Coming Up for Air

by Sarah Leipciger

  Lake Ontario was polluted and sometimes, when the wind was right, there was the ripe smell of sewage from the filtration plant at Ashbridges Bay, west of where Anouk now stood, on the beach. Staying with Nora for July and August. Anouk thought her mother had decided to live in this part of Toronto so that Anouk would have chosen to live here with her, but Anouk wasn’t even allowed to swim in the lake. Anouk of the water. Anouk of the river. Here, on this beach, looking out across one of the Great Lakes, which, if you didn’t know better, you’d think was the ocean; at her back was the splintery old boardwalk that ran all the way from the bay to the bluffs. In those months, the two hottest of the year, Anouk was banned from the water. Too polluted. Anouk of the gunky lungs. Anouk of the cystic fibrosis.

  * * *

  That summer, when Anouk was a few months shy of twelve, a fourteen-year-old girl named Carolina Cho was preparing to swim across the whole of Lake Ontario. The crossing was going to happen on the last weekend of August, and Anouk and her mother were following Carolina Cho’s story as it was being recounted in a weekly column of the local newspaper. The portrait of Carolina Cho that ran with the column showed her standing on Cherry Beach, which was west of where Nora lived, practically downtown, in her cap and goggles, legs spread in superhero stance with her hands on her hips.

  As part of her training, the column described, the girl got in the water at Cherry Beach and swam out into the open lake, along the length of the Leslie Street Spit: a sandbank landmass that consisted, mostly, of landfill that was dumped when the city was being developed, but also of sand that was being sluiced off the Scarborough Bluffs and carried west by the water. She would hug the spit up its west side and down its east, cross the wide mouth of Ashbridges Bay and carry on eastwards, passing beaches and parks that shuddered and breathed with maples and oaks. Carolina Cho’s father, who was coaching her and always wore a red cap that was faded to pink, paddled alongside her in an aluminum canoe.

  Anouk and Nora read that Carolina Cho swam in all kinds of weather. She swam in the dark. She swam when the waves were white-peaked, when they leapt on to shore, each wave like a hand reaching out and grabbing the shoulder of the wave in front of it. She swam in the early-morning fog when the surface of the lake was still, when there was nothing but an almost imperceptible roll and her body cut through the water like a blade through silk.

  Some days, Lake Ontario was coloured a rich, navy blue. After rain, it was the colour of stale, milky coffee. Some days, it was pond green. Once, Nora told Anouk, something went wrong at the filtration plant, and from out of Ashbridges Bay there crept a black and bubbly slick of stuff unnamed. It licked up on to the beach for a week before a good rain finally washed it away.

  Each week that summer, Anouk cut the Carolina Cho column out of the newspaper. She kept the cuttings in the drawer of her bedside table and imagined what it would be like to be friends with Carolina Cho.

  Anouk was bored. Nora was at work most days, as a receptionist in a dental office on Queen Street, a few blocks east of her apartment, and Anouk didn’t have a lot to do. After her meds and physio, she would walk to the beach and hunt for mermaid stones, pieces of glass that had been ground and smoothed over time by the movement of waves over pebbles.

  Some days she would walk to where Nora worked, and they would eat lunch together at a restaurant on Queen Street. Some days, there was just the TV. On Friday nights, they would go to a movie at The Fox, a seventy-year-old theatre where the seats (several of them broken) were soft, springy and covered in tattered red velvet, and the popcorn was cheap. After the movie, they would cross the street to the Chinese diner for grilled cheese sandwiches and fries served by waiters who were tired and uninterested and famously rude.

  ‘Isn’t this great?’ Nora asked Anouk the first time, after their plates were slammed down and half of Anouk’s fries slid across the Formica table, coming to a rest under the tableside jukebox.

  ‘It’s great,’ Anouk tried.

  * * *

  On a Wednesday in the last week of July, after Nora left for work, Anouk got on her bike and took the bike path, which ran parallel to the boardwalk, to the Olympic pool. She locked her bike and went through the turnstile to the pool building. The entranceway smelled of wet concrete, piss and chlorine. It was dark, and echoed the sounds of the pool, which was above. She bypassed the changing rooms and climbed the concrete stairs into the sunshine, where the pool deck was crowded with kids and wet towels that were plastered by sun-warmth on to the cement. She found a dry spot to lay out her towel and sat down, got a book out of her bag and pulled off her T-shirt and shorts. Stretched out her legs, wriggled her toes. A toddler leapt over her legs, spraying her with his water shake.

  The pool deck was a suntrap and the walls around it blocked any wind that was coming off the lake. She was supposed to be careful of the sun, because the antibiotics made her skin sensitive, but instead she lay right back in it, the sun’s hands all up and down her body, and she read for as long as she could stand it. When she thought she might ignite from heat, she hotfooted it to the edge of the pool.

  This wasn’t really swimming. Not really. The water boiled with too many kids. She jumped in, body pole-rigid, and was grateful for its cooling, but there was nowhere to swim to. The water was sterile, almost dry with chlorine. She dunked under, opened her eyes to the sting and pulled herself along the bottom, fingers gripping blue tiles. Legs everywhere. A foot jabbed into the small of her back. A nebula of hair drifted past her face. She got out, knowing it had been a waste of time but glad she’d at least tried, and padded wetly over to the wall that faced the lake. She was just tall enough that she could rest her arms on its top ledge and look out. The wind lifted her hair, dried the chlorinated water from her face, tightening the skin. On the horizon where lake-hazy blue met sky, a line of pale-white sails paused, like commas. Today the lake was rough and dark, and the big lofty trees in front of the beach stretched their arms and made music in the wind. A few people were there in the lake, windsurfers and bathers. But generally, other than Carolina Cho of course, people didn’t bother. Too many stories having to do with the pollution, or of weird stomach bugs and infections.

  Off to the right, the rocky, curved arm of Ashbridges Bay, where sailboats docked and sometimes the filtration plant spilled its shit. Anouk imagined the girl swimming, her red-capped father following in the canoe. She, Carolina, she could have been out there in the chop, just then. Swimming right through all of it.

  * * *

  The next day, Anouk packed a bag with a towel, water, a jam sandwich and a packet of Creon pills. On her bike again, this time she continued west along the trail past the Olympic pool, and through the park that lay to the north of the bay. Beyond this, the path moved inland and ran parallel to an expressway and a sad-looking greenbelt. She’d never ridden this far before, and when she came to a fork in the path, she took the left turn down Leslie Street, assuming this would take her to the spit.

  She was riding through an area that she would write about when she was older. This story would be part of a series about Lake Ontario, which would also include a piece about the Scarborough Bluffs, and about the Toronto Islands. And these stories would not be written in a private notebook kept in a little girl’s desk, but would be run in a national magazine.

  But here she was, now. Riding through a kind of purgatory that was once one of the biggest marshlands in eastern Canada. Mallards, mosquitoes, reeds and terrapins. Miles of flat, insect-pocked water, home to lake salmon, bass and pickerel. Pit-stop for migratory birds from all over the northern hemisphere. The city grew around it and up against it. For decades, it was used as a raw sewage dump for a pig and cattle operation, but then people started dying of cholera and so forget the egrets, forget the swans. The swamp was drained and filled.

  Now, the area was an industrial wasteland, with squat, square buildings on hard, grey earth darkened and mottled by motor oil stains. City di
rt. Shreds of plastic caught and fluttering in chain-link fences and rusty padlocks hanging from heavy, metal gates.

  Anouk rode for a long time through this and she wondered if she’d gone the wrong way. There was no respite from the sun. A drop of sweat travelled down in front of her ear and, defying gravity, settled behind the lobe.

  At last, a sign for Cherry Beach appeared, and she took the turn to the right and the landscape changed again. Trees. A lot of them. Not like the big ones close to home but a good showing of poplars and birch, alders. She passed a small marina and boat club and the cheerful clink of halyards on masts. Here, there were people with dogs and books and bicycles. The grass along the side of the bike path was long and untended, spotted with furry dandelions gone to seed and tiny white daisies. She followed the signs to Cherry Beach and when she got there, propped her bike against the trunk of a tree and stretched her legs. Longest bike ride she’d ever done. The backs of her knees were sweating and her bum hurt. As her sweat, extra salty, dried on her forehead, it left a residue on her brow. As if she’d been swimming in the ocean.

  Already in her bathing suit, she stripped off her clothes and pulled the towel out of her bag. She walked barefoot across the prickly grass, dodging acorns and goose shit, and shuffled through the sand to the edge of the lake. Today, no wind, yet still, cool relief coming off the water. Directly north of where she stood, an electricity plant. To the right, downtown, the CN Tower.

  Dead-eyed gulls swooped and landed and, habituated, ticked right up to her on red stick feet, expecting scraps. Black, skittering squirrels with scavenging paws stalked her from bench railings, and chipmunks raced fluidly up and down beachside tree trunks. Fat Canadian geese waddled in and amongst the trees, casually dropping their long, green turds in the grass. City wildlife.

  So. This was where Carolina Cho disembarked on her swims. If Anouk could, she would have stepped into the water alongside and followed her out to the open water until their strokes synchronized and their breathing did too.

  Built into the sand there was a red lifeguard stand. A raised platform just big enough for a chair and sun umbrella. No lifeguard, but a white sign screwed into the frame warning people of the high pollution levels in the water, advising potential swimmers, strongly, not to do it. In so many words. Anouk took a deep breath. Even in this humidity, her lungs felt relatively clear. She stepped into the water.

  Chill-ache up to the ankles. Up to the knees. The girl with the swampy lungs. The soles of her feet buzzed over lake stones that shifted with each step, and she dug her toes into the gaps between the stones. Bathers swim at your own risk. She dove in. The cold was a shock and when she came up, had to fight for breath. She stood again, breathed until she was calm, and dove again under this water that was unknown. She took a few strokes, feeling strong, towards the end of the spit that curled a few hundred metres away. Dove again, deeper, colder and darker, and opened her eyes. Nothing to see but a green-grey haze. The river at home tasted like grass but Lake Ontario tasted more like the meltwater that might drip from a defrosting fish. But still. This was fresh water. Open water. Why did she listen to Nora? She was grinning now, dog-paddling in circles. She somersaulted and came up giggling as her insides continued to flip. She turned back to a shore that was further away than she’d expected and then spun and duck-dived and resurfaced, and did this again and again and came up in a front crawl. The spit wasn’t so far now so she carried on towards it, keeping an eye out for sailboats that might be crossing from the marina.

  Close to the spit, the water shallowed again and then she reached the man-made bank of rubble, geometric chunks of pocked and stony concrete, rusty rebar tunnelling through some of the concrete pieces like worms through apples. She climbed the bank, grazing her elbows, her knees, and stepped up on to the spit. Flat and grassy, young trees in full, bright leaf. The grass had been left to grow wild and there was a lattice of paths running through it, and there were people here too. Dogs. Benches and garbage bins. It wasn’t like her island but still, it was a destination. She picked her way along the periphery, barefoot and agile, a skinny, sunburnt girl in a green bathing suit, and plucked a stem of tall, woody grass and chewed it. She picked a bouquet of soft-headed dandelions and sent the umbrella seeds floating with one deep puff, and her palms were left sticky with dandelion milk.

  Standing at the end of the spit, she looked west towards the CN Tower and Toronto Island but to the south, out to the left, nothing but water. Birds here, plenty. Geese and gulls and slate-grey pigeons. Sparrows and chickadees and warblers, and she thought she saw a junco, fat and dark-eyed, but couldn’t be sure.

  * * *

  Later, when Anouk got home, Nora was in the backyard, snoozing in a lawn chair with the newspaper laid across her stomach. Anouk watched her, for a moment, from the kitchen door. A pot of spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove and the whole house smelled of hot tomato and beef and garlic. Anouk went to the bathroom and peeled off her suit and emptied into the toilet the pale, pebbly sand that had collected in the gusset. She ran a hot bath and looked at herself in the mirror until it was obscured with steam. She looked through the window and could see that Nora was no longer asleep in the backyard, and then there was a soft knock on the door.

  ‘You having a bath? Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where’ve you been? Today was my early, I thought we could do something fun.’

  ‘The pool.’

  ‘Oh, again? I’m glad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Yesterday you said it was awful. I didn’t think you liked pools.’

  Anouk imagined her mother on the other side of the door, one hand flat against the wood panel. Guilt in her voice, in her face.

  ‘Was it okay? Was it fun?’

  ‘It was fine.’

  ‘Did you swim with other kids?’

  ‘Yep.’

  That evening, a movie on TV and Nora cupping Anouk’s back up and down. There was hardly any mucus and Anouk was convinced this was because of her swim in open water. Her body was happy. The heavy night air circulated freely about the house through open windows and from somewhere, the sweet smell of jasmine. Somewhere there was honeysuckle, and somewhere a lawn had been cut. They drank cola out of chilled beer mugs and shared a bowl of dill-pickle-flavoured chips.

  Halfway through the movie, thunder grumbled from far away and deeply.

  ‘Come,’ Nora said, her hand on Anouk’s knee. ‘Come on.’

  Anouk’s mother leapt from the couch, and then she was out of the front door and Anouk followed. They sat on the porch and watched the people on Queen Street pick up the pace, go for cover. That feeling of the sky about to open up and plummet, a drop in pressure, a sincerity to the quietness of the world, and the whole world waiting felt like a guitar string being wound too tightly. On the trees, the pale undersides of leaves had turned belly-up, desperate for a drink.

  ‘This is the best thing. It’s just the best,’ said Nora. This was a new Nora, happier away from the river, from Red and from her. ‘This reminds me of my mother,’ Nora said.

  ‘Rain?’

  ‘Ya. The porch, the rain. Can you smell it?’

  Anouk sniffed. Storm smell, similar to blood. Goosebumps on her arms.

  First, wind. In the movement of the trees they could see it coming up the street from the lake. The temperature dropped instantly and the khaki sky rushed with sound. A few fat drops of rain appeared on the sidewalk and on the parked cars, and then the deluge. Spray off the porch steps kissed their feet, the fronts of their legs. On the other side of Queen Street, a cat darted out from under a car and clawed manically up a tree. Lightning cracked the sky copper.

  ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Nora said, her voice barely audible over the sound of rain. ‘The air is, I don’t know, it’s . . .’

  ‘We get storms like this at home, too.’

  ‘I know. And I loved t
hem there too. It’s just different in the city. Smells different. Feels closer.’

  Anouk shrugged. ‘Can we watch the end of the movie now?’

  Later, while they slept, their garbage cans were burgled by black-masked raccoons with nimble fingers. Later still, the yowls of cat fights at dawn.

  * * *

  Cherry Beach became a daily thing. Anouk would swim out to the spit and scramble up and over its bank. One day, she thought she saw the head of a turtle, but it was a shampoo bottle. Another day, she found a dead chipmunk with its eyes pecked out and its body sunken like a squashed can. Maybe there wasn’t a lot of life under the surface of the lake, like Red said. But stuff was happening on top. Sailboats and windsurfers and motorboats. Long, cumbersome war canoes paddled by fourteen people in perfect unison, a cox yelling orders from the back. Every day, she sat on a rock at the end of the spit and scanned the water for Carolina Cho and the father in the faded cap, and she would look out at the waves, across the long, long summer where nothing much was happening.

  26

  L’Inconnue

  Paris, 1898

  Not long after Axelle left me in the doorway, perhaps two or three days, I was coming out of the apartment with a basket and shopping list, heading for the Boulevard de Sébastopol, when I came nose to nose with Nicolas. In that moment, I had been ruminating. It was only a meaningless thing: a pair of pale freckles at the base of Axelle’s right ear, one smaller than the other like the moon orbiting earth. It was these, the smallest, sweetest things, that hurt the most. And then there he was, and he had the look of someone who’d had a lot more liquor than sleep. His eyes were bloodshot and without any spark, and his lips hung dumb and wet. I carried on walking and he lurched beside me as if, in his mind, the whole world were tilted and he was walking perfectly upright. I tried not to be afraid but my toes curled, grabbing for balance. We came to the corner, busy with road traffic, and had to wait to cross.