I remembered lying on the rug in front of the fireplace with my arms folded under my head, sucking a stolen sweet, staring at my grandmother’s paintings on the wall: a dry-docked fishing boat, a bunch of flowers, and the koie my grandfather built above the lake where you died, Bear.

And then.

I remembered her. I saw her face as clearly as the empty sky above me – every contour, every small blemish in the plaster. The round, youthful cheeks, smooth as buttermilk. The clumped eyelashes. The smile. I saw her and it was as if she saw me back, and it was as if she said: Well. Here you are, Pieter. At last.

46

Anouk

Toronto, 2018

Anouk has a strong urge to move her hand and thinks for a long time about doing so, but it feels as if it’s been replaced by a block of wood. She tries the other hand. It’s become wood too. That, or her hands have been bound to the sides of her body. There’s singing. Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah. The River Jordan is. The River Jordan. The River. Is. It’s something. It’s bloody and old. Hallelu-u-jah.

Forget moving one piddly hand. Instead, swim.

She dives like a whale. She is fathoms-deep and placid. Salty. Briny. Body warm. Somewhere, a heart beats. This isn’t just water; this, whatever it is, this. Fluid can be inhaled. This fluid is more viscous than water and it fills Anouk’s nose, mouth, trachea, lungs. It breathes for her. Her blood flows rich and scarlet and is more saturated with oxygen than she’s ever known. She looks up towards the surface. There is a cloudy, marbled, out-of-focus world beyond where she is now. Voices are hush, hush, hushing. Or. That sound could be the wind in the trees. Or. It could be the sound of loamy waves rolling up a pebbly shore, losing momentum, and falling back into the milky bosom of a gentle sea.

Anouk rolls and dives even deeper until she’s pulling herself along a muddy riverbed. She grapples with weeds, gets tangled and then is released. A long-whiskered, flat-headed catfish glides in and out of her peripheral vision. It’s the same colour as the riverbed and almost impossible to see, but she knows it’s there by the clouds of sand it blasts into the current with every flick of its tail fin. She propels herself along the river bottom by clutching at rocks and using them for momentum to drive herself forward, and she’s moving at such a clip that her clothes are slipping from her body and soon she’s naked, and the water is breath against her skin. It should be cold but it’s warm. Body-warm.

Up ahead, a bend in the river and around the bend, a submerged tree. Its black, leafless branches flow with cottony green witch’s hair and frogspawn, soft river growth so abundant it’s as if the tree has lain here for a hundred years. There’s enough space between the prone trunk and the riverbed for Anouk to fit, so she shimmies under there, hugging the tree, and sees that on the underside of the trunk, a patch of bark has been stripped away and there are words etched into the bare wood.