Where you are, I think it’s like a river, and you’re the flow. And every so often, out of the flow, you, me – all of us – we crawl up on to the bank and we do life. That life may be rich and long or it may be tedious. It may be a disaster – it’s a gamble. But the only certainty is that it will end, and when it does, you find yourself the river again.

River is life and death both.

43

Nora

Toronto, 2018

Three weeks after her fortieth birthday, Nora’s daughter is called in for surgery. Nora and Anouk arrive at the hospital just after 8 p.m. and Anouk signs the forms she needs to sign and her sputum is analysed for bugs. She’s fitted with a cannula, and then her transplant surgeon comes into the room and tells her it’s not going to happen tonight after all. The surgeon who removed the donor’s lungs has determined they’re not viable.

One month later, another pair of lungs become available and they’re sweet as peaches, but Anouk is in the hospital, immobile with pulmonary infection. It’s hardly her daughter lying there in that bed, and there’s a chance she won’t ever be well enough again for transplant.

But Anouk does recover enough to go home, and eight more weeks pass. Once again, the call comes, and Nora and Anouk are in a taxi bound for St Michael’s Hospital.

‘I don’t know if I can take this again,’ says Nora.

They sit at either window in the back seat, looking out, but their arms are extended towards each other, fingers grasped loosely together. It’s January, just after 7 a.m. They have stopped at a red light. The city is peaceful. It’s dark and it’s stone frigid. The sky is the colour of copper and the streetlights cast a yellow glow on the ground, and in each of their halos can be seen a cascade of frozen crystals sifting to the earth. This is the consummate moment. If the surgery goes ahead today, Nora will either still have a daughter at the end of it or she won’t. This truth is as definitive and indivisible as each one of those goddamn snowflakes falling to the ground.

The hospital is transforming from night to day when they arrive. The heavy main doors swing with people arriving to their shifts, but many of the corridors remain dark. As they pass through the main foyer, there is the grating squeak of a metal grille opening, revealing the coffee-shop counter. A stack of newspapers bound tightly with plastic waits in front of the still-closed stationery store. A young doctor in green scrubs and rubber shoes walks past thumbing her phone. All of these details are acute and frightening. Whatever happens, these are the last hours the world will feel exactly. Like this.

There won’t be a lot of waiting. If this is going to work, the lungs need to be connected to Anouk’s blood supply within a few hours. This is the sort of language Nora uses, the language of medicine, of mechanics.