Anouk wrote about how, when all this was going on, she looked at the girl and the girl had turned her face towards the cornfield beyond the barn, looking as if she were prepared to stand there for all of time if she had to.

Twenty kilometres beyond the farm, they stopped at a roadside chip truck for poutine before turning on to the eight-lane highway that would drag them like a riptide into Toronto. Anouk took a handful of enzyme pills, and she and Nora and Red sat at a picnic table to eat, the glossy brown paint of it peeling off in tiny filings that stuck to the backs of their bare legs.

The sun was hot, the sky hazy and yellow. There was no wind, only the odd shush of a passing car and the creak of insects rubbing their legs together in the dry roadside grass.

Nora looked at her watch. ‘We’ll be late doing your physio.’

Anouk shrugged.

Nora stared at her. Swiped a gravy-soft fry, sloppy with cheese, from Anouk’s paper cone of poutine. ‘You feel Okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘She’s fine,’ Red said.

‘You won’t always have us around to check the time, you know.’

On the ground in front of the table, Anouk spotted the corpse of a dead mouse, pounded foetal into the cement like chewing gum. She slid off the picnic table and crouched down to inspect the mouse and all its parts, perfectly preserved as if under a glass plate. Precise claws, curved tail, the divots in the cheeks that sprouted white whiskers, and the whiskers themselves. Only things missing were the eyes. Dried out or pecked out. She pointed one finger out to touch it.

‘Don’t,’ Nora snapped. ‘That’s disgusting.’

Back in the car, Anouk opened the carton of duck eggs. They could have been described as blue, she wrote later, but only because blue was the closest you could get. It was the same as describing the veins on the insides of your wrists as blue. There had to be a better name for that colour. She just didn’t know yet what it was.

13

Anouk

Ottawa River, 1987

First day of school. Anouk walked the dirt path to the main road to meet the bus. She was dawdling, couldn’t help it. September leaves. And the sun. Shining through the leaves. Close to the main road, she bent to undo her shoes – she was going to take them off and run through the leaves – but as she bent down she heard the impatient idling of the school bus engine.

‘I’m still here,’ said the driver, that sympathy smile pasted on his face.

She was often late. It was the medication, and then having to wait for the medication to work so her lungs would be ready for the physiotherapy. The year before, the driver had been instructed to wait whenever this happened, but it would have been better if he were mean about it. He was mean to everyone else.