjusted that too. She turned slightly to the beach, to the camera, and waved politely, then turned back towards the horizon and lifted her shoulders vigorously a few times, rolled her neck. She raised her right arm straight up and, from the support boat a few metres off, a horn blasted. Short and definitive. The girl, moving quickly now after the last few minutes of careful deliberation, splashed a few steps deeper, stumbled a little on the stones, and dove in.

The next scene of the news clip, filmed from the boat a few hours after the crossing began: Carolina Cho alone in calm water. Bright sun, minimal splash. With almost no kick, she trailed her legs behind the power of her arms and hips, and flicked her streamlined feet efficiently like tail fins only once every three or four strokes. She was water. She was lake. Her breathing rhythm, the newscaster said, was something she’d perfected over years: two breaths over two consecutive strokes, head down for two strokes then breathe again twice to the opposite side.

She’ll repeat this pattern for twenty-four hours, Nora thought, until she gets to the end. What would go through your mind, with nothing to think about but your breath? Nora knew all about lungs and how they were supposed to work. The air would travel smoothly into the healthy lungs of this girl Carolina Cho, and branch off into the bronchi where her cilia flowed as freely as river weed, then slip without resistance into the smaller bronchioles, and deeper still into the air-sac clusters of microscopic alveoli where the oxygen would be transferred into her blood. Pathways clear and unscarred.