‘Shit. Is she okay?’ Fraser’s voice, alarmed.

‘It’s fine,’ said Red.

The more she tried to stop, the harder she wanted to laugh, and the coughing got worse. She coughed until she felt the release, and there was a great gob in her mouth.

Red, who’d left her alone, now handed her a tissue. Still hugging the tree with one arm, she spat into the tissue. Put it in her jeans pocket and drew the back of her hand across her lips, wiped her eyes. A few remnant coughs sputtered like an engine just turned off.

Fraser, one hand clasped over his forehead: ‘Christ. You were hackin’ like an old man.’

‘People say I sound like a dog barking,’ she said. ‘Or a smoker.’

‘That’s a two-pack-a-day cough,’ Fraser offered, ‘at least.’

‘At least,’ Red agreed.

9

Nora

Ottawa River, 1987

Nora and red had argued that morning again, about moving south, back to Toronto. For Anouk, Nora reasoned, to avoid the cold winters. To be closer to the specialist clinic. But Red countered with the fact that Toronto could be just as cold as Pembroke, and why would they want to live where the air was less clean?

Because nobody in Toronto will ever be shocked that I’ve never driven a snowmobile, thought Nora. Or question why I would rather stay home and watch TV than go fishing, or cross-country skiing. No one would ever expect me to know about canning my own tomatoes. Because in Toronto, Nora thought, I could go to a party crammed with people I’ve never met, or I could ride the Queen Street car from where it starts to where it ends, and through my window see the different parts of the city pass by like rock strata. Big, leafy maples and Lake Ontario in the east, drunks cocooning themselves in sleeping bags on benches in Moss Park, the centre point of Yonge Street. I could keep riding, she thought, past the Eaton Centre and Sears and all the head shops and record stores on Queen West, the street vendors selling nuts and hot dogs with sauerkraut, past the suede tassels and leather boots and army surplus in the windows of the retro stores; I could just sit on the streetcar all the way west until I hit the Polish delis on Roncesvalles and then High Park, and then turn around and go back again.

She didn’t say this though. Nostalgia was a weak argument. And she did appreciate Pembroke. She loved how her daughter was growing, this child of the river. Anouk’s lungs were more robust for all the time she’d spent in the water. The river – its rhythms, its fluctuations and its pull – the river welcomed Anouk. It enveloped and accepted her. Absurd. But Nora believed it.

It made her spit though, Red’s insistence that nothing ever change. That they stay here for ever. And why did every damn thing have to be about Anouk anyway?

As soon as the stones that spun off Red’s truck tires could no longer be heard pinging the roadside trees, Nora and Jody moved to each other in the middle of the kitchen. It was a bit of a fumble; Jody was no romantic. A farmer of hops and sunflowers, and endearingly stupid. Two hours of hockey every Tuesday night in the old boys’ league kept him fit as a fiddle. His face was beautiful and made more so by a partially missing front tooth that had been cracked by a flying hockey puck years before, and capped, then knocked loose again and left.