Page 14 of Lost With My Enemy

"This is in the itinerary now," she says, wringing out the hem of her sweatshirt. "Day five. Canoe incident. Duration: forty-seven minutes. Outcome: total submersion. Notes: never again."

My laugh comes out before I can stop it, wet and genuine. She glares at me, but the corner of her mouth twitches. A millimetre. Maybe two.

"You're laughing."

"You're funny."

"I'm soaking wet and furious."

"Those things aren't mutually exclusive."

The twitch becomes a tremor. She presses her lips together hard, fighting it with visible effort, and then a sound escapes. Small, involuntary, reluctant. A laugh that surprises her as much as it surprises me.

"I hate this trip," she says, still half-laughing.

"No you don't."

She wrings her sweatshirt again, harder than necessary. "No. I don't."

* * *

We change at the rental, which is a converted garage apartment behind someone's house in Sault Ste. Marie. One bedroom, pull-out couch, a shower with unpredictable water pressure. Elise takes the first shower because she claims hypothermia rights, and by the time she emerges in dry clothes with her hair towel-dried and unstyled, I've laid our wet things over every available chair.

Without the sleek bob, her hair has a slight wave to it. Looser. Less controlled. She catches me noticing and tucks it behind her ear with a sharpness that suggests the wave is not intentional and not welcome.

"There's a Timmies on the main road," she says, consulting her phone. "I need food and Wi-Fi."

"Tim Hortons it is."

The Tim Hortons in Sault Ste. Marie looks like every other Tim Hortons in Canada, which is both comforting and slightly depressing. We order at the counter. She gets a black coffee and a turkey club. I get a double-double and a box of ten Timbits, and she watches me eat four in the time it takes her to unwrap her sandwich.

"Do you always eat like you're being timed?"

"Do you always unwrap sandwiches like you're performing surgery?"

She peels back the wax paper with deliberate precision, inspects the contents, removes one tomato slice, places it on a napkin, and takes a measured bite.

"The tomato was soggy."

"The tomato was a tomato."

"A soggy tomato compromises the structural integrity of the bread."

"You know that sentence is insane, right?"

"I know that sentence is correct."

The Tim Hortons is half-full. An older woman behind the counter is chatting with a truck driver at the register, and fragments of conversation drift over while we eat. My brain is half-listening, half-occupied with the way Elise holds her coffee cup with both hands, fingers laced around it.

"... I'm telling you," the woman behind the counter is saying, leaning forward with the energy of someone who's been waiting to tell this story all day. "March, right? Middle of that blizzard that shut down the 17 for two days. This couple pulls up in a little sedan. Kid's got no coat. Just a hoodie and joggers. Driving on a spare tire through a whiteout. And there's a girl in the passenger seat and a little dog in her lap, and the dog's name is Potato."

The truck driver snorts into his coffee. "Potato?"

"Potato. Named after a vegetable. A dog. They drove from Saskatoon. On a donut tire. In a blizzard."

"That's either the stupidest or most romantic thing I've ever heard."

"Both, honey. It's always both."