Coming Up for Air Read online

  For breakfast, she fed me as much salami, eggs, smoked salmon and leverpostei as I could eat. She wanted to fatten me up before sending me home to my mother and father in Stavanger. When she could, she would come with me to the beach, but she was busy at home. There was wood to split, and there was the baking and the painting; there were vegetables to tend, chickens to feed, various dogs and a one-eyed cat.

  Most days, I came home with shells and stones, a piece of driftwood, or a sweaty clutch of the pale wildflowers that grew in the grassy dunes that backed on to the beach. Once, I returned with a washed-up glass bottle, scratched and tarnished and chipped at the mouth. I believed it must have, at one time, contained a paper scroll. A message from Denmark or England or France. I kept this collection on the windowsill in my bedroom, which had a view of the sea. It was a very small room with a very big view, in a red-roofed house of white clapboard.

  In the front room there was a basket of wood next to the stove. There was a comfortable sofa, two armchairs and a low table. If there was a windstorm, which there often was, the windows shook in their frames. On the wall hung a few paintings: a dry-docked fishing boat, a vase of daisies, the koie my grandfather built up at the lake, with its grass-covered roof and tin chimney. My grandmother painted these and I never considered whether they were good or bad.

  Also on the wall: a clock manufactured in England. An oval mirror, speckled. And a plain white plaster mask, smooth as buttermilk. So milky that I often thought about licking it. The face was a young woman’s and it was very realistic, almost alive. Her eyes were closed, with matted eyelashes, and her cheeks were high and round and youthful. She smiled, a little. She smiled a little and it was one of those smiles that could not be contained, as if she were on the cusp of telling me something.

  3

  Anouk

  Ottawa River, Canada, 2017

  It’s september, anouk’s birthday. She’s turning forty. Her mother Nora has come with her up north because it’s a big deal for Anouk, turning forty. When she was born, doctors predicted her life expectancy to be far shorter than that. They’ve come north, away from the city, because Anouk would like to see the river, the place she was born, before she’s called for surgery. She’s on the donor list for a new set of lungs.

  The conversation with the specialist at the cystic fibrosis clinic went something like this:

  ‘The indicators are telling us it’s time we think about transplant.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Your last few FEV1 readings were less than thirty per cent.’

  ‘My lungs have had it.’

  ‘How long has it been since you’ve been able to work? Have you been writing?’

  ‘I’ve been trying. It’s hard to concentrate.’

  ‘All the medication.’

  ‘Yes, ya. There’s that. It’s just. Nothing interests me.’

  ‘You’re spending more time on IVs than not.’

  ‘I haven’t got any ideas. For stories.’

  ‘Half your day is taken up with extra physiotherapy. I’m not surprised.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘If we stick to your current treatments, you haven’t got a lot of time left. Maybe a year.’

  ‘A year.’

  ‘And it’ll be a lousy year.’

  ‘You’re telling me.’

  ‘A successful transplant could give you six. It could give you more.’

  ‘Or less.’

  ‘We don’t know. But you can stop using supplemental oxygen. And you won’t be coughing. Imagine that, no coughing.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘Post-op, you’ll still be on a lot of medication, but what matters is your quality of life will be better than it is now. And right now, it’s not very good.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think we should refer you to the transplant team. Get your name on the list. But it’s up to you.’

  Up here, in the last days of September; up here, by this river banked on both sides by trees, a few houses and cottages; up here, the air is crisp and smells something like hope. Though everything is dying, death here is sweet and it smells like hope. Anouk and her mother have rented a cottage (the house just up the river from here, where Anouk was born, where her father lived until he died, now belongs to someone else) and it’s evening, and they’re sitting on the floating dock in two fan-backed, wooden chairs. They share a wool blanket, draped over their legs, and they share a cold beer, and there is the rustle of wind in the trees and the lap and suck of water against the gently rolling dock and the quiet, ubiquitous hiss of Anouk’s oxygen concentrator.

  September is an ending and a beginning, both.

  The trees are turning and the river reflects purple, yellow, orange burning. The loons haven’t yet flown south and they’re out there now, yodelling to each other.

  ‘Loons,’ says Anouk, more an exhale than a word. She leans back and sighs, content.

  ‘I always thought they sounded like a pack of crazies,’ says Nora. She squints across the mouth of the beer bottle, stares at the water. ‘Laughing at me. Loonatics.’

  Anouk has learned that, of all the doctors and specialists out there, you’ll never meet a person more blunt than the transplant surgeon. The transplant surgeon deals in risks and percentages. The transplant surgeon deals in likelihoods. Her transplant surgeon, a tall woman in her fifties with shorn hair and smart stud earrings, loves percentages. In her comfortable office with cushioned chairs, she spoke about the percentage of patients who never make it out of the hospital. She spoke about the percentages of patients who make it through the first year, the second, the third. Not an especially high number. She listed, with one neat and tidy finger dabbing the palm of her opposite hand, the risks of post-operative infection, acute rejection, chronic rejection. Anouk’s new lungs, she explained, won’t be diseased like her old ones, but her immune system will slowly attack and injure them, and within a few years they too will become scarred and ineffectual.

  ‘Lungs,’ said the surgeon, ‘are a difficult organ to transplant.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The tissue is extremely fragile. The alveoli, they’re minuscule and easily damaged. The cells are metabolically very active so we have only a little time between harvest and transplant. A few hours. You’ll be on call. It will be your responsibility to get to the hospital on time.’

  There was talk of what recovery would be like, swapping the old cystic fibrosis daily treatments, which Anouk has lived with all her life, for a new regime, new medications to deal with the complexities of rejection. ‘This probably isn’t what you wanted to hear,’ the surgeon said.

  These words, more than any of the others, made Anouk angry. As if she had been deluded all along and now here she was, hearing the truth for the first time.

  Nora puts her hand on Anouk’s knee. ‘Are you tired?’ she says. ‘Long drive today.’

  ‘I think I’ll stay out a bit longer.’

  ‘Then I’m going in for another beer,’ says Nora, hoisting herself out of the chair.

  Cold air on Anouk’s legs from where Nora has lifted the blanket. ‘Get me one too.’

  Nora stops, looks at her. Considers.

  ‘It’s my birthday.’

  They smile at each other, two smiles weighted and complicit. They were never sure until now they’d make it this far.

  Before the transplant team would agree to put Anouk’s name on the donor list, she and her mother were subjected to what felt like a trial. There were meetings with her surgeon and other surgeons, a nutritionist, a psychologist and a physiotherapist. Also, a doctor of bones. A doctor of kidneys. Nearly every body part represented. The team had to agree that Anouk and Nora would behave, could handle the pressures both pre- and post-op, would do what they were told. They had to determine whether she would put forth her best effort to survive. What
she was going to be given was precious.

  The dock pitches slightly with Nora’s retreat and Anouk looks out across the water. About an hour ago she thought she saw a golden eagle. Nora thought it was a hawk but Anouk is pretty sure it’s an eagle. And she knows of an island, out of the many islands in this river, she knows there’s one close where eagles often nest. She used to see them when she was small, riding in the aluminum outboard with her dad, Red. They’re rare, but they’re here.

  Someone is out there in the world breathing through a pair of healthy, pink lungs that are going to end up in Anouk’s body. She inhales deeply, or tries to. Her lungs snag against their cavity walls like sandpaper. Healthy lungs, the CF specialist explained, are springy and spongy. If poked, they would give way and pop back like pillows. They have sharp-edged fissures that fill efficiently with air. Anouk’s lungs have hardened. They’re gnarled. Riddled with cysts and pockets of pus. They’re the colour of dung. The description makes her think of a piece of gristle, or a wad of gum drying on the edge of a dinner plate.

  Anouk eases herself out of her chair and spreads the blanket on the dock. She has to manoeuvre around the delicate tubing that runs from the oxygen canister to the cannula in her nose, and lies down on the blanket and presses her cheek into the cedar. The cedar, still warm from the day’s sun, the smell of it, fills her. It topples her. It’s in her blood, this smell, this river. She reaches over the edge of the dock and dips her fingers, caresses the cold water. She wants to swim but can’t. She wants to immerse herself. Maybe she could just float, holding on to the edge of the dock, but she can’t risk getting sick. The dock moves again and here is Nora, poking Anouk’s bum with the tip of her sneaker.

  ‘Skinny ass,’ Nora says. ‘Skinny, skinny ass.’

  The echo of the loon is like air in her wasted lungs.

  4

  Anouk

  Ottawa River, 1987

  That sky of Anouk’s youth, that sky over the Ottawa River Valley, over the river, over fields of corn and sunflowers, flax and blueberry – that sky stretched on for ever. Her house was on the river and the closest town was called Pembroke, where she went to school and where, deeply gouged into the weed-cracked sidewalk in front of the school, were the words: Mr Morton is a azz-licker. There was an IGA grocery store, a Canadian Tire, a movie theatre. In the summer, the roads were jammed with people from southern Ontario with canoes and kayaks strapped to the tops of their cars, bikes on racks with wheels spinning in the air. In the early months of winter, the snow banks that lined the streets, snow thrown up by 4 a.m. ploughing, were white and loafy; by February they were dark grey and ice-shiny. In the gas station you could buy fishing worms and leeches in neat, Styrofoam boxes, and next to the gas station there was a boutique that sold prettily painted mailboxes and scented candles and beaded wind chimes.

  The Ottawa River was wide open for long stretches, then channelled and split by islands and arms of land that connected together to make a warren of small ponds and passages. Where the water ran wide, the current was slow. Early in the morning, the river, in some parts, was so calm and covered in mist that it disappeared. If it weren’t for the striders skating to and fro, their fine legs bending the surface tension of the water, you’d scarcely know the river was there.

  A few kilometres upriver from where its course squeezed and buckled over boulders and falls, where the water rushed white and frothy and deadly, there was a quiet pocket in the southern bank. A horseshoe bend in the land, a tiny bay. Not even a bay; a dimple. In the middle of this pocket there was a small island that, if viewed from the bank, looked like a tall ship. One lofty, spindled pine at the bow. At the other end of the island, the stern, a tapered deck of Canadian Shield igneous rock.

  Anouk lived with her mother and father, Nora and Red, on the riverbank adjacent to the tall-ship island. The house, built of weather-darkened clapboard, sat on top of a gentle, grassy slope that rose from the bank. It was a split-level house, with a large ground floor where the kitchen and dining room opened to the living room, which was walled on its river-facing side by a vast window. So. You could see the river from almost anywhere in the house.

  Nora came from Toronto and Red was from Pembroke. They met in 1971, in a three-storey brick house just off Spadina Avenue in Toronto, working with a charity that helped newly arrived American draft dodgers find jobs and places to live. Red was in teachers’ college at the University of Toronto and Nora wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. They fell in love surrounded by guys whom they considered heroes, who rode bikes or hid in the trunks of cars to cross the border into Canada so they wouldn’t have to shoot people in a country about which they knew nothing. Nora and Red fell in love listening to Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Eagles. It was romantic. When Red’s mother died in 1975, he inherited her house in Pembroke, sold it, and convinced Nora that they should buy the place on the river. At the time, she was taking a course to be a counsellor. It was her work with the draft dodgers that made her want to do this. She didn’t really want to move to the river, but she was in love.

  * * *

  For the first week of August, the month before Anouk’s tenth birthday, Nora’s sister Mel came up from Toronto for a visit. The two sisters spent a lot of time by the river, lounging in deck chairs on their crescent of sand (too small really to be called a beach) with their legs stretched out and their feet in the water. They drank bottles of beer, which Anouk fetched for them from the kitchen. Anouk liked her aunt. Mel was a little bit bad. She smoked Rothmans Specials and swore and told dirty jokes, and she made Nora laugh. Anouk liked how her mom and her aunt looked like two different versions of the same thing. They both had long, slender legs and knobbly knees. Bodies wide at the hips, square torsos and flat chests. Both with broad shoulders and long necks. But Nora’s hair was red-blonde, like Anouk’s, and Mel’s was dark brown. Nora’s shoulders were covered in orange freckles in the summer. Mel’s were smooth and tanned. Anouk had the same flamingo-like physique as her mother and aunt, but she would never be tall, and her shoulders and back were slightly hunched because of her cough, which she lived with every day. To hunch the shoulders, to roll the back, was to open the chest cavity, to ease the passage of air into the lungs. This was what her body did.

  A few days into Mel’s visit, Anouk sat in the sand near her mother and her aunt, ploughing a trough with her heels. She didn’t sit too close to Nora because if she did, Nora would start pleating her hair, looking for louse eggs. Anouk had made the mistake of scratching behind her ears at breakfast the day before, and now Nora was obsessed. Anouk’s scalp was indeed crawling with lice, and Anouk knew it. She wanted to scratch the shit out of it but didn’t want to give Nora the satisfaction, so instead, she got up from the sand and walked into the river. For Anouk, in the summer, the river was the land was the river was everything. She moved effortlessly between the two, picking up her damp bathing suit first thing in the morning, picking it up from the floor next to her bed and uncoiling it from the pretzel shape it took on when she’d rolled it off her body before going to sleep. She waded into the water now until it was up to her scabby, mosquito-bitten knees and dunked herself, eyes open to the sting of freshwater the colour of tea. She exhaled all the air out of her lungs so she could sit on the silty bottom. Underwater, her skin looked melted-butter yellow, dotted with black particles of river matter. When she needed to breathe she resurfaced, turned to see if Nora was watching her.

  Nora, speaking to Mel, held her hand above her head, as if shielding her eyes from the sun. She was doing this to keep the river midges away from her face; they were attracted to the highest point, like lightning. Mel had a T-shirt wrapped around her head against the bugs. She slapped her upper arm and plucked something dead from her skin, said to Nora, ‘I don’t know how the fuck you can stand living here.’

  To which Nora replied, ‘Who says I can stand it?’

  Anouk dove under again, avoided a stand of water lil
ies with a few strong frog kicks, then resurfaced and flipped over to float on her back. Pedalling her feet lazily, sculling her hands, she peered up at the sky, so empty that it looked like there were swirling bubbles up there, like water in a pot the instant before boiling. She swam to the ledge of rock at the stern end of the island and pulled herself up, careful not to scrape her shins. The bald rock was sun-warm, and through the arches of her feet, she could feel her island buzz. She stood for a minute, catching her breath, then clambered up the rock, toeing the solid folds between the slabs, to where the island was a soft carpet of copper-coloured pine needles and moss and old leaves like brown paper. The frogs had been prolific this past spring and there was the rock pool in the middle of the island to be visited, amphibians to be counted. She picked two buttercups and a couple of delicate bluebells from the thin island soil, twisted their stems together and tucked the arrangement behind her ear. It was hot. Sweat pricked her itchy scalp. A yellow cricket javelined past her knee and was gone. She practised the fox-walk. Bare heel on the ground first, feeling for sticks or rocks. Roll the outside of the foot into the step and land gently on the ball of the foot. Repeat. Slow and methodical. If she were in a group, each person would step into the others’ footprints, like voices overlapping in song. This was the way the first people did it, how they moved undetected through the bush.

  In the swampy dip at the centre of the island she parted the cigar-headed bulrushes and squatted by the water, thick with globular algae. Lacy milkweed tickled her thighs; something else pricked underfoot. She became still. At first, nothing. Then she saw them. Seven frogs, no, eight. Silent and cool as marble, heads just visible poking out of puckered water. One, its skin dry and grey, perched regally on a stick. She had named the frogs earlier in the summer, made up stories about them. Wrote these stories down in a little book. The one on the stick, that was Redmond, named after her dad.