The next bridge along the river was the Pont Alexandre III, the place where Axelle and I, a lifetime before this, had stopped to watch the ambling boys. It was now two in the afternoon and growing cloudy, the sun just a dull hum in the sky. Normally this would have been unthinkable and scandalous, to be alone and skulking under a bridge, but, if nothing else, the apathy I felt was certainly freeing. I remembered that feeling I had the first time I’d been here, with Axelle, when I wanted to take off my boots and do what the boys were doing. This second time, I believed I was that person who could shed herself and just. Climb. I placed my basket on the ground and took one tentative step on to an iron rib, wrapped my arms around the nearest support and pressed the side of my face against it. The metal was cold and rough with rivets that were hard and reassuring against my cheekbone. Feeling stronger than I had in weeks, I skirted around this pillar and reached for the next, grasping it with one hand before letting go the first, and slid my boots flatly along the rib, too afraid to break the connection between my feet and the bridge. Afraid I might get tangled in my skirts and fall. With both arms, I hugged the second pillar, and, once again, repeated the manoeuvre pillar-to-pillar until I was a quarter of the way out over the river. I lowered myself into a sitting position and dangled my legs over the water, a mumble of murky green licks, a good drop below my sturdy black boots. The river. Intoxicating, ceaseless ripples like tongues whispering incoherently. And the wind passing under the bridge was a doleful answer to the stone woman howling from the Pont des Invalides several hundred metres away. I stared into the water and remembered what it felt like when once, Axelle rested her head on my naked stomach and her eyelashes brushed my skin. And I stared into the water and remembered the dark warmth of Madame Debord’s bedroom, which smelled of wood and woman and wax and sleep. I hadn’t expected to grow so fond of her.

And then there was you. The stranger growing inside me. You were a gift I neither wanted nor deserved, and I felt very strongly you weren’t mine to keep.

Below my dangling feet, the river.

32

Anouk

Toronto, 1989

On her second-to-last day in Toronto, less than a week after Carolina Cho did not make it across the width of Lake Ontario, Anouk went again to Cherry Beach. Yellow leaves tumbled across the grass and there was a change in the wind – a fresh cold, the edge of fall. And the sky was for ever blue. Not a cloud.

An infection was coming; the low-down rumble and scratch was there. This itch happened when the lining of the lungs became inflamed and rubbed against the lining of the cavity in which they sat. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, like hearing your own voice in your head when your ears were clogged with water. Or like an involuntary twitch. The last thing she should have done was to get into the lake.