“If that were true, you wouldn’t have them,” Hanna says, nodding to the frosted glass balcony doors, through which they can see the wavy outline of Tommy and Petey. The boys love going to Hanna’s place. They love her hardwood floors, the balcony overlooking the harbour, the nine hundred channels on her high-def TV. It’s strange, seeing her outdoor-loving boys – who will no doubt grow up as northern as they come, as northern as their dad and their granddad, who will fish and hunt and drink beer, who will drive quad runners in the summer and snow machines in the winter and trucks year-round – sitting on rattan deck chairs, sipping some kind of artisan root beer, and taking pictures of the Sleeping Giant with their iPhones. They turn into different creatures here, city boys, and sometimes Katriina can see little glimpses into alternate futures for them. It never lasts, though – five minutes at home and they will be devising new ways to maim each other with household objects, new things to drive their BMX bikes over.

It’s not that she doesn’t love Tommy and Petey. She does. It’s just that everything with them is so physical, so immediate, so loud. So Shawn. Part of the reason she agreed to try again was to give her own genetic material one more chance to fight its way to the top, to see if she could produce a child who people might recognize as her own.

“Maybe they broke me,” Katriina says.

Hanna lowers her coffee mug. “It seems to me that you’re more worried about your body not performing the way you think it should than you are about having or not having another baby.”

“Maybe,” says Katriina. The whirlpool in her coffee is still spinning, and she has a strange, irrational urge to be inside it, to surrender herself to the void. Maybe she is beginning to understand what drew her mother-in-law to that waterfall.

—

Later that afternoon, Katriina is showing a young couple from Winnipeg around the Paulsson house when she hears a sudden, sharp wail coming from above them, a keen so profound that she has to stop and hold on to the doorframe as she is discussing the possibility of fitting an eight-person table plus a buffet in the dining room.

“I’m so sorry,” she says to the couple. “I can’t even explain that.”

“You’re explaining it fine, I just don’t see it,” says the woman, who is called Irene or Aileen, Katriina isn’t sure.

“Excuse me?” says Katriina, holding a hand over her right ear to try to block out the noise. She hasn’t even said anything yet about how the sound might be from a passing train, or a neighbour’s cat that has been trapped in the rafters.