The Cure for Drowning

Set in rural southern Ontario and spanning from 1931 to 1953, the novel opens with ten-year-old Kathleen McNair falling through the ice of a frozen river while walking home with her older brother Landon and younger brother Jep. Drawn toward open water by a mysterious blue-green light and voices only she can hear, Kathleen plunges into the freezing current. Landon carries her seemingly dead body two miles home. Their mother, Caroline, refuses to accept the death and stays up all night performing Celtic prayers and rituals, eventually sacrificing a newborn lamb and feeding the child broth from its blood. By morning, Kathleen opens her eyes, profoundly changed: She must relearn basic skills, her personality becomes secretive and intense, and she begins wearing boys' clothing. Jep starts calling her Kit.

By 1939, Kit is nineteen and restless on the family's sheep farm. Dr. Heinrich Kromer, a German-born physician driven from Montreal by anti-German prejudice, moves to Harrichford with his French-Canadian wife Régine and their seventeen-year-old daughter Rebekah. Rebekah first glimpses Kit racing the train on horseback and mistakes Kit for a boy. As the families grow entangled, Landon begins courting Rebekah openly, while Kit and Rebekah form an intense private bond. Jep tells Rebekah about Kit's drowning and revival, calling Kit a changeling, someone taken by the fair folk and replaced.

A love triangle develops over the summer. Landon drives Rebekah home from dinner and steals a kiss. Kit and Rebekah grow closer through private outings: hiking, reading poetry, sharing quiet intimacies. Régine pressures Rebekah to accept Landon, revealing she once had an intense friendship with a woman and understands Rebekah's desires, framing the move from Montreal partly as a way to separate Rebekah from similar attachments.

That August, Kit and Rebekah share their first kiss by the river. After Kit's horse dies, Kit and Rebekah shelter from a thunderstorm in a cottage in the pine forest and make love. Kit begs Rebekah to run away together. Landon, meanwhile, receives Dr. Kromer's permission to court Rebekah. At the Labour Day dance, drunken townsmen vandalize the Kromer car with anti-German slurs and threaten violence. The incident convinces Rebekah her family is in danger. She writes Landon a farewell letter but cannot bring herself to write one for Kit. Before dawn, she and Régine board a train to Montreal.

Kit arrives at the Kromer house and overhears Dr. Kromer telling Landon that Rebekah has left. Believing Rebekah chose Landon, Kit fights Landon in the yard. Their father, Dermot, separates them. That night, Kit crops their hair and hops a westbound freight train. Two years later, Kit encounters a frightened underage recruit named Christopher McNeil, convinces the boy to go home, and takes his air force enlistment papers and uniform. Kit boards the train for basic training as Christopher McNair.

By December 1942, Kit is a flying officer and navigator aboard a Lancaster bomber called Friday's Girl, stationed in Lincolnshire, England. Kit's uncanny navigational intuition earns them the nickname "Lucky McNair." During a night raid over the Ruhr Valley, Kit senses the pathfinder flares are a decoy and redirects the crew using the stars. After a Christmas Eve party, Kit and bomb aimer Laurie Hartwick end up alone in the barracks, where competitive banter escalates into a sexual encounter.

In a parallel storyline, Rebekah serves in naval intelligence at Devil's Battery in Halifax, intercepting German U-boat transmissions. On Christmas Eve, she encounters Landon at a nightclub. They sleep together, and Landon proposes before shipping out. Weeks later, Rebekah discovers she is pregnant. Her letters to Landon go unanswered. Her mother sends money with instructions to handle the situation alone. When Rebekah's commanding officer discovers her false enlistment name and her pregnancy, she is discharged. Rebekah finds refuge with Hatti Dano, a nightclub singer whose dress she once mended.

Kit befriends Isaak Keyserling, a Czech navigator Kit initially suspects of espionage. Confronted at gunpoint, Isaak reveals that his secret meetings are with his lover, Matthew. Kit keeps the secret. Isaak confides that he can no longer bear bombing missions, knowing civilians and prisoners like himself are among the targets. Kit helps Isaak plan a desertion, but Isaak is reassigned to a doomed bomber and killed.

In a structurally intercut sequence, Rebekah's dangerous labor and Kit's final catastrophic mission are narrated in alternating passages. Kit is wounded by shrapnel, and the aircraft breaks apart over the English Channel. Kit pulls the injured Laurie from the burning plane and bails out into the water. Simultaneously, Rebekah delivers Adelaide with emergency help from Hatti and their neighbor Mrs. Tsu. Both Kit and the baby survive. Kit later describes being rescued from the Channel by selkies, the seal spirits of the family's Celtic folklore.

Rebekah's mother makes clear she is not welcome home. Rebekah writes to Caroline McNair and receives a terse invitation, arriving at the farm with infant Adelaide. Caroline constructs a cover story: Rebekah married Jep before he shipped out, and Adelaide is his posthumous child. This fiction secures Rebekah a war pension and social respectability.

Over the next three years, Rebekah becomes essential to the farm. Dermot falls gravely ill, and Caroline sells the sheep and most of the land. Adelaide grows into a lively bilingual child who, like Kit, hears mysterious voices in the river. Kit's wartime story concludes with reassignment to a Pathfinder squadron, a bomber unit that marks targets with flares for following aircraft. After the war ends, Kit lives anonymously in Toronto until a dream of Jep sends Kit home in 1947. Kit arrives on foot, meets Adelaide, and discovers Jep's death from the telegram on the mantelpiece.

Kit throws themselves into repairing the neglected farm. Rebekah is distant at first, afraid Kit's return threatens her place, but they reconnect through shared work and confessions about the war. When Dermot collapses and dies, the shared grief draws them together, and they resume their romantic relationship.

The fragile peace shatters when Landon arrives with his English wife Sophie. Because Dermot died without a will, Landon inherits the farm as eldest son. Caroline supports the decision, telling Kit she cannot be trusted not to run away again. Rebekah confronts Landon about his silence during her pregnancy. He admits he received only one of her letters, months late, and that he married Sophie in the interim. Kit and Landon fight again.

A violent tornado strikes. Adelaide wanders to the river and is pulled underwater by the same supernatural creatures that nearly drowned Kit as a child. Kit dives in, wrestles the child free, and carries her to safety. The storm destroys much of the farmhouse. Landon and Sophie sell the property and move to Orangeville with Caroline.

Free to choose their own future, Kit, Rebekah, and Adelaide decide to head west after Adelaide announces she wants to see the ocean. An epilogue set in 1953 finds the family near Victoria, British Columbia. Nine-year-old Adelaide narrates a camping trip aboard their sailboat, named Siobhan after the selkie ancestor. By the campfire, Adelaide retells the family legend with a new ending: In the original tale, Siobhan was trapped on land after her sealskin was burned, but in Adelaide's version, Siobhan dives into the sea and transforms without needing the lost skin, because she always knew who she was. A seal barks in the distance.