Anouk was writing regularly and waiting tables in a pizza restaurant, so less than a year after Red died, she moved into a basement apartment, not far from Nora. There were a few boys, or men. There were a few men. Once, possibly, love. He had these Van Gogh sworls of hair on the back of his neck that destroyed her. Or it could have been his eyes, the colour of dark sand at the bottom of the river, spurring dangerous thoughts of leeches and cold water, or something that would disperse in a puff if you tried to capture it in your hand. But also silky, silty, invitingly soft between the toes.

The first time she took him home he wanted to learn about cystic fibrosis, so she told him. Told him about her medical regime and told him about the diabetes she was sure to develop because her scarred pancreas was unable to produce insulin. She told him about the depression she sometimes suffered due to the strong steroids she took. She told him about how, when she was young, she didn’t think she could die from it, and she told him about how it felt when she realized she would.

This was her first sex. When he pulled off his jeans a clutch of coins fell from his pocket and rolled loudly across the floor, and then he kissed the soft lobe of her ear and stroked her hair. From upstairs, from the family who lived upstairs, the bump of some heavy thing falling. Small feet pattered in retreat and someone yelled. There was crying and the tunnel voices of TV.

After, he said to her, with his head resting on her chest: ‘Your lungs may be shit but your heart is strong as fuck.’

Anyway. It probably wasn’t love.

Here was Anouk now, hurrying down Bay Street to the Queens Quay ferry terminal on a Tuesday morning, late for the 8 a.m. Toronto Islands ferry. By the skin of her teeth she made it, bought a ticket and hopped through the rolling gates to the boat just before they shut.

The foot-passenger ferry, open-aired and bullish, looked like something out of another century. Heavily varnished wooden deck and ironwork painted navy blue. Sturdy lines and miles of pop rivets.

The ferry ploughed through the inner harbour and she stood on the deck, leaned over the wooden railing and watched the downtown skyline retreat. The air smelled of gasoline and suntan lotion, wood varnish and dead freshwater fish. A small sailboat bobbed across the froth of the ferry’s wake, barely enough wind to fill its mainsail. The ferry completed its fifteen-minute crossing and the passengers gathered at the box-nosed stern, crowding on to the wide staircase that led from the upper deck to the gangway. Anouk sat on a double-sided bench while everyone got off, waiting for the stairs to clear. Above her head, hundreds of faded orange lifejackets strapped to the inner roof, the kind that slipped over the head, the kind that resembled old locks.