I straddled your small body and slapped your face. We both knew you were dead, but there’s knowing and there’s the heart and these two entities don’t always act as one. The dock rocked up and down as I threw you over my knees and hit your back with the heel of my hand, as if trying to dislodge food stuck in your windpipe. Your mother pulled you away from me and settled you into her lap, and I watched as the blue cotton of her skirt darkened with water. She was shaking you, and your arm bounced up and down and clear water dripped from the tips of your perfect fingers. This moment very quickly became a series of details. Your toes, bone white. Your hair drying quickly in the breeze. A stranger paddling over in a green canoe, his face a paper cut-out of a face. The toy yellow boat where I’d left it on the end of the dock with its cargo of dead mice.

25

Anouk

Toronto, 1989

Lake ontario was shrinking. At one time, when Toronto was still called the City of York, the shore lay several blocks north, in terms of the city. Front Street was named so because it originally fronted the northern shore of the lake. The Royal York, the finest hotel in town, was built facing Union Station, just by the water, but as the lake receded, exposing more and more land, the city developed until, lying between the hotel and the lake, there were two highways, more hotels, and a quayside shopping district.

East of the city, which, when Front Street was first established, would have been forest and farmland, there were the Scarborough Highlands, which later became known as the Scarborough Bluffs, sand cliffs bordering the lake that were more than a hundred metres tall at their highest point. They were compared to the cliffs of Dover by English colonialists, albeit a much smaller version, and they were eroding, little by little. In the 1940s, as Toronto’s population grew, it became fashionable to build large houses on the clifftops, where the air was fresh and the views across the lake incomparable. The construction of the houses increased the rate of erosion of the land they were built on, and, by the time Anouk’s mother moved back to Toronto in 1987, leaving Red without a wife and Anouk with a choice, an abandoned bluff-top cottage that once belonged to an artist had already crashed into the lake. The city was busily planting trees and boulders at the base of the cliffs to slow the effects of erosion, to save the homes, but the lake, and its shore ever-changing, was eating away at the bluffs. Try as they might, they could not stop what the water was doing.

Anouk’s mother moved to the part of Toronto just west of the bluffs, where every street running north–south ended at the lake. Nora had always lived in this part of Toronto; it was where she was born. And this was where Anouk’s aunt Mel also lived. This was where the water was. But Anouk found the beach sand to be gritty with dirt, riddled with bottle tops and cigarette butts, sand that left your feet grey and dusty. It wasn’t a junkyard, it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t the same as home. Lake Ontario didn’t smell the way water should; there were no hints of cedar sap or mineral or dirt. It smelled more like cold tin.