She went into the living room and woke her father and sent him shuffling up to his bedroom. Halfway up the stairs (stairs which were rough and splintery and without carpet, the carpet still not replaced after having been ripped up, years before, by Nora) his glasses fell from his ear and he stepped on them, breaking an arm off the frame. He didn’t stop to pick them up. Anouk found a spare pair in their old leather case in a kitchen drawer, and left them out on the counter in front of the toaster. She went out to the porch and sat. Time passed. Time was passing. Something was changing. There was the sound of crickets and frogs and the titch and scratch of some small, sharp-clawed rodent.

And the wind in the trees was the sound made by the currents of the earth.

In the morning, Anouk got out of bed close to dawn, woken by a snag: she should have been feeling good about having a story published in a newspaper, but she was not feeling good at all. She was groggy in the lungs. Creaky in the bones. Anxiety like an up-note, unresolved. She wanted to get up and walk out of the house right now, walk out of the kitchen door and barefoot it down the grassy slope to the sand. To the water. But cystic fibrosis owned the first hour and a half of every day. So before anything else, she did all that.

By the time she did get outside, around eight, the sun hadn’t yet had the chance to take the night’s coolness out of the air, out of the grass, and the grass was still dew-wet. Goosebumps rose on her arms. There was the mossy smell of river water, of rich dirt and cedar resin. This was the particular smell of the morning and it existed nowhere else but here, at this hour. The oak leaves – that tree where her tire swing once hung – the leaves on that tree were clapping now in a cool blue breeze. Not enough wind to touch the river though; its surface made only of light.

The phantom call of a loon echoed as if there were no echo in the world until there were loons in the world.

Somewhere in the trees there was the unsettling chirp of a bird that sounded like the snip of scissors cutting quick, short pieces of stiff ribbon. The lament was incessant and followed Anouk to the river.

She wanted to be in the water but the rasp in her lungs told her she probably shouldn’t, and experience had taught her, at last, to listen. So instead she dragged the cedar canoe from its resting spot on the grass and rolled it over and pushed it into the water, stepping in with one foot in the centre of the hull as it launched off the sandy bottom. A daddy-long-legs rode on the canoe’s gunnel, its prancing, articulated legs as delicate as fibres, the sun reflecting butter-yellow on its grey, speckled back. She tried to catch it. But the spider was agile, and escaped over the gunnel and down the outside of the curved hull. She leaned over, hunting it, and saw that it clung to the hull by the stern, out of reach and just above the surface of the water.