“Lady Superior,” Kate called the lake, half-jokingly, in the early days of their marriage – his royal mistress, occupying his thoughts when they should have been on his family. God, he hasn’t thought about that for years, the way she would tease him about finding secret stones stashed in his pockets, the smell of lake water on his collar. She still wouldn’t go near it, the water that tried to drag her down, her nemesis, stealing everything from her in small increments – including her husband.

Her nemesis, his passion. Today, at least, he has three more hours to spend with Lady Superior as he makes his way across, back to Thunder Bay harbour and up the Kam, then back to Kate. He wonders what she would think about him coming back for her now, after all those times he didn’t. The kids never understood why he was always away from home, on the boats from April until November, then heading out to man the ice huts as soon as the ice was thick enough, trekking out across the region to set them up and maintain them for the weekend fishermen with their souped-up snow machines and their coolers of beer. But Kate knew, she always knew. What kept him out here, and what kept him away.

—

Walter and Kate remained friends through high school. He became studious and surprisingly athletic, which seemed to cancel each other out in the hierarchy of popularity, rendering him somewhere in the middle. Kate grew beautiful and rebellious, which kept her hovering around the fringes. Walter suspected that most people were a little intimidated by her. After the incident at Chippewa Park, when the pieces of the Kate he knew slowly started fitting back together like a jigsaw puzzle, there was a new edge to her, a new destructiveness that kept others at a distance.

“I know it’s crazy,” she told him one night after the two of them had snuck into the hayloft of the old Babiak cow barn to drink her father’s brandy, “but I feel like God has forgotten about me. Like I was supposed to die that day, and no one up there ever bothered to double check that I had.”

“That is crazy,” said Walter, who wasn’t even sure he believed in God. He sat down against a bale, the scratchy hay digging through the back of his shirt, and breathed in that sweet, musty smell. “Anyway, it’s not like you’re invincible.”

“I’m not?” Kate asked before taking another gulp. Then, with the bottle still in her hand, she climbed up to the loft door, precariously close to the edge. Walter’s body tensed, but he didn’t say anything. He was getting tired of always being the one to call her back.