After Irene/Aileen and Shawn leave, Katriina leans against the front door, breathing in deeply. The wailing has stopped. She goes upstairs, checking all the rooms for stray raccoons, for hidden smoke alarms, but can find nothing. Nothing but a silent house, waiting to be occupied.

“Claudia?” she whispers into the silence.

She is going crazy. She must be going crazy. She reaches for her elastic, but it’s not there. She has a flash to it sitting in a pool of water on the edge of the sink at Victor Street, where she took it off to rub Polysporin on the scratches. With increasing panic, she searches the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, the floor of the closet in Claudia’s room, the junk drawer in the kitchen, anywhere there might be a stray elastic band.

In the end, all she finds is some garbage bag twist-ties and a pad of yellow Post-it notes in a kitchen drawer. She digs a pen out of her purse and writes on the top Post-it. Be a better…

But there are too many things to cover, too many aspects of her life that she has let slide. She sticks the note to the inside of the cupboard door. Then she changes her mind and crosses out the “a”: Be better. Just be better.

SEVEN

It is Saturday morning before Walter is able to head back to Thunder Bay. He tells the researchers he has a family emergency and arranges for another local guide to pick them up and take them back to Nipigon. They nod, barely looking up from their work. It doesn’t matter to them. All that matters is the research.

I was once like you, Walter thinks, watching them unload the last of the supplies from the Serafina. Needing to catalogue, report, and document everything, to find connections and understand the delicate balance between nature and man. To change the world. But he learned long ago that the more he documented, the less he understood, and the fight to change the world was actually carried out in a series of committee meetings in which people argued over the wording of how to publicly refer to the destruction of nature. Should this be an alert or a warning? How many beneficial use impairments do we need to qualify as an area of concern? How do you define the delisting criteria? If you asked Walter, all of Lake Superior should be an area of concern, but no one ever asked Walter. They just took his data and filed it away, filtered it through report after report until he gave up following the trail. Now, he sees Lake Superior as a cancer patient who has been deemed ineligible for chemo. He just wants to be with it as much as he can in the time it has left.