“Well, that would be fine by me. We could go fishing on the river. We haven’t done that since you were little, and David never had any interest. Jijuktu’kwejk. That’s what the Mi’kmaq call it.”

“I know. I’d love to go fishing. I really want to come home.”

“Do you now?” Even Lucy’s tongue was stiff and she could barely quiz her daughter.

“Yeah. Get back to work on my thesis. Help out in the garden maybe. Go fishing with Dad.”

“That so? Is our job not working out up there in Churchill? Or in whatever the other name for that place is. I can’t be expected to learn a foreign language at my age.”

Silence.

Deirdre taking a breath.

“Yup. Finishing up.”

Lucy always asked the right kinds of questions, not like Declan, always encouraging Deirdre’s ridiculous choices, always wanting to hear about whatever outlandish place she was in or silly job she had taken. Lucy had to redirect her or Deirdre would just tell them whatever she wanted, always giving bits and pieces which never made sense. She’d started doing this, making up stories to frighten Lucy, when she was a child and then she kept going as a teen. It was the teen years when it all went wrong, when Lucy could make neither head nor tail of Deirdre’s stories. Lucy felt as if she were an intruder in her daughter’s life when she spun her tales.

One day Deirdre stopped volunteering anything, saying Lucy only heard what she wanted to. From that day on her convoluted stories were reduced to bullet points. Like the eyeball. Deirdre said she flew into Rankin Inlet, that little Inuit village, and had a good time and ate lots of unusual stuff. Lucy asked what she meant by “unusual stuff” and Deirdre said weird stuff out of the sea and Lucy had to say what the hell do you mean weird goddamn stuff out of the sea, can you be specific? Then, and only then, did Deirdre share the details. Eating a seal eyeball — it was a real delicacy, she told them, an honour to be given one, and a test.

“What did it taste like?” Declan had been fascinated.

“An eyeball.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Deirdre, how the hell do you know what an eyeball tastes like? Lord God Almighty. So if I pulled out my own eyeball and took a bite, it’d taste just like seal eyeball?”

Pause.

“Like fish oil.”

Declan loved that, thought it was dandy, and told everybody at the square dancing on Wednesday night how his daughter was on the Hudson Bay eating seal eyeballs that tasted just like cod liver oil. Except he kept trying to say it how they did up there in that frozen wasteland, Kangiqsualuk ilua. He was as proud as she was embarrassed. Lucy almost walked out. It was so humiliating how Declan tried repeating the word over and over as they danced on the creaking wooden floor of the community hall. He’d sounded like he was having a hemorrhagic attack. And there was Erma doing an allemande left in her extra-full crinoline, her daughter an accountant and married with two kids. Alfretta over there doing a do-si-do, with her new dye job (Harvest Wheat Blonde), her daughter a dentist and married. And there was Lucy weaving-the-ring with her grey-streaked black hair, wilted crinoline, and her daughter eating eyeballs up in the North, not even working but volunteering with a bunch of nuns and learning to speak Inuktitut. It didn’t even sound believable.