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neighbourhood knew him for several years. The name spread quickly once it escaped our house and by the time he was in school, that was pretty much who he was.
    I said I didn’t want this to be a story about blame, but I can’t help it. I blame myself for that.
    He seems so feeble.
    That was all I had managed of the journal so far. Even those few words seemed too much: Nora’s thoughts on Pete’s feebleness. I couldn’t look further. Not yet, anyway. I closed the book and took it into the house.
    I didn’t know when I’d get to it again. The river seemed a better idea, with its muddy banks and water sounds.
    My house is just a block and a half from the Red River. Filthy as it is, the river has always been a comfort to me. I walk beside it, along the path in Lyndale Drive Park.
    The park didn’t used to have a name. It was just called “down by the river.” I remembered laughing with Joanne, when we were kids, because the city had decided to declare it a park. It made it too official, too public, for something that we owned.
    We had shouted to kids on the other side of the river—boys too tiny to make out. We chose to make them handsome and worldly, superior to our own boys. And I guess they did the same with us. We would make dates with them and spend hours getting ready, washing our hair and choosing what to wear, only to shout at them for an hour or so, back and forth across the sluggish brown water of the Red. It didn’t take long to lose interest. There wasn’t much satisfaction in it and we knew better than to meet them up close. I guess we understood, deep down, how great the disappointment would be.
    On windy days the water gets riled up and it’s easy to see how the force of the current could pull someone under. It happens every year. The Red River claims at least one life.
    There is a marina across the way. Sometimes in the summer there are parties on the boats and again, in the old days, my friends and I would shout across, never with much success. These were older kids, or even adults, and we weren’t of much interest to them with our questions and comments: “So, are you guys drinking beer? We have cigarettes but no beer.” Those were the types of things we said. Very sophisticated.
    The river freezes solid in winter, of course, which makes getting to the other side untroublesome, once the paths have been trampled down. It would have been simple to visit the tiny boys then, but in the winter they were never there. We tobogganed, a sport that scared me. For a while I assumed that that was how I was going to die, especially if Pete was with us, because he couldn’t see me. It would have been so easy for him to glide over me and drive a jagged piece of wood from a broken toboggan through my eye and into my brain.
    I walked back home now, breathing in the scent of the plum and the cherry and the apple blossoms. Whatever Nora’s journal had to tell me, I wanted to believe I could take it.

CHAPTER 3
    Reading Nora’s journal was hard work. I took it in small portions, usually reserving a chunk of time for it in the late afternoon. I figured that way it would be too late for Nora’s words to colour my whole day but early enough that they wouldn’t keep me from sleep. It didn’t always work.
    Thoughts was a misleading title. There were facts and events and dates and times, descriptions of the weather. Codes and secret words for Nora’s eyes alone. And thoughts, too.
    Another reason for reading it in the late afternoon was that I could accompany it with a drink: gin and tonic with a squeeze of lime.
    I didn’t always follow along chronologically. Something, maybe impatience or fear, maybe both, caused me to leap ahead, then back again, starving for pieces of my mother and then wishing I had never seen her face.
    The day after Stan dropped it off, I read this:
    July, 1937.
    Mr. Trent had his men friends over for cards tonight. Jack Logan, Herb Howland, and Darcy Root. I don’t think Darcy is a man at