Back Roads

by Andrée A. Michaud

  The simplest solution would be to ask Heather, but I’m afraid she’d be waiting for me with her gun and would terminate me before the final scene. In any case, I feel as though I lost contact with her the moment I entrusted Vince with the task of making her live again for me, and particularly since I understood Howard W. Thorne was still contemplating schemes of revenge beside a tombstone under which a body lies that I dare not exhume to compare its features with my own.

  I have pushed Heather toward inertia and am unable, now, to think of her as anything but pale and trembling in the middle of the endless autumn, engulfed by leaves turned red and falling unceasingly among trees offering up their bare trunks to the cold. I have to get her out of there, must absolutely get her out of there before the mould that has attacked the seats of her Buick starts to make blemishes on her skin.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Heather dreams of a sea she has never known; of unfurling foamy waves submerging the rocks at the edge of the beach in a spectacular roaring, their din increasing as the waves come in, they’ll soon be where she is, inundating the forest and tipping over the car we’ll watch drifting with the docks toward the dried-up rivers.

  * * *

  For P.’s homecoming I’ve prepared a herb omelette, a green salad, and an apple pie — my “famous apple pie,” as I call it — made with the fruit of the apple tree that leans by the fence whose rails we’ll need to move if we don’t want the tree’s lower branches to be damaged. And I’ve opened a bottle of the Ardèche wine P. really likes, no doubt due to his memories of the region, good memories, somewhat darkened by the death of his friend from there.

  He proposes a toast to the dead friend and I propose another to all our dead loved ones, because they are increasingly numerous, because we live right at the heart of a zone slowly depopulating to the rhythm of passing seasons that break our bones. Then he tells me about his trip, about the finds he made in certain bookstores and the stench of the city, its dense, heavy air, before asking me how I spent my solitary days. I don’t have much to tell him, because solitude is silent, and I have no intention of telling him about the voice in the night, Good night, honey, good night . . . So I tell him how Heather climbed onto the roof so she could scratch at my window, adding that she might be dead right now as we’re drinking the Ardèche wine, drowned by the fury of an unknown sea and lengthening the list of our dead loved ones.

  P. says no, she can’t be dead because I look more and more like her every day. “Your hair,” he says, “the paleness of your skin,” which he touches with his fingertips. Then the sun goes down and we go to bed. When I turn out my lamp, I hear his voice on the other side of the partition wishing me “Goodnight, honey, goodnight,” and a shiver runs through my sweat-drenched body.

  * * *

  Vince doesn’t know how Jackson died. All he knows is that Jackson was run over by a vehicle, that Heather cried for a week before she disappeared in La Languette, and that he barely saw her during this time, barely talked to her, because she was constantly shouting or murmuring, “Jackson, Jackson, my love.” Nothing else, just these shouts and murmurs, a troubling anger. “I don’t know anything else, what do you want me to say?”

  When he stops he is out of breath, and I can hear the tick-tock of the clock on the old stove, which emits a kind of trill when the second hand passes the 12. I abandon him to this preoccupying noise, my coffee already cold on the linen placemat.

  * * *

  I have to get Heather out of the woods. I have to get Heather out of the woods. I pound the desk as I wrack my brains, unable to figure out how to change the impetus of Heather’s situation, and all the while Vince is surrounded by the haunting tick-tocking of the clock; he lowers his head, eyes too heavy to contemplate the future and tells me I need to move fast.

  * * *

  It’s impossible for Heather to be dead, P. has confirmed. It’s impossible that she doesn’t exist, because the phenomenon of sympathetic assimilation, where one person takes on another person’s features and vice versa, requires two people. What he forgot to add is that at the end of the process — when the assimilation has evolved to the point where they are mistaken for each other — one of the two has to retreat and let the other one take over. Will it be Heather or me who quits the stage before the curtain falls?

  VII.

  In time, the repetition of events ends by drawing, in its wake, shapes traced with such persistence that we are able to deduce a few truths about the motive determining this repetition.

  I step on the gas, a woman with a young and mellifluous voice utters the word glorious, metal crunches and crumples so resoundingly it brings to mind the terror of the final straight, the atmosphere inside the car is suffocating, and I fall into a red abyss.

  It’s time to rewrite Heather Thorne’s autumn.

  The phosphorescent clock on the dashboard shows quarter after midnight when Heather Thorne regains consciousness. It takes her a few minutes to orient herself: the car skidding for no reason, her acceleration into the woods, the final impact, the irrevocable cracking of the branches, the metallic crumpling sounds, and then the red silence of fainting.

  She touches the blood flowing over her left temple with her fingertips and looks in the glove compartment for something to clean up with, but all she finds is a pile of Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, and Steve Earle CDs. Then she manages to grab her bag from the back seat despite the searing pain ripping through her right thigh. She takes out a silk scarf and knots it firmly around her leg, presses a few tissues to her temple, and then swallows a couple of ibuprofen tablets that lodge in her throat. Water . . . she would love some water.

  She tries to open the car door but it’s jammed and blocked by a tree trunk. With difficulty, she slides over to the passenger seat, lifting her legs over the gear stick with an effort that forces a cry of pain out of her, but the door on that side also refuses to open, which is when she spots the glimmering axe on the back seat. She picks it up and smashes the glass of the window with the tool’s wide end. Shards of glass hook into her hair and she uses the sleeve of her leather jacket to break the pieces remaining in haphazard relief on the frame. She will have a few wounds on her hands and wrists, but they’ll disappear or scar over in the coming days, and the right sleeve of her jacket will also retain marks, like animal scratches, from this incident.

  Finally, she extricates herself from the vehicle and takes in great gulps of the night air, her breaths turning into gasps. Water . . . she needs to find some water. She crawls forward, her right leg useless, looking for any reflection of the light of the three-quarter moon shining through the branches, and then she notices a slope. There must be water down there. She lets herself roll down the incline, unable to suppress the cries of pain burning her throat, and ends up near the thin trickle of a stream snaking through the moss. She plunges her face in and drinks until she is no longer thirsty, and then stretches out on the bed of moss, out of breath but with her thirst slaked.

  Stars are shining above the tops of the trees, and she has no idea where she is, who she is, or why she has ended up in this forest. She remembers nothing but the irrepressible force pressing her foot down on the accelerator — and then the image of a woman appears in her memory, a woman standing by the side of the road, her arms half raised, and then words as vivid as the pain searing through her right thigh come into her mind: My name must be Andrée, her name must be Andrée. We are hunted women.

  * * *

  I heard the nasal cries of a flock of geese I could not see crossing the sky. Winter will be here soon.

  * * *

  “My name must be Andrée, Andrée A.,” Heather says beneath her breath as the mud she’s applied to her wounds sets and bits of dry earth with perfectly straight edges fall off her injured thigh.

  My name must be Andrée, she thinks, the name evoking for her nothing but the distressed expression of a woman raising her arms near a stream
with a background of sparklingly colourful coniferous and deciduous forest in the background.

  My name must be Andrée, she insists — Andrée A. — before the muffled din of metal rubbing against the bark flying in dusty fragments around the Buick brings her back to reality, and she corrects herself: My name must be Andrée, Andrée A. But I am not who I think I am.

  As is my habit every Wednesday afternoon, I visited my mother in the nursing home with the endless turquoise walls where she has been compelled to retire since her last stay in the hospital. The pair of women I’ve dubbed the “two sad sisters” are sitting in the living room, in the same spot as usual, mute and staring at nothing except their own disappearing past. The younger one’s head is resting on the other woman’s shoulder, hours spent in silence. A light sometimes appears in the younger one’s eyes as someone approaches, but then extinguishes itself quickly, not strong enough to reach the nearly blind eyes of the other. Hours spent in silence waiting for lunch, dinner, night.

  I walk past them with my mother, whom I’m taking outside for a breath of fresh air. The younger one’s eyes had responded for a moment when I greeted her, but then her head fell back onto the other one’s shoulder as the door clicked shut.

  With my mother at my side, I gazed at life — at wasps, grasshoppers, yellow September butterflies, at the heavy bunches of ripening grapes weighing down the Virginia creeper that runs the length of the big porch, at birds, children — yes, life — but the sad sisters followed me home and here they are in a corner of my study, the younger one’s head resting on the other one’s shoulder, motionless and silent though perhaps communicating with their thoughts or in the short sighing breaths of their boredom, two broken dolls bringing to mind the dead twins that haunt the corridors of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film that made a great impression on me; two sad sisters who look more like each other with each passing day, due to that phenomenon by which one person absorbs another’s sadness and vice versa.

  * * *

  Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, someone knocked on our front door. “Heather!” I exclaimed, my heart beating fast, because ever since the moment when I realized it was imperative that I get her out of the woods, I’ve had the feeling she’s been moving further away instead of closer, and that the day will come when I’ll no longer be able to catch her at all.

  I approached the door but stepped back a little when I saw a woman I didn’t know on the porch — black hair, on the short side — and a teenager, her son, who was almost a head taller than her. I was wary of opening the door to them, strangers who show up in the middle of the night usually bringing only bad news, but since the woman had seen me I didn’t have much of a choice.

  The diminutive woman entered first, and then the son, to tell us they’d just hit a deer with their vehicle, that the son’s phone wasn’t working, and they wanted to call the police. This is just a smokescreen, I thought initially, these people want something else, the father is probably hiding behind the cedars with the older son, ready to rush into the house as soon as his wife gives the agreed signal, maybe smoothing her hair over her forehead, as she is doing right now.

  Convinced I’d seen through their plot, I quickly went back to the window, where all I could make out was my worried reflection, then that of the small woman, whose wide eyes betrayed a curious terror. I apologized, a little ashamed of my reaction. “A shadow,” I said, as the little woman started to squint, her dark eyes staring at me with a kind of rat-like nervousness that reminded me of the way a rat’s eyes dart around as it notes the crumbs on the floor, noises in the walls, and hostile smells, making me uncomfortable. The little woman was afraid, perhaps asking herself just who were these strangers whose door she and her son had knocked on, because you never really know whom you’ll encounter, it could easily be someone bad, and you might think the smiling people opening their door to you are there to help when really they have just one idea in mind: to seize the day and give their murderous impulses free rein.

  The small woman’s fear was that of Little Red Riding Hood when she innocently steps into the mouth of the wolf — only how could we be the wolf? I swept away the horrors intruding on my mind, wild beasts salivating over fresh meat, the screams of the prey, the silence, broken only by the sound of lapping mouths that follows their execution, doing my best to convince myself this woman’s manner was nothing like the nervousness of the wretched little hoodlum who goes into the house of a couple of frail old people, intent on stealing their meagre possessions. Besides, people who show up in the middle of the night to rob and, if necessary, flay you, tend to be calm and cold, sizing up the situation in a single glance, noting the exits, the weapons, telling a joke as they measure up the strength of all the people present and then stabbing you or tying you up as soon as you turn your back or show any sign of weakness.

  P., who did not share my unease, invited the small woman and her son to sit down as I dialled the police and then held out the phone to the woman, who’d taken off her shoes on the carpet, and whose feet I couldn’t help staring at, the toes spaced too far apart, a wide gap between the big toe and the next one. As I did so, the woman was answering the police’s questions — no, the deer didn’t die on the road, it collapsed on the shoulder, yes, her car was totalled, but she had insurance, at least she thought she did, she wasn’t sure anymore, the accident had shaken her. After she hung up, she stared vaguely in the direction of my study, as if she no longer knew where she was. Then she and her son thanked us and left.

  Standing at the threshold, I watched them disappear beyond the arch and into the darkness. I imagined the mother deer, who might not have been killed, who was perhaps dying in the ditch, fear in her stomach, worrying about her little ones. “I knew it,” I said to P., “I knew those two would bring bad news, it was written in their eyes, in that woman’s posture, in the way her neck hunched into her shoulders and made her look even shorter next to her son.”

  “It was written,” I repeated a couple of times as Holy Crappy Owl, who’d not said a word for ages, wiggled at the end of his string to screech, “It was written, it was written, it was written . . .” I calmed him down before he strangled himself, and left the house, thinking I might be able to find the doe and relieve her suffering, but I wasn’t brave enough for that, not incensed enough to stick the knife P. gave me into her throat, the Smith & Wesson Special Tactical with the black serrated blade, so I turned around and went home, not proud of myself for being such a scaredy cat. I sent up a prayer to the god of deer, assuring myself that, despite the cruelty we attribute to it, nature can be compassionate and kill quickly — with a single blow — all this before the deer has the time to realize she’s on her way, or to worry about her little ones who will bleat like calves, exactly like calves.

  * * *

  The big-game hunting season is coming. People are already allowed to kill with a bow or a crossbow, but soon we’ll be hearing gunshots and seeing bodies strapped to the tops of cars, legs tied, hooves in the air, or sticking out of the backs of trucks. Right about now Gilles Ferland and Herb McMillan must be getting their ammunition ready, cleaning their guns and anticipating the first stage of the hunt — unless, that is, they’re now incapable of killing, even a fly, even a mouse, gripped by nausea as soon as they hear an animal’s cry, as soon as they imagine its blood on the rotten floor of the cellar. I don’t know. These men are brutes. Not sure if you can make a brute into a decent guy. I don’t believe so.

  * * *

  P. went out with his walking stick and flannel shirt with the aim of finding the doe, who’d apparently been struck about two hundred metres from the house. “No doe,” he muttered when he came back. Then he went to his study.

  I stayed frozen in place, my pen in the air, in the middle of a sentence describing the found doe. Could I have been right last night, when I imagined the father and the older son behind the cedars, and that the operation was
aborted for some reason of which I was unaware? Could the mother and son have been on a reconnaissance mission while the father and the other son were waiting in a car that wasn’t the slightest bit wrecked? Were they doing so in case things turned out badly, in case the people who opened the door to the wife and youngest son were crazy, maniacal psychopaths?

  I wonder again about the woman’s jitters; perhaps the husband had ignored her qualms and forced her to implement his plan, and she couldn’t help but be afraid of the consequences of her actions. Unless someone had picked up the deer. The father, for example, returning with his two sons, or the policeman who’d answered my call, or maybe the men the police officer sent along — his uncle and brother-in-law — for the still-fresh meat.

  I have no idea what really happened, but I’m keeping an eye out. If the little woman shows up again, I’ll make her spill the beans and ask her what they did with the meat, the gun, why her husband was waiting outside, behind the trees or in the car, with the elder son, the brute of the family ready to slit throats for just a few measly dollars.

  Sitting down near the stream, Heather breathes in the fall scents perfuming the forest. The smells soothe her, though she doesn’t exactly know why, and make her want to walk until she loses herself, until she’s no more than an animal sniffing the wind. She imagines this animal, half horse, half deer, galloping freely into a clearing, its hooves stirring up the brown grass that the autumn has flattened to the ground, its nose sniffing at the fireweed fluff, before a scent of snow tickles its nostrils, leading it to panic and snort, sensing the quiet threat that northern winters bring.