Here is a time-lapsed chronology, a little row of consequence, of fallen dominoes:

Kay Clancy, an aspiring teenaged gymnast of uncommon talent, was being coached by a near-Olympian when she met Joséph Patrice Emmanuel François Gabriel LeBlanc, or Joe, in 1960. Both came from families that had dwelled in Valley towns for generations. Joe, of White Pine, Ontario, was descended from a long line of rivermen who sent logs down the Ottawa. His father, Jacques, died doing just that, and Joe grew up without him, under the somewhat shoddy care of his mother, Delphine, which his two great-uncles said was a great tragedy. When the town of White Pine was flooded to make room for a dam, Delphine went south, and Joe, almost but not quite a man, stayed behind. White Pine filled up with water, and the streets Joe had known as a child were washed from the face of the earth, but Kay later said it was a lucky thing, because otherwise he might not have found her when he walked the nine miles to Deep River to live with his uncles, Alphonse and Toussaint.

In Kay’s account of the fall and subsequent capture, she claimed, “I don’t know myself how it happened. All I can tell you is, one minute I was in a back flip, spinning through the air, and the next, I was in his arms. I don’t know where he came from — well, I do. I mean, he came from White Pine, you know that.” Here she always laughed, amused with herself, and then became serious. “I mean, I don’t know how he came to be in the gym, happening by, right at the moment my spin went wrong. He always said he was just out walking, that he liked walking. He was always out walking, so that’s true, I suppose. But I have to tell you” — and her eyes would lift and focus on some distant image — “I think it was more than that. I think he was sent to me.”

There were two points in Kay’s story at which Margar longed to interrupt. When Kay said, “I don’t know where he came from,” Margar wanted to ask, “But do you know where he went?” And when Kay said, “I think he was sent to me,” Margar wanted to ask, “And away? Do you think he was sent away from you too?” But she said nothing, and continued to pretend that she was just fine without him, for as she’d heard her mother say, how could a child miss what she had never known? But she did miss him. And she looked for him everywhere.

After Joe disappeared for the second time, the myth that surrounded him remained open-ended. He may have tipped his canoe and drowned. What, then, of his body? Even the legendary painter Tom Thomson eventually resurfaced. Eight days after he vanished in this same neck of the woods, he floated up in the placid waters of Canoe Lake, a purple wound at his temple. Which meant the unknown handyman Joe LeBlanc was a man of greater mystery, for he was never seen again. What happened to him was a question around which lives would be sculpted. The possibilities were many, and made the probability misty and easy to ignore. He had been spotted portaging to the river, as usual, but one theory suggested the man with the canoe might not even have been Joe LeBlanc. Admittedly his face was never seen, only his loping, river-bound body, distinct but not singular, making room for the idea that Joe had not run off at all, had perhaps been kidnapped, tied up in the canoe, and carried away by a look-alike stranger.

Margar arose fatherless in the age of the yellow happy face. The flat circle head and eyes, the black half-circle grin, alarmed her brother Louis, but Margar was without fear from her very first moments. Set apart as she was (the last one, and possibly unwanted), she pushed her differences to the extreme, so that before she had all her baby teeth she was a rascal, a mischievous sleepwalker, a pick­pocketing imp who needed no one to get by. While Louis quaked in his tiny body, hungry Margar reached out for everything and more. As with a puppy, her big baby feet and hands predicted her stature. By the time she was three, she was as big as six-year-old Louis, who had been a huge toddler but had stopped growing. By the time she was ten, she had surpassed both the teenaged Estelle and their mother Kay. It was obvious she more than resembled her father, but it was rarely mentioned. Without him, Margar was a tall anomaly, a giant in a family of dolls. But she was cunning — no one ever knew she minded.

Nor would they know, years later, how she wept at the death of Pierre Trudeau. It was in September of the year 2000, during the Sydney Olympic Games, that the charismatic former prime minister got old and died. The whole country mourned for both the man and the era in which they had come to know him, but Margar took to her bed, weeping like a schoolgirl who was thirty-five years old. People lined up on Parliament Hill to touch his flag-draped coffin; they lined up again in the tiny towns throughout Ontario and Quebec to watch his funeral train roll by, but Margar, bedridden, was paralyzed with sadness. Trans­fixed by the images on television, she decided the procession was of a time more romantic than now, and was therefore one that suited him. Two of Trudeau’s beautiful sons stood at the window and offered their grief-laden smiles, and when she looked at them, she thought not only of Pierre but of the third son, Micha, who had been swept away in an avalanche just two years before — the little baby she had seen in the stroller long ago. And though Pierre had courted so many women before and since his wife, she thought of Margaret, too, there being something everlasting even about families that don’t last.

From the Hardcover edition.