‘It’s a good place to end up!’ hollered a cousin.

Anouk folded the bag back into the canister and tossed it on the beach, then splashed out to the water again and swam to where Fraser was. The water was so cold, it reached into her with two hands and stole her breath. Fraser looked at her and his face squared with worry, and she found just enough air to tell him she was okay. She took the black, blood-iron water into her mouth like wine. Felt every marvellous bubble that passed between her toes and crept up her thighs. She ducked under and opened her eyes to the murk, resurfaced and smelled what her river offered up: sand and clay and lily and bulrush and weed, warm granite and coniferous sap and rot and the silver-green glint of a dragonfly’s diaphanous wing, and the life and death and the deep-winter freeze that was coming. She thanked her father for giving her this. River.

Fraser said, ‘You need to get out now, girl.’

And she said, ‘Don’t tell my mother.’

But Nora had disappeared hours before, and so had Jody. And everyone noticed this, but the story was dog-eared by then and nobody cared.

Nora was sitting with Anouk now, in the living room in Toronto where the deer antler collected dust on the mantel. At some point Mel had arrived and they were watching Anouk. Mel was cradling a cup of something hot and she was smiling over the rim of the cup.

‘Let me in on the joke,’ Anouk said.

‘You were talking in your sleep,’ said Mel.

‘I wasn’t asleep.’

‘You were howling.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘What were you writing?’ Mel asked, nodding to the computer that was still balanced on Anouk’s lap.

‘Nothing.’

42

Pieter

Baltimore, 1959

I met with miller and Wolf in a sparse office in a Baltimore hospital. The room was clean, a typewriter on the desk, a metal filing cabinet by the door. A few chairs and a film projector on a low table, pushed against the wall. Outside the window, November wind worried at the last brown leaves clinging on to the wet, black branches of the trees that lined the hospital car park. Clouds moved quickly across an ash-grey sky.

Wolf, a few years younger than Miller, had the hooked nose and flat forehead of an eagle. Jet-black hair. He sat casually in one of the chairs, elbows resting on his knees, while Miller, much broader in the shoulders and thinner in hair, sat at his desk. They were both younger than I, bright-eyed. Miller was a joker, told me he’d expected a Norwegian toymaker to look more like Geppetto, perhaps bearded, wearing a leather apron and smelling of wood and glue. They wanted to compare stories of transatlantic travel – air travel was a novelty in those days – as only months before they’d also been on a plane, to a conference in Norway in fact. That’s where they’d learned about me.