“It’s good to hear from you, Deirdre an Bhróin.” Lucy couldn’t stand it when Declan tried to say their daughter’s name as if it were Declan himself who’d just stepped off the boat, not his drunken papist grandparents. Declan insisted on naming their daughter Deirdre, not something pretty like Rose or Heather, which Lucy had preferred. He didn’t even mention until Deirdre was starting school how the name came from a morbid Irish myth: Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Lucy remembered when Deirdre had been a small child, sweet and tender, laughing when she poured out her Corn Flakes and got a bowl of mouse turds instead. She laughed about everything back then instead of screaming as she did once she turned thirteen, when it was as if puberty had disturbed some slumbering animal inside her. David was such an easy child, spending most of his childhood reading books in the tree house Declan built in the woods by the stream. But not Deirdre. She was the one hanging from the branches by her knees, chattering and howling like a monkey with her long red hair flickering like flames as she swung.

Now here Lucy was trying to have a normal phone chat with her daughter, but a normal conversation with Deirdre was always impossible because she was never doing normal things. Like when she was little, coming home from the park with some story about the boogie man in the trees who chased her, and the neurotic little girl from the Lupin Cove Road she played with back then who grew to leave her fiancé at the altar so she could go to Europe. At least Lucy hadn’t had to deal with something like that . . . yet. Lucy licked her lips and took a deep breath before she spoke.

“So how are you?”

“Oh I’m pretty good. Pretty good.”

“I see. Cold up there?”

“Well, the river just broke.”

Declan spoke. He was always asking questions about the wrong things, not making any effort to help Deirdre be normal and fit in. “When’d the Churchill River go and break?”

“The other day.”

“That so. Like yesterday?”

“Beginning of June.”

“Always break then?”

“Bit early this year.”

“What did you say the Inuit call Churchill? I was trying to remember the other day so I could tell the fellas at the Blomidon Naturalists Society. Koogie . . .”

“Kuugjuaq. Dad. Churchill’s the name the white people gave it. Hudson Bay is Kangiqsualuk ilua. The Cree there call the Churchill River Missinipi.”

“Isn’t that something? I’d love to come up and visit you in Kuug-ju-aq, Deirdre. See the Aurora Borealis. What did you say it’s called?”

“Arsaniit. Well, look, Dad, actually . . . I thought I’d come home for the summer.”

Home? Oh, God, that was it. This was why Deirdre was calling. Lucy could feel her anger wrapping around her like a shroud, suffocating her. Her chest tightened. She could hardly breathe. It was happening more and more, these surges of anger choking off her breath whenever she talked to her daughter. There was something beneath the anger, something quiet and desperate, poking at her insides. And Declan going on like he’d actually go up north to that godforsaken place. He was master of daydreams just as he was when they first met. She was a fool to think anything would ever come of those dreams. Deirdre was just like her father: a lush full of fantasies with the curse on her name.