In the swampy dip at the centre of the island she parted the cigar-headed bulrushes and squatted by the water, thick with globular algae. Lacy milkweed tickled her thighs; something else pricked underfoot. She became still. At first, nothing. Then she saw them. Seven frogs, no, eight. Silent and cool as marble, heads just visible poking out of puckered water. One, its skin dry and grey, perched regally on a stick. She had named the frogs earlier in the summer, made up stories about them. Wrote these stories down in a little book. The one on the stick, that was Redmond, named after her dad.

‘Hello, Redmond,’ she said.

What she wrote about Redmond in her little book was this: Redmond was lonely, being the king. When you’re a king, you don’t get treated like a person, you get treated like a king.

On the far side of the island she sat on a submerged sandbar streaked with black, iron-rich sand and clay deposits. The current had carved perfect wavelets into the sandbar, and the shallow water that now flowed over the sand glinted black and grey and gold. Anouk dug her fingers under a tablet of clay and prised it away, clouding the water. She mashed the clay between her palms until it became a paste, then lathered it up and down her arms and legs, across her cheeks and forehead. Left a handprint on her bony breastplate. She climbed on to a ledge of granite, the rock glinting with mica, and stretched out in the sun like a lizard, and soon her skin began to tighten as the clay dried a silvery, flaky blue. Her face a mask. She was island. She was river.

This had been a really bad summer for wasps. Worse than usual. The day after Mel went back to Toronto, Anouk and Nora and Red ate their dinner on the porch, plates of barbecued chicken and the end-of-season peaches ’n’ cream corn balancing on their knees. Anouk watched a wasp land on her corn, searching with its antennae. Another two wasps danced around her chicken, bounced off her wrist.

Nora asked Red to install screening around the porch so that the following year, they wouldn’t have to put up with all these goddamn wasps. She had been stung twice this summer, she said, and kept finding wasps in her drink cans.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to swallow one,’ she said.

‘Just check the can before you drink,’ he said. He swatted at a wasp that was investigating Anouk’s hair.

‘But I don’t want to check the can before I drink.’ She brought a cob of corn to her mouth, then put it on her plate again without taking a bite. ‘This effing place,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Plenty of wasps in Toronto,’ he said.

‘Did I mention Toronto?’

The next day, Sunday, Anouk went with her mother into Pembroke, to the Canadian Tire, where Nora bought a wasp trap, a little plastic dome shaped like a cartoon hive. Since they were in town, they also stopped by the IGA for groceries, and walking back to the car they passed the movie theatre. Anouk stopped and looked up at the billboard. She called to Nora, already a few shops ahead, asked her to come back.