The medical team won’t disclose how the donor died, only that the lungs were helicoptered into the Toronto Island airport. The donor will only have died hours ago and the lungs are probably here now. There won’t be a lot of waiting at all.

Another metal chair by another tightly made bed in another room with lights that hum. Consent forms to receive blood, to receive the organ itself, have been signed already but they have to go through the rigmarole again. General risks of surgery. Possible bypass during the procedure and the risks of. Risks of being anaesthetized. Risk of stroke, of bleeding, of needing a transfusion. Anouk nods and nods and nods. They’re briefly left alone.

‘I think it’s happening this time,’ says Nora.

Anouk is still nodding, like some kind of mechanical toy winding down. Nora checks her phone. Eleven messages from Mel.

‘What are you going to do for breakfast?’ Anouk asks.

‘Don’t know.’

‘Did you remember your book?’

Nora looks in her bag. No book. The clock on the wall has a white face with plain numbers and no second hand. ‘No more coughing,’ she says.

‘No more physio,’ says Anouk.

‘All that free time you’re going to have.’ Nora thinks she should say something else, something more significant than this chatter, something maternal. And then a nurse comes in, wheeling at her hip a trolley of instruments for inserting a cannula. She pulls a green curtain around the bed to separate Anouk from the other patients in the room. She tells Anouk that one of the specialists from the CF clinic phoned and sends her best wishes.

The nurse offers Anouk a pill. ‘This is a mild sedative,’ she says, holding out a tiny paper cup, ‘to take the edge off. It’ll relax you. You don’t have to take it.’

‘I’ll take it,’ says Anouk.

‘Slip it under your tongue,’ says the nurse. ‘Just let it dissolve.’

These are the last hours the world will feel exactly. Like this.

With two fingers, her hand shaking, Anouk places the pill under her tongue. She closes her eyes, presses her lips together. The nurse begins to prepare Anouk’s hand for the cannula and there’s something, Nora knows it, something she should say that will help or guide or instruct, something like that, but all she can manage: ‘My baby. I love you.’

Anouk

The operating theatre smells like metal and antiseptic. It smells like rubber. Anouk wears a blue paper cap, and its elasticated hem is hot and itchy against her forehead and the paper smells like disinfectant. The ceiling seems very far away. She’s thinking of a poem she knows, can’t remember the name of the poet, she’s thinking of the words to a poem she knows where the poet is on the operating table and starts to hallucinate about the hairs on the anaesthetist’s arms, hairs that are thick, red and curly like little coppery ferns. He wants to reach up and touch the hairs because, he thinks, it may be the last thing he ever sees. But he’s afraid that if he does something like that, does something so irrational as to reach up and curl his fingers into the thick hair of the anaesthetist’s arms, and then survives, he’ll be laughed at later on. But very soon, he stops caring about whether or not people are going to laugh at him, and when he tries to reach up to touch the hairs, which have now become little jets of fire, he discovers that his arms have been strapped to the table.