One boy, who couldn’t have been older than five or six, leapt athletically from one girder to the next, using the strength in his legs to maintain his balance and stop himself from tumbling into the river. Barefoot, he scrambled to the top of a pillar, using the large rivets as grips, and, hidden in shadows in the upper arches of the bridge, piped to his friends, ‘Regardez-moi!’ His voice echoed and the other boys, swinging and hanging upside down from their knees, hollered their appreciation, encouraged him to go higher. A deeper voice, likely an older brother, told him he was an ass.

I imagined dropping my skirts and my hat and shawl, right there on the path. Unlacing my tight boots and tossing them into the water and climbing into the guts of that great bridge, just like those boys, and hanging upside down until my temples throbbed.

‘Street rats,’ Axelle said, and pulled me by my hand.

‘It looks fun,’ I said, allowing her to drag me, watching the boys from over my shoulder. Though I hadn’t so much as undone a single button, I was out of breath.

‘You’re a strange one,’ Axelle said. We were out in the sun again, standing under the chestnut trees that formed a neat line all the way to the centre of the city. Axelle pressed her thumb into the palm of my hand while a woman passed close by, pushing a grizzling infant in a pram. My heart thumped regardezmoiregardezmoi.

‘Nothing about you seems to fit,’ Axelle said and held my arms out, examining me like a seamstress would. ‘You are a collection of surprises.’

‘I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.’

‘Nor am I,’ she said, and smiled.

17

Nora

Ottawa River, 1987

Nora dreamt she was falling and woke from this dream a little after dawn with the half-formed notion that the sensation of falling in sleep was actually the memory of being born. Or of dying. That total loss of control, that endless inhalation without the response of the exhale. She turned to face the window and through the gap in the curtains could see the first snow coming down, a universe of minuscule cogs, free-falling.

Red, asleep beside her, rolled over and mumbled. That face, the way his hair curled behind the ear, the smell of him. She would have touched him, but.

She put on a hefty wool sweater over her nightgown and pulled on a pair of Red’s thick grey boot socks. Downstairs, she set the coffee machine and turned up the thermostat and stood in the middle of the kitchen staring at the floor, staring at nothing, waiting for the coffee. When it was ready, she poured it into a thermos and then went to the hall closet. Boots and coat on, scarf wrapped around the bottom half of her face, she took her coffee out to the porch. The cosmic silence of snow. There must have been five or six inches, and it was still falling. Hot coffee in the throat, down the gullet, and she stepped off the porch into airy snow that gave no resistance and filled her boots.