The final words of the newscaster: When Carolina Cho exhaled into the water, her father had reported earlier, she hummed. This, as far as her father understood, sent her into a state of bliss.

By 7 a.m. Nora and Anouk were on their bikes and getting close to the spot where Carolina Cho was meant to land at Ashbridges Bay. The lake was ribbed and pulsing with an insistent chop from a wind that had built overnight. On the beach, a gathering of fanfare. A television van and locals who had come to welcome the swimmer ashore. It was a perfect day. Still August, but the rising blue of the morning sky and the shifting broad leaves of the beach maples promised September cool. Anouk would be going back to her father in a few days.

Nora laid out a blanket and some food she had packed for breakfast: cream cheese and sweet grape jelly on bagels, sliced apples and bananas, cold sausages. Thermos of hot chocolate. Balloons jogged from where they’d been tethered to the lifeguard stand, and a few boats were anchored in the bay. A man bobbed alone in a Laser, mainsail pulled down and relaxed over the boom, with a pair of binoculars around his neck.

Anouk perched on the blanket like a meerkat. From under her white T-shirt, Nora could see the blue straps of her bathing suit and this, these stupid little straps, broke her heart.

Nora spilled hot chocolate on the blanket, and Anouk fed her bagel to a mob of dull-eyed seagulls who squawked and brayed and refused to leave. Eight o’clock became nine o’clock and Anouk, funnelling sand through the heel of her fist on to her legs, asked shouldn’t she be here by now, and the TV woman paced around her van with a walkie-talkie pushed against the side of her face. The man out in the sailboat scanned the horizon with his binoculars.

Starting at the television van, the news travelled from one end of the bay to the other like wind. Carolina Cho had been pulled out of the water. And like wind, the story was impossible to capture. Someone said she’d been bitten by a lamprey. Someone else said it was too windy and wavy out in the middle of the lake. And another: she’d become nauseous either from the bite or the waves, and couldn’t keep her food down.

Anouk. Baffled. Nora poured the remaining hot chocolate into the sand and they packed their bag and rode home.

30

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1898–9

Some weeks after Nicolas left on a train for Marseille, I still bore Axelle like a scar, and had come to the conclusion that life would be more bearable lived quietly and without love. Because within me, in the place where my body breathed, a sort of melancholy had settled, like ash. This wasn’t sadness or outrage or even heartache. Whatever it was, it was far worse than those trivial things. I chose to ignore this feeling and continue what I had been doing before, to brew coffee for Madame. Heat water for her bath. Eat what little I could.