An excerpt from a work-in-progress tentatively titled “The opposite of drowning.” It is set in Toronto in the early 1990s where twenty-year-old Bea Porter is a lifeguard on the edge of Lake Ontario…

“Aphasia,” the bald doctor declared, piling pamphlets on Nan’s bedside table. “It’s quite common with stroke patients. It can just be a passing phase while the brain heals itself, or it can be permanent. There will almost undoubtedly be some sort of memory loss, either temporary or not, long term or short term, we’ll have to see, but the brain is an incredibly complex organ with an extraordinary capacity for healing itself.”

Mom and Dad let Nan go on and on about nothing while Bea flipped through a pamphlet. The colour was slightly off, so the illustrations of comforting families sat next to hospital beds with their shirts outlined in black, red t-shirts veering left.

The pages unfolded to walk Bea step by step through Nan’s blood-starved brain, the clot, like a knot in a long forgotten shoelace. It was the same brain diagram as in her lifeguarding manual, the big white cauliflower, the red spot on the left, the clot. The clot that ruined Nan was probably smaller than her thumbnail.

An excerpt from a work-in-progress tentatively titled “The opposite of drowning.” It is set in Toronto in the early 1990s where twenty-year-old Bea Porter is a lifeguard on the edge of Lake Ontario…

Bea slows as the road goes from paved to unpaved, the fine dust billowing out behind the car in a huge plume. This road is windy, and she slows down even over the bridge. There aren’t very many today, but at around 4 every afternoon, there were hundreds of larks on either side of the road, swooping from one side of the bridge to the other. They make their nests underneath the bridge, mud and reeds and grass stuck together so they looked like purses, and hung, somehow, from the criss-crossing steel beams. Bea could never figure out how they didn’t fall. She also never figured out why at 4 they’d start this crazy swooping flying thing – maybe that’s when the bugs were out, or maybe that’s when they all came home from wherever they had spent their day.

Last summer, there were scientists in hip waders taking pictures and taking notes. Tracking the birds’ movement, they told her when she stopped one day to ask. They were ornithologists, they studied birds, all they studied was birds. It was crazy, to think that that’s all they knew, all they did all day was birds, birds, birds. Bea didn’t know anything about birds, just that they had hollow bones. She didn’t even know how they managed to build nests that stayed together, that hung from beams like purses, with beaks and little claws, and yet there were people who knew all of that and a million more things. It made her feel like she knew nothing about anything. Because if there were people who knew birds this well, people who specialized in just this kind of lark, she didn’t even know what kind of lark this was, there were people who knew that much about mosquitoes and seaweed and rock bass, people knew things about everything, and all she knew was Airway, Breathing, Circulation. All she knew was first aid, and anyone could learn that.

Bea sits on the chair with the sun burning her kneecaps and imagines the lake frozen, or as frozen as it’d get, with huge translucent chunks and triangles breaking over themselves, long grey cracks, the water dark underneath. She wonders if the lake makes that moaning sound, the ice shifting, melting, breaking, like Lake Minnetawa, or if it’s too big. She’s pretty sure it’s too big to freeze over completely — it never gets crazy cold in Toronto, or not for long enough amounts of time.

The beach is quiet this morning, and it’s hard to keep her eyes on the water. Even with her sunglasses, the sun’s bright on the water, brighter than looking directly at the sun, she thinks and she wonders if it’s true that you could go blind if you looked directly at the sun. She’d done it, figures every kid had at some point. And there had been an eclipse when she was in high school and they had been taken out to the football field with pieces of paper with holes in them. But how did that make a difference? How did that make it okay to look at the sun. She hadn’t looked, was too scared Mrs. Sandercock was right and that she would go blind, but a bunch of the guys said they’d looked and their eyes were fine.

A woman in a red bathing suit dives off the dock, without even leaving a splash, and swims out to the rope, her strokes long and perfect. That’s how Bea hopes she looks like when she swims, except this woman is older. In her mid-40s Bea guesses. Her arms are ropey as they rise and fall out of the lake, steady and even. One-two-three-breathe, one-two-three-breathe – her rhythmic stroke gives Bea something to hold onto, and when Red Bathing Suit reaches the end of the rope, without missing a beat, she turns around and heads back.

An excerpt from a work-in-progress tentatively titled “The opposite of drowning.” It is set in Toronto in the early 1990s where twenty-year-old Bea Porter is a lifeguard on the edge of Lake Ontario…

An excerpt from a work-in-progress tentatively titled “The opposite of drowning.” It is set in Toronto in the early 1990s where twenty-year-old Bea Porter is a lifeguard on the edge of Lake Ontario…

She knows this book backwards and forwards, knows everything about it, the bent corner of the cover, Nan’s penciled-in notes on the inside back cover, next to the ruler and the line drawings on the endpapers.

Illustrations fill the middle section of the book, the pages glossy instead of matte and the drawings are exactly how she remembers — the bottoms of the drawn stems covered in dirt, little arrows pointing from the page into the cap.

The book falls open where the pages pull away from the binding, the page of waxycap illustrations. These are the Smurf mushrooms, their perky little red caps like roofs.

She loves the melodrama of mushroom names – the ones that sounded like the names of evil superheroes in medieval Europe – Jeweled Deathcap, Destroying Angel, Bleeding Fairy Helmet, Deadman’s Fingers and Poison Pie, and then the good guys – Pink Hairy Goblet, Flimsy Veil, Golden Trumpet and Weeping Widow. You could make a whole cartoon with these mushroom names. You could populate an anthology of kids’ stories.

An excerpt from a work-in-progress tentatively titled “The opposite of drowning.” It is set in Toronto in the early 1990s where twenty-year-old Bea Porter is a lifeguard on the edge of Lake Ontario…

Drowning seems inevitable, even with her lifeguarding certificate photocopied and filed in her supervisor’s Cert. binder. It’s not that she’s afraid of water. She’s not. And it’s not that she doesn’t know how to swim. She does. She’s been swimming for as long as she can remember. She’s even taught it – back crawl, breaststroke, treading water, the whole nine yards. She knows exactly how to keyhole her arm underneath the water, kicking from her hips, toes pointed out behind her. Bea knows that sidestroke and breaststroke conserve energy and she can breathe on either side when doing front crawl. She knows how to write a boating plan and all of the things you have to take with you – a bailing bucket, a throw rope, an oar, PFDs, and knows how to curl her knees into her chest in H.E.L.P. – the heat escape lessening position – a clunky acronym for the tiny ball you wrap yourself in if the boat tips and the water is cold.

She’s taught her lungs to hold air for minutes at a time, minutes that feel like hours, and has thrown flutterboards to fake-drowning victims in countless pools and lakes, lying on the edge of a dock or the gritty tiles of a pool, coaching them in, “That’s it, keep kicking, what’s your name?”

But even with the whistle around her neck, the red and white singlet over her bathing suit, LIFEGUARD spelled in all caps across her chest, it still seems impossible not to drown. She can’t imagine that something wouldn’t wrap itself around her legs, her arms, pulling her down, holding her under, water filling her lungs, her voice disappearing in bubbles that might not even make it to the surface.

And so, every time she makes it back to the beach or the rowing dock, her suit dripping and darkening the sun-bleached wood, towel wrapped first in a turban, then around her waist and tucked into itself, it’s a small victory, a miracle somehow.