In so many words, she was telling me to get on with it.

Which is what I did. I climbed, as I had done before, and once I reached the right spot, I spent very little time there. I waited for a sign but, as I already told you, none came. There was nothing sensational in this act; from the outside, very little drama. I stood, leaned forward, expelled the last of my breath and let myself fall.

The black water. Accommodating. Closed over my head.

36

Anouk

Ottawa River, 1996

Anouk was eighteen years old and driving Red’s truck with the windows down, and feeling pretty good because in the empty seat next to her, a copy of the local newspaper. And in those pages, her first printed feature article. A revisiting of the story of a tornado that had hit a nearby town ten years before, and the efforts of the local Mennonite community to help in the aftermath. Her pitch. Her work. First summer out of high school, first money she had ever earned, in the bank.

She stopped at a roadside farm stall to buy six ears of peaches ’n’ cream corn. The stall also carried pints of blueberries and cherries, plastic jugs of apple cider and pies. A black goat cleaved at the gravel at the side of the road where it was tethered to a stake, and the farmer gave Anouk a couple of cherries to feed to the goat.

‘Watch what he does with the pits,’ he said, and then, as if he were duty bound: ‘The cherries aren’t local, they come up from Niagara.’

Anouk offered the cherries to the goat and indeed, it worked each one with its long, bearded muzzle, and eventually a bone-clean pit was ejected out of the side of its mouth by a tongue that was as grey and shiny as steel.

Back in the car, the milky smell of corn husk. The clouds were fast moving and passed over the sun so quickly that the road ahead snapped from light to dark and back to light again, shadows from rock or tree at once sharp as the edge of a piece of paper, then faded, then gone. Today, everything was beautiful.

She got home just as the sun was beginning to set. Great wedges of deep-orange light branded the side of the house, the lawn, the west faces of the trees. Red wasn’t around, so she left the newspaper and the corn on the kitchen counter and went straight to the river, swam out to the island and climbed on to a slab of rock and lay there, stomach-down, and picked at a splat of dry, mint-green moss that was spread over the surface of the rock like scales. This rock. She pressed her cheek close into it. This rock striated fluidly with layers of black and purple and orange, and flecks of gold and silver. She wasn’t supposed to be out here, just now. This hour of the day, she should have been back at the house taking her pills. Nebulizer. Physio. Repeat.