Close to the water, the shore was stony – a slip and scatter of smooth, broad stones, perfect for skipping. And the temperature, even in the middle of the summer, was breath-taking cold. Red once told Anouk that this was because the lake was dead, nothing living in it to warm it up. But when Anouk told Nora this, Nora said that wasn’t true. Plenty alive in there. There were trout, catfish and carp. There were weeds. And in the middle, where the water was deep, there were eels.

Anouk’s mother left the family when Anouk was in the hospital with a lung infection. Just walked out, in the middle of the night. She stayed away for nine days. And then, she called, with a decision and a choice. Anouk chose her father. Anouk chose the deep winters, the sky, the river. All Nora asked for, out of everything the family possessed, were a few record albums, photographs and books, and the antler she’d ripped from the head of the buck she’d killed.

Lake Ontario was polluted and sometimes, when the wind was right, there was the ripe smell of sewage from the filtration plant at Ashbridges Bay, west of where Anouk now stood, on the beach. Staying with Nora for July and August. Anouk thought her mother had decided to live in this part of Toronto so that Anouk would have chosen to live here with her, but Anouk wasn’t even allowed to swim in the lake. Anouk of the water. Anouk of the river. Here, on this beach, looking out across one of the Great Lakes, which, if you didn’t know better, you’d think was the ocean; at her back was the splintery old boardwalk that ran all the way from the bay to the bluffs. In those months, the two hottest of the year, Anouk was banned from the water. Too polluted. Anouk of the gunky lungs. Anouk of the cystic fibrosis.

That summer, when Anouk was a few months shy of twelve, a fourteen-year-old girl named Carolina Cho was preparing to swim across the whole of Lake Ontario. The crossing was going to happen on the last weekend of August, and Anouk and her mother were following Carolina Cho’s story as it was being recounted in a weekly column of the local newspaper. The portrait of Carolina Cho that ran with the column showed her standing on Cherry Beach, which was west of where Nora lived, practically downtown, in her cap and goggles, legs spread in superhero stance with her hands on her hips.

As part of her training, the column described, the girl got in the water at Cherry Beach and swam out into the open lake, along the length of the Leslie Street Spit: a sandbank landmass that consisted, mostly, of landfill that was dumped when the city was being developed, but also of sand that was being sluiced off the Scarborough Bluffs and carried west by the water. She would hug the spit up its west side and down its east, cross the wide mouth of Ashbridges Bay and carry on eastwards, passing beaches and parks that shuddered and breathed with maples and oaks. Carolina Cho’s father, who was coaching her and always wore a red cap that was faded to pink, paddled alongside her in an aluminum canoe.