‘Well then,’ he said.

‘Can we wait another day? See what happens?’ She coughed and spat again. A feverish, sidestep swoosh inside her skull.

Nora appeared in the doorway then, leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed over her chest and looking heavy. When she saw that Anouk was watching her, she bent to pick at something on the knee of her pyjamas.

‘We have to bring her in,’ Red said. ‘We’ll take her local.’

‘I think we should go straight to Toronto,’ Nora said. ‘They’ll just send us there anyway.’ She took a big breath, filled her lungs right up, and went straight to Anouk’s closet and opened it. Pulled things out – old boots, Lego, a deflated volleyball – and scattered them on the carpet.

‘What are you doing?’ Red asked.

‘Where’s her bag?’

‘Hall closet.’

All the song was gone from their words, Anouk’s parents, when they spoke to each other. They were beat. She was tiring them out. Nora left the room and came back a moment later with Anouk’s bag, the one they used for long stays at the hospital.

They still did her regular physio, cupping her back, even though within the hour her lungs would be full of fluid again. Anouk in fever, almost pleasant, waited on the couch while Nora worried a trail around the kitchen, packing food and water for the car, stopping to look out of the window at the snow. Red was upstairs packing pills and the nebulizer – the motorized compressor, the tubing, the mouthpiece. To nebulize: to inhale the medicine by mist, to inhale it straight into the lungs, so that it would loosen the gunk that clogged the cilia, making it easier to expel.

The world outside the window was still and the sky a flat grey, and the pine trees that circled their yard like palisades were laden with white.

Nora came out of the kitchen and went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Red. ‘You nearly ready? Radio says more snow in the next few hours. I want to get south of it.’

Red answered with the heavy fall of his thick-socked feet on the stairs, the stairs stripped of carpet and splintery rough. He lumbered with a backpack hanging off one shoulder, a sleeping bag tucked under each arm, and gripped in one hand the hard-shelled case that held the nebulizer. He dumped it all by the front door and slowly his body rose.

‘We’ve got to get a move on,’ said Nora.

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

Anouk watched. She watched Red collect coats and hats and gloves, and pile them next to the bags. She watched Nora move from kitchen to living room and back again. She watched the first new flakes of snow reel and curl past the large living-room window, falling slowly and softly as if they’d been dropped accidentally and would not be followed by any more.

19

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1898