Finn’s bag is one of the last ones off the plane, sad and lonely on the carousel. She drags it through the airport, wheels locking and tangling with the revolving door, and then out onto the sidewalk into the furnace-heat of a northwestern Ontario summer. She is struck breathless. There it is, all of it: Mount McKay, the highway, the big sky, the stench of the paper mill. The men in camo jackets and the girls in pyjama pants, everyone driving trucks or Mustangs, blaring bad radio through open windows. The Native kids on their bikes, doing tricks in the parking lot, rubber skidding against pavement. The rumble of the trains scaring the deer off the tracks. The unrelenting wind blowing from the west. The constant pull of the lake to the east. The overwhelming vastness of the boreal forest, that feeling she had almost forgotten, as if you have been set down in the middle of nowhere, a floating city in an infinite wilderness. And Finn wants to cry because it’s been three years, and nothing has changed and everything has changed. It’s all still here, still the same. And even if she never left the airport parking lot, she could still tell people she experienced Thunder Bay and it would be true. It’s all right in front of her.

All except her family, of course. Who the hell knows where they are.

TWO

Exactly two hours after her mother-in-law goes over Kakabeka Falls in a barrel, Katriina Parker has a miscarriage. She would never suggest the two incidents are related, but she also doesn’t believe in coincidences. It had been an uneventful Friday morning, spent sitting at her desk updating the MLS listing for the Paulsson place and trying to figure out what she is going to make for supper that night and whether Shawn will be finished at the restaurant in time to pick Tommy up from tae kwon do or if she will have to end her open house early. And then the phone rings and Shawn is calling from the hospital and Kate is in a coma and no one can pick anyone up from anywhere. Did Kate finish mending Petey’s soccer uniform or will I have to do that too now? Katriina wonders, before realizing what a horrible thought that is. She pulls back the elastic band she wears like a bracelet, snapping it against her wrist, the sting reverberating through her body, briefly quieting her anxiety.

“I just can’t understand it,” Shawn says on the phone, his voice shaky, defeated. “Did she ever say anything to you?”