La Grande Sauterelle was looking out the window as she sipped her chocolate; from where she sat, with pillows wedged against her back, she could get a glimpse of the lights on the bridge to the Ile d’Orléans.

Jack talked about the river a little more. Many of the memories that he shared with his brother were associated with that river. The memories had no precise age (he couldn’t recall the exact year), but they were always associated with a season, and most often it was winter. He remembered, for instance, something from very long ago: men were using a saw to cut blocks of ice out of the river, and those blocks of ice, stored under piles of sawdust, kept the food in household iceboxes cold during the summer. He also remembered that they would clear a circular skating rink on the river and that, to warm skaters and provide light for them at night, they would burn old tires in the middle of the circle. He remembered that he and his brother used to go into the forest on the other side of the river, where they would catch rabbits with brass-wire snares. He remembered . . .

The girl’s head had dropped to her shoulder, and the man saw that she had fallen asleep. He hesitated briefly, then wakened her as gently as he could, and they turned in for the night, the girl to the big bed and he to the sofa. The man had trouble getting to sleep, but it had been that way for a long time. When he woke up in midafternoon, the girl wasn’t there. Or the cat.

In the kitchen sink he found the dishes she had used for breakfast, and they were the only traces of her in the apartment; she hadn’t left a note to say where she had gone or whether she’d be back. He looked out the window to see if she was walking along Dufferin Terrace, but she wasn’t there. When he leaned out he could see the old Volks at the end of the street; perhaps the girl’s knapsack was still in the van, but he didn’t really feel like going to look. He had a shower and something to eat, then started making a list of what he’d need for the journey to St. Louis. When he ran out of things to write down he felt like going for a stroll, so he went out, leaving the door unlocked.

The sky was grey, but it wasn’t cold, and a fair number of people were walking in Old Quebec. The man crossed the park diagonally, then went along rue Haldimand and the slopes of the old city led him to the Librairie Garneau. Inside the bookstore, he studied the display of recently published novels and opened a few to read the first sentence, but nothing he read satisfied his requirements: the first sentence, he felt, should always be an invitation that no one could resist — a door opening on to a garden, the smile of a woman in a strange city. Then he went to the back of the store where the Québécois books were kept, and after checking that the clerks weren’t watching, he looked for his own books on the shelves. He had written five novels, two of which were, by and large, failures. Strangely he found only the two novels he didn’t like, and he opened one of them: the first sentence struck him as anything but an irresistible invitation. He replaced the book on its shelf and, before he left, bought the most recent road map of the United States.