Back Roads

by Andrée A. Michaud

  * * *

  I interrupt my work for a few moments and go to the patio doors that look onto the backyard, go back to my desk, back to the door, and then take a jar of pistachios out of the pantry and snack on them frantically, licking the salt off my fingers as I go and watching the starlings search for insects in the shorn grass. I haven’t written for two or three weeks, it feels like five, and the reality of this is causing me anguish. I need to move, to ease the tension, eat, chase away the flies bothering me, the prickling in my legs, before I am able to return to that river, that sea, the couples walking in the dark.

  * * *

  On the shingle beach, I couldn’t take my eyes off the white splash of a bird that stood out against the black sand. Everything pointed toward the bird’s dying — its isolation, its immobility, its diminishing whiteness — and I tried, while not taking my eyes off it, to make it understand that it wasn’t alone, that when the sea washed over it there’d be a witness to its last flight, and then a couple walked by, hands intertwined, and I abandoned the bird, which was perhaps just one of those free spirits defying the laws of its species and therefore destined to solitude. I gave it one last look and headed toward the far end of the quay.

  I’d been in the seaside village because, the following day, I was due to give a reading from my latest novel, but the power of the river had taken me away from Boundary just as it took me away from Heather, Vince, and Howard W. Thorne. The only character the sea didn’t submerge was P., whom I would tell about the bird as he described, in turn, the network of rivers that waters our countryside; whom I would tell about the smell of iodine, and the feeling of well-being, of the isolation that the increasingly deserted quay inspired in me — just me at one end, a shadow that, had you not read such peace in her posture, you might have believed was about to wade into the foam.

  Leaning on the piled-up stones protecting the quay from the sea’s repeated assaults, I watched the waves cresting, white in the immense darkness, telling myself that their parallel lines were perhaps only the result of our capacity and desire to make order of chaos.

  Strangely, I felt at home, in my element, perhaps because of the waves’ regularity, which apparently echoes the rhythm of our breathing. I filled my lungs with salty air, endeavouring to conform to the cadence of the sea, the roaring of which seemed to emanate from further away than the waves — as if they’d actually broken before hitting the rocks and the blast preceded the collision that would ultimately split and disperse a force that only had cohesion in its plurality.

  Fascinated by the roaring, the sounds of wet shells, and the rumbles of thunder ripping through the darkness, I closed my eyes and understood that I was hearing the echo of a primordial breaching.

  The next day, in an enormous garden, I shouted, “Who’s there? Who’s fucking there?” channelling Zaza Mulligan, the first girl to die in Boundary. Afterward, I hit the road again under another baking sun. Hundreds of kilometres from the sea, Heather was waiting for me with her head on Vince’s shoulder at the intersection of the 1st Line and La Languette, in front of a wayside cross reminding us that others had believed in resurrection before us.

  Once I was back in the village I found Vince, who’d not moved since I left and was gazing sadly at the photo propped up in front of him. It hardly needed a genius to work out that Vince, despite being a few years older than Heather, was madly in love with her, and that she felt the same way about him.

  I understood now why Vince preferred not to rehash the circumstances of Heather’s death. The pain was still there, and it would never go away, because the story of Vince and Heather was one of those unfinished ones that you never stop wondering about, wondering what might have happened had the other person survived, had the story continued, had there been children in the story, two or three little blond or brown heads that could have given it a different meaning. And I understood why Vince never told Howard Thorne about the relationship he had with his daughter. He was afraid of stoking Thorne’s anger, of being cursed as a fucking bastard and an abuser of young girls before having his jaw broken and being thrown out of the house like so much trash. Their friendship had been born of a drama and a lie that forbade Vince from sharing in Thorne’s grief and joining his anger to Thorne’s.

  “I would never have hurt her,” Vince muttered, and then, once again, he referred to the moment when, on December 7, 1980, Thorne knocked at his door and the two of them set off to search for Heather, Vince as worried as Thorne was, but forced to hide it and pretend Heather was no more than Thorne’s daughter to him, and that he was accompanying him to stop the man from going crazy.

  “I nearly went crazy myself,” said Vince, and then he stared at the photo again, in which none of the imminent drama was prefigured, just like all those pictures of smiling people with no idea that, the very next day, they’ll die in a car accident or from a heart attack. Like in that picture of my father looking so content in the moment before he died — a photo that doesn’t exist, that nobody ever took, but which is nevertheless one of the most vivid in the album I’ve accumulated over the years: Dad, fifty years old, leaping up from the postage-stamp-sized lawn in front of our house onto the porch whose cement has only just dried, laughing in the unrestrained way of men who have their whole future in front of them.

  I stretched out my hand to pick up the photo of Heather, Vince, and Jackson, suddenly wondering who’d taken the snap. I asked Vince, who said it was his brother, R., who’d sought to immortalize the moment. I held back the swear word rising to my lips and examined the luminosity of the photo, gauged the angle from which it had been taken, the distance between photographer and subject, and then let it fly: “Calvaire!”

  There was no doubt in my mind: the photo was the work of a young man in love, of a teenager secretly lusting after his brother’s girlfriend.

  * * *

  The following day was very strange. From the minute I woke up, I had the curious sensation that my vision was warping textures, corners, and colours, that I could see the people around me with X-ray vision and anticipate their movements. I was watching the cat and realized I could make out the skeleton beneath its fur. I intuited the shadow stretching out across the kitchen floor before P. traversed the ray of sun beaming in through the patio doors; I could see the object hiding on the wooden table: a bowl, maybe a mask or a boomerang, ready to strike me in the face when I was least expecting it — this being the purpose for which the wood was destined.

  I knew all this was an illusion, the result of my own hypersensitivity, but still I was unable to focus on my work or even to hold my pen, which was bending under the pressure of my fingers as if the material wanted to revert to its original form. So I decided to leave my desk and go weed the garden where, I hoped, I’d be able to wrestle with the questions vexing me since the previous day — with the possible implication of R. in Heather’s disappearance, with R.’s curious attentiveness to Vince ever since Heather’s shadow had reappeared in my wake, with the almost visceral hatred R. had evinced toward me after I’d interrupted his brother’s otherwise placid existence.

  I raked over the thousand and one questions on my mind until the mist turned to rain. Then I went back to my desk, cursing the day I’d let R., someone I barely knew, into Vince’s house.

  On my desk, the lamp had turned into a steel bird.

  * * *

  On this Sunday in late August, La Languette was deserted. No trucks, no cars, no ATVs. I parked, as I usually did, set back at a distance from the wayside cross — if I’m still able to say “as usual,” because I’d not been back to La Languette since I’d met Heather. I should have returned as soon as the first scenes of the novel I’d outlined by the river came back to me, but I’d preferred to focus on Howard W. Thorne and on Vince, indirect witnesses to the drama, instead of going into the field and examining the ground for clues, proof, or other traces of the drama in question.

  I realized how a
bsurd all this was when I woke up that day and saw a hare scampering into the morning haze behind the house, the small animal’s flight making me think of the dozens of hares we used to see leaping and bounding through La Languette when I was a girl and we’d go out in the mist to watch the animals leaving the woods. Taking the scurrying hare as a sign, I fed the cats, made myself a coffee, and, without even bothering to shower, announced to P., who was still asleep and whose dreams would no doubt be visited by visions of horror, that I was returning to the scene of the crime.

  When I got out of the car, I was amazed by the stillness of the scene. The birds had been up for a long time, but I could hear only two crows calling to each other in the distance. Even the river, its rushing waters normally audible from the wayside cross, seemed to have gone silent. I walked over to the little bridge to confirm that, in spite of the summer’s abundant rain, the river had lost its energy. The banks that had been flooded in spring were lined with rocks of all sizes piled up there by thousands of spiral swellings, and the height of the water had dropped at least a metre. I picked up a stone and hurled it into the pool at the bottom of the bridge, which had largely dried up over the course of the summer and was no longer a pool in anything but name. It hit the thin layer of water stagnating on the silty bottom with a muffled noise before sinking into the mud beside a heap of stones that other people had probably tossed in before me to break the dense silence.

  The anemic flow of water, like the still of the morning, told me fall was on the way, and that if I didn’t want to forestall Heather once more and have to observe her from the January snows, I’d need to get a move on. I walked back to the cross, the site where the photo of Heather, Vince, and Jackson had been taken, and where Heather had parked her father’s Buick before she disappeared. Then I walked around in an effort to recreate the scene and bring together the various factors of which I was aware.

  From where I was standing, I could no longer see Jackson, who was hidden by the front of the Buick, though I could just about see Vince’s head and shoulders as he smiled at an invisible dog. Heather, however, I could see more clearly. She wasn’t smiling anymore, and was struggling, against time’s grip or the constraints of the image, to rush toward Jackson and pick up his inert body from where it lay in front of the Buick. In the background, at the mouth of the logging road that joins La Languette immediately beyond the bridge, two snowmobilers were watching a distressed Heather leaning over the lifeless dog and sobbing, Jackson, Jackson, my love, before she turned around to face the two snowmobilers and yelled, Don’t come near my dog, you fucking maniacs, don’t you ever come near him again. Then she ran toward them to slap them, kick them, and spit in their faces. I was about to go lend a hand when the noise of a horn made me start and I realized I was standing in the middle of the road, fighting the shadows that had swallowed up Heather Thorne.

  Embarrassed, I retreated to the edge of the roadside ditch to allow the vehicle to pass. In it were a red-haired man, Herb McMillan, and a burlier guy, Gilles Ferland, who were driving very slowly and staring at me as if they’d seen an apparition as they passed. I watched as their eyes widened, their mouths opened, and Ferland murmured tabarnak before McMillan stepped on the gas and the truck sped away in a cloud of dust. When the dust settled, I ran to my car, and near it I noticed the shadow of R. putting his camera back into a leather case and smiling at Heather, radiant in the newborn day.

  * * *

  P. was finishing breakfast when I got back. I said a quick hello and went straight to the bathroom to look in the mirror. A few sweat-drenched locks of hair covered my forehead, and I pushed them back so I could see the whole of my face, which, it seemed to me, was retreating into the mirror, beyond the reach of my outstretched hands, moving further and further away, pushed by some force that wanted to destroy it or ruin it.

  I jumped when P., his broad shape framed in the doorway, asked me what was going on. I tried to answer, but the mirror had taken my voice as well, then my face disappeared over there, in the tempestuous winds of winter 1980.

  Herb McMillan and Gilles Ferland hadn’t been dreaming. They really had seen Heather Thorne’s ghost in La Languette, come back to haunt the location of her unhappiness and their crime. I wiped my forehead, now covered in snow, and moved away from the mirror, aware that the hand holding the pen would soon be nothing more than the scrawny, evanescent hand of a woman returned from among the dead.

  * * *

  There are fewer and fewer moths, and the large-winged kinds have been replaced by small moths, long and boring, whose names I don’t know, and which might, for all I know, not even be moths, but insects that have failed in their attempt to live by flying. Three or four of them followed me into my study after my usual evening walk and, not content with hurling themselves at the inside of the lamp, they swoop at me, clinging to my hair, fluttering against my forehead, and then fly back to the lamp with their wings beating erratically. Even the cat isn’t bothered by them. He twitches his ears and tail whenever one of them brushes against his fur, and then sinks back into his dreams, which I can tell are as agitated as my thoughts, all focused on McMillan, Ferland, and R., who are perhaps plotting right now, huddled over the wooden bridge spanning the slow river.

  * * *

  Did I make it all up this morning, or did I just invent what was necessary for my autumn to superimpose itself over Heather’s, and for us to see our last snowfalls together? Did I invent the mirror or did it invent me? Did I invent Jackson’s death and Heather’s tears, did I invent the men who saw my ghost, my double, the shadow side of my soul?

  My questions hang suspended in the smoky room and I am no longer trying to answer them, because how would I know, when the rain touches my skin, if I am writing what is or am becoming what is written?

  * * *

  The days are shortening imperceptibly, one or two minutes at a time, and here we are back again at that time of year where I have to cover the east-facing windows in my study if I don’t want to be blinded by the light skimming past the tops of the spruces.

  Shadows form on the curtain, shapes so distinct they occasionally frighten me, and whose contours I try to sharpen, telling myself they’re probably just intimations of wandering souls surrounding the house, spirits of the place whose desire to be seen sometimes projects them onto the curtain where I make the ink flow, joining the sun so that their transparent matter is imprinted on the supple fabric.

  P. has gone to the city to do some research, and to take part in a conference on eco-criticism — a word in which I hear echoes of mountains inhabited by animals mocking our desperation to understand nature when, instead, we should simply allow it to act upon the course of our lives.

  It’s the first time since we moved into this house that I’ve been alone in it. The solace of my solitude enhances the peace of where we are, and I try to enjoy these days without words rendering my voice hoarse, and aim to rediscover the silence free of human noise that has been my natural environment for years.

  In the chair I’m sitting in, all I can hear is the wind’s whistling and the gentle snoring of the cat sleeping beside me. I won’t work this evening, I’ll just listen to the creaking house and then go to bed.

  * * *

  A hand has just knocked on the window of my bedroom on the second floor, the hand of a woman in distress calling, Help me, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know if it’s Heather, Sissy Morgan, Elisabeth Mulligan, or one of the other characters who’ve pleaded for sympathy over the years, and I’m not all that bothered about finding out, since the absurd fear of hearing a voice in the bedroom next door has kept me awake ever since a rustling of fabric dragged me from the numbness into which we are plunged by the fleeting images we experience before sleep. I was swimming in the cloudy waters of a mountain lake when I heard the sound of fabric being rubbed between two hands. I sat bolt upright in bed, my heart beating, alarmed by the feeling of a vague but real threat weighing on th
e silence of the house.

  I’ve not moved since then, because I’m almost certain that as soon as I drop my guard, P.’s voice — even though P. isn’t here — will pipe up behind the partition separating our two bedrooms to wish me “Goodnight, honey, goodnight,” due to some phenomenon reproducing sounds after their echo has faded, as if their effect were so imprinted by their regular enunciation that they repeated by themselves, or perhaps because, quite simply, the fear of fear sometimes has us imagine all the possible and familiar resonances of horror at its most intimate. Given all this, the woman whose nails are scratching my windowpanes is just one bad dream among many.

  * * *

  Dawn finally came, the pink at the horizon illuminating motionless clouds. There’s no mark on the window from the scratching nails, P.’s bedroom breathes the cold air of empty spaces, and the cat is calm, completely untroubled by the ghostly presences that amount to nothing but my own anxiety.

  I make myself a strong coffee and sit down at my desk, where more concrete problems than those disturbing me during the night await. Who killed Jackson, and what did Heather know about the accident? These are the questions I need to answer if I am to establish whether I imagined the scene I witnessed at La Languette — Heather angrily screaming at Ferland and McMillan, Don’t come near my dog, you fucking maniacs — or if this was just me projecting from a past whose violence still permeates the countryside if you look at it from a certain angle, just as the echoes of certain voices can also be found in it.