Anouk lived with her mother and father, Nora and Red, on the riverbank adjacent to the tall-ship island. The house, built of weather-darkened clapboard, sat on top of a gentle, grassy slope that rose from the bank. It was a split-level house, with a large ground floor where the kitchen and dining room opened to the living room, which was walled on its river-facing side by a vast window. So. You could see the river from almost anywhere in the house.

Nora came from Toronto and Red was from Pembroke. They met in 1971, in a three-storey brick house just off Spadina Avenue in Toronto, working with a charity that helped newly arrived American draft dodgers find jobs and places to live. Red was in teachers’ college at the University of Toronto and Nora wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. They fell in love surrounded by guys whom they considered heroes, who rode bikes or hid in the trunks of cars to cross the border into Canada so they wouldn’t have to shoot people in a country about which they knew nothing. Nora and Red fell in love listening to Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Eagles. It was romantic. When Red’s mother died in 1975, he inherited her house in Pembroke, sold it, and convinced Nora that they should buy the place on the river. At the time, she was taking a course to be a counsellor. It was her work with the draft dodgers that made her want to do this. She didn’t really want to move to the river, but she was in love.

For the first week of August, the month before Anouk’s tenth birthday, Nora’s sister Mel came up from Toronto for a visit. The two sisters spent a lot of time by the river, lounging in deck chairs on their crescent of sand (too small really to be called a beach) with their legs stretched out and their feet in the water. They drank bottles of beer, which Anouk fetched for them from the kitchen. Anouk liked her aunt. Mel was a little bit bad. She smoked Rothmans Specials and swore and told dirty jokes, and she made Nora laugh. Anouk liked how her mom and her aunt looked like two different versions of the same thing. They both had long, slender legs and knobbly knees. Bodies wide at the hips, square torsos and flat chests. Both with broad shoulders and long necks. But Nora’s hair was red-blonde, like Anouk’s, and Mel’s was dark brown. Nora’s shoulders were covered in orange freckles in the summer. Mel’s were smooth and tanned. Anouk had the same flamingo-like physique as her mother and aunt, but she would never be tall, and her shoulders and back were slightly hunched because of her cough, which she lived with every day. To hunch the shoulders, to roll the back, was to open the chest cavity, to ease the passage of air into the lungs. This was what her body did.