Back Roads

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Before she left, she checked how the wound on her right thigh was doing. She noticed it had reopened, which didn’t surprise her as time seemed to be moving slowly backward. Using the previous landmark to guide her, she retraced her steps as far as the mossy boulder, but it had disappeared, and the clearing and birches too. As for Jackson’s yelping, now it seemed to be coming from everywhere at the same time, as if she were stuck in a bowl or cavity, inside which echo answered echo.

  Heather Thorne was on her own, alone with four Jacksons calling out to her for help, lost in the interlacing of a maze opening onto a past that only she could solve.

  * * *

  Heather has disappeared. I send this affirmation out like an arrow that crashes into the wall, just missing its target and making the lamp wobble, its light casting waves over P., who notices neither the arrow nor the lamp illuminating first his left and then his right eye as it rocks back and forth. I hesitate to tell him the news, convinced he’s going to tell me that it’s impossible for a character to escape like that, but he reflects for a moment, the lamp now lighting up his whole face, and asks me how I plan to find her.

  Is he serious or just playing along with me? Seeing that he’s waiting for an answer, I admit that I’ve not really thought out a plan yet: Heather’s departure has put me in an unpredictable situation which will lead me to an impasse. It seems sensible to wait for the snow and the coming storm to search for Heather, just like Vince and Howard W. Thorne did earlier — but with the advantage, this time, of having a head start.

  “Dangerous,” says P., and Crappy, listening at the doors, repeats the word. “Dangerous, Andrée, dangerous, gun, bang!” I pay no heed to Crappy’s warnings, because the texture of the silence enveloping our words has changed, all of a sudden. I glance outside and notice that the rain, which had stopped at dawn, has started again and is hammering the roof with its heavy pattering.

  Herb McMillan’s house, built on the edge of a river feeding into Two Hill Lake, looks, from a distance, like an abandoned cabin. But I’m not fooled, because fresh tire tracks lead to the house. The closer I get, though, the straighter the walls stand, ultimately revealing a solid wooden house with no ornament other than a rack of moose antlers above the door. A man’s house. A hunter’s house.

  Following the footprints on the muddy path, I creep around the house and hold my hands up like a visor to the window of the back door and make sure McMillan isn’t home. I push the door open, and it swings back with a sinister grinding noise that gives me pause. I call out to McMillan, in case he’s in the back room, and take my boots off on a braided rug where another pair as dirty as mine has been placed. Out of caution, I call again, and then start inspecting the house.

  I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I know I’ll find something, what with McMillan being the only one who’s not revealed anything yet. I open one of the kitchen cupboards, rummage in drawers, and tiptoe to the back, to what must be the bedroom. I grip the door handle, try to turn it, but it’s locked. What I’m looking for is in this room, this closed room I’m already thinking of as an ogre’s lair. Eventually I find the key at the bottom of a jar and, heart thumping, insert it into the lock, afraid that McMillan is hiding behind the door ready to jump me as soon as the inevitable squeak is heard. With my foot, I push it open anyway, and, expecting McMillan to appear, retreat in the same motion, but the bedroom is empty. In the darkness I can see the luminous halo emanating from a thin metal object — my computer — which I take to the kitchen table.

  In the pale light of the screen, I click on the file named Back Roads, and find in it all the corrections and additions I’ve made since the computer was stolen, all of them, including the pages of the last few weeks and the ones I’ve not yet written, but which are, I know, identical to the ones I shall write. The novel is already there, complete, and can no longer be changed.

  * * *

  It’s raining when I race out of McMillan’s house. My unlaced boots stick in the soft ground and I can see the rain streaming into the river, agitated by swirls. It’s written: “agitated by swirls.” An apocalyptic light, because the end is near, pierces the foggy summits of the two hills, and I collapse right when I’m about to grab my door handle. It’s written.

  It’s written.

  The rain snakes around my neck, wets my already matted hair, and jumps into the puddle that will reach my mouth in a moment or two. The heavy noise of the falling rain surrounds me, mingling with the pattering on the car and the rushing of the river toward the lake.

  The light dims and, little by little, the puddle of water grows until it reaches my mouth, which fills with the taste of mud and metal. I lean up on my elbows, even though it feels really good to be lying there at one with the rain-swollen earth, grab the car door handle at last and get into the car. Once I’ve shed my coat I turn the heating up to full blast. Ahead of me, Herb McMillan’s house is collapsing into the river, detritus floating away with the current. Herb McMillan doesn’t exist. Herb McMillan is nothing more than one of the other names I’ve given myself.

  * * *

  I’ve put on some dry clothes but I’m still shivering. A cup of tea steams in front of me, and I pick it up with two hands and hold it to my cheek, my chest, and then to the inside of my wrist, from which the heat travels to the rest of my body.

  On the television, Kevin Bacon is playing Ryan Hardy in The Following and points his gun at a serial killer, or maybe it’s his own reflection in the mirror, I’ve lost the thread of the story, because the noise of the shot and broken glass resonates as far as the forest where Heather, at the sound of the explosion, throws herself on the ground, near a hollow where rain has formed a pond and the water fills her mouth with a taste of bark and lichen.

  * * *

  The unreadable letter, which now has the texture of an old piece of parchment on the verge of crumbling, is on my black table between a growing pile of books and the cream-coloured poinsettia that is my only concession to Christmas decorations this year. Holy Crappy Owl protests, because he misses the company of the twin owls who wave their wings over the table at the solstice; Holy and Crappy, whom he thinks of as nephews resident in some faraway country and visiting just to join him in the singing of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” I tell him Holy and Crappy are waiting for the snow — like Heather, like me, like everyone — and that they can’t travel here until the storm carries them. “Even Santa Claus is waiting for the snow, for fuck’s sake!” I yell, and the cat wakes up, glares at me with slanted eyes, and then jumps out of his armchair and goes upstairs.

  It’s December 10 today, so Heather must have been dead for three days, but time is stagnating and stretching out, extending the balminess of October into the darkness of Advent and its crazy rabbit-stew mix of rain, snow, slush, and sludgy mud, the deerskin mittens I bought to protect myself from the La Languette cold of no use to me now. Reluctantly, I turn back to reconstituting the events surrounding Heather’s death.

  In other circumstances, the mild weather would fill me with joy, but I have a murder to solve, or perhaps a murder to commit in order to solve it, depending on how you see it, because the only important thing is solving the mystery of Heather Waverley Thorne’s disappearance and reappearance.

  And there’s the letter on the black table which never leaves my peripheral vision, the letter totally contradicting the revelation that made me fall back into my chair in Herb McMillan’s house — because if the story I’m so keen to reconstruct is already written, how would shutting my mouth change anything about it?

  There are too many people populating the story, too many hands trying to rewrite Heather Waverley’s already written past. I need to take back control of the situation and, as soon as the first storm appears, rush into the desolate woods of La Languette. And if the storm doesn’t come by itself, I’ll have no other choice but to induce it, the way you induce a birth, and to try to interpret
Heather Thorne’s last cries though the furious whistling of the wind.

  * * *

  The languorous notes of Erroll Garner’s “Misty” fill the house, interrupted only by the light clicking of my fingers as I type, “The languorous notes of Erroll Garner’s ‘Misty’ fill the house.”

  * * *

  My face is no longer becoming paler, probably because time is stagnating. Nonetheless, I powder my cheeks a little, and Vince’s too. He’s been breathing a little easier what with the rain averting the coming snow but he’s still worried, because he knows the snow will inevitably arrive. He takes advantage of the reprieve to put chains on his truck’s tires, fix the brakes, change the oil. He wants to be ready when Howard W. Thorne knocks at his door to drag him off in search of Heather. I point out that snow chains are banned now, to which he replies that no ban is going to stop him from saving Heather this time and that, if we follow the logic of the events we’re preparing to live through, they’ll be taking place in 1980.

  The powder I’d applied to my cheeks disappears instantly. Vince is right: I didn’t need to induce the storm, because it had already taken place — because it started on December 7, 1980. All we need to do is wait for the disturbance of time to carry us there. I hold out the Vise-Grip that Vince, lying under his truck, has asked for. Its handles are stained with black oil residue that I wipe on my cheeks.

  * * *

  The bitterness of the water on her cracked lips carries Heather far away from the forest, onto a beach covered in brown seaweed that the rising tide washes over her face and then carries back out to sea with each shushing of the waves. Her body half submerged, Heather wants to be as supple as the seaweed and float with it. She smooths her hair, stretches out her arms, and hears the faint strains of a gull calling. Jackson, she thinks. Jackson, she wants to shout, but the powerful tide enters her dry throat. Jackson, she thinks again as morphing red and black shapes cover the milky sky. Thrusting her hips, Heather eventually manages to arch her body back and spit out the pure water obscured by the seaweed. “Jackson . . .” But the cries drowning in her parched throat turn into groans, hoarse gargling sounds in the forest’s icy air.

  As she sits in the pond tasting of bark and lichen, all of Heather’s limbs are trembling. I’m going to die here, she thinks, I’m going to die in this endlessly identical forest before I’ve even confronted the men driven mad by their culpable desires. Then a scream from beyond the trees shakes her, an interminable whine that rips through all parts of the forest. Gathering up every last bit of strength, Heather Waverley Thorne supports herself on her hands, unfolds her stiff legs, and walks unsteadily in the direction of a phantom dog’s destiny.

  * * *

  I wipe the mirror with the palm of my hand and bring my face closer to the reflected being in the misty surface attempting to identify me; I stare hard at the worried expression my breath is fogging up again, and in a low voice say, “My name is Heather, Heather Thorne,” at the same time as my distressed reflection.

  “Heather Waverley Thorne is my doppelgänger,” I finally say to the person looking at me — to my double — and then I start to laugh, aware that after taking cover behind a legion of doubles, today I find myself standing in front of my exact and ghostly counterpart, come from I don’t know what fantastical universe, from I don’t know what parallel world destined to meet my own, so that here before the mirror I should ask which one, out of my reflection and me, actually possesses some reality. And I laugh and I laugh, while the mirages crumble away.

  My past has taken on a dimension that surpasses what remains of my future, and I turn toward it, toward a long and dusty road where my steps sink into the shadow of trees, when the day’s brightness, some mornings, awakens no joy in me, no emotion, no hope. I sit down in my black leather armchair, let the sun warm my face, and summon the memory of clear mornings of earlier times, of the walks I took with Miro, my Uncle Lorenzo’s dog, just as dawn was breaking. And I walk, with Miro at my side, on the gravel path of the 4th Line, happy simply to be alive and enjoying the privilege of a solitude reinforced by the melancholy of the mist-covered fields.

  Sometimes, when my head isn’t heavy with weariness and fitful sleep, all I have to do is close my eyes and once more I can feel the fullness of August afternoons smelling of wild apple trees and ripe hay, once more I can make sand pies that I line up on the dock. I am eight years old and know nothing of death. I’m fifteen years old and running with Miro, wanting to seize what is most beautiful from the world, unaware that it is precisely this beauty that I’ll draw on when I grow too tired to put on my boots and coat and I plunge my hands in the cold sand.

  I’m fifteen and I don’t yet know, when Miro runs over and presses his head to my thighs, that from the far side of the first curve hiding the horizon, a Buick will soon appear, and I’ll recognize myself at the steering wheel, looking for Miro in the ditch, looking for Miro in the undergrowth, desperately calling out, “Jackson, Jackson, my love.”

  * * *

  Jackson is the name of all the dead dogs, dead cats, dead fathers, friends, and loved ones. Jackson is the name of my necropolis. Jackson, my love.

  * * *

  I read somewhere that if a person meets their doppelgänger they’ll die within three days. Will the story that I’m telling, then, be over in a few hours — like in one of those dreams where time contracts? Have I really lived through two winters since I first wrote, “I must be called Heather,” or did I merely imagine I’d lived them in order to keep the moment of death at bay, the moment of writing “I must be called Heather, she must be called Heather”?

  * * *

  An intense cold has followed the rain. The fields are frozen, and the paths covered in a layer of rough ice that hurts the cats’ feet, as well as the wild turkeys’, the hares’, the rats’. The trees emit eerie creaks and the landscape feels as though it might rip in two, that a thin streak will cleave the sky and run straight to the ground, where it will spread out like a fault line and split open the earth as the forest collapses in thousands of shards of glass that land in the hardened snow.

  As I sit inside the car, the condensation of my breath settles on the windows, where a thin frost is forming. I am scarcely able to hold my pen, which squeaks over the lined paper on which I’m writing “river, cross, thistle, lichen, ray” in the hope of remembering, when I go home, the layout of this place and of the river in particular, its waters emerging here and there between ice banks, beneath which you can see, if you stand on the bridge, other layers of ice gnawed at and pitted by the current. The movement of the water is incessant as it changes direction over the rocks, branches, and innumerable obstacles piled up on the riverbed.

  With numb fingers, I put the cap back on my pen, pull on my deerskin mittens and open the door. I run to the river, lean over the side of the bridge, and engrave a few words etched on my brain: lace, relief, crystal, false turkey tail, Trametes versicolor, and on my way back I stop in front of the iron cross decorated with a hollow metal heart where there used to be a bleeding heart surrounded with thorny branches.

  Once I’m back in the car, my glasses fog up again. In order to note what I saw, I must turn on the engine and run the heating. “Cross, heart, thistles, broken swells of the river under which layers of ice on top of each other look like black rays, uneven hilly areas, big semicircular mushrooms, false turkey tail, Trametes versicolor, like the ones you see on dead trees in any season,” I write, and then I turn the heating off.

  In the too-perfect silence that accentuates the noise of each of my movements — the rustling of my coat, the rubbing of my thigh against the seat — I wipe the melting frost off the front window and observe the rusting wayside cross amid the dried thistles and alders. I’m amazed that no monument to Heather, however simple, has been erected near the stone pedestal on which the cross is mounted, and write in my notebook, “No cross for Heather,” then draw a crucifix in the frost forming o
nce more on the windshield, through which I can see a white ribbon tied to a road sign on the other side of the bridge, flapping in the wind.

  I decide the ribbon is for Heather, and that someone, Vince or Howard W. Thorne, replaces it when it gets dirty or frayed, just as people replace withered flowers on graves.

  I turn the engine back on and wait until I can see clearly before taking to the road. I’m just about to leave when a grey truck slows down when it’s level with my vehicle and the driver leans over to look at me. This is the second driver that has passed since I parked near the bridge, the second driver who’s given me a mistrustful look, no doubt convinced that a woman alone in her vehicle at the crossroads of La Languette and the Saint-Joseph Line is up to no good. I smile to indicate everything is fine, but he doesn’t reciprocate. He’ll be among those who accuse me, a woman on her own on a freezing day, when Heather disappears and we find her lifeless near a sleeping tree. Whatever. At the risk of freezing her fingers, at the risk of seeming crazy, at the risk of being accused of crimes that she didn’t invent, an author must return to the scenes of her drama.

  * * *

  I should have thrown myself into the river. I’ve been obsessing over this idea since it got dark, seeing the slow water again, my body leaning over the edge, the black line waving on the stony bottom, and I feel again the slight vertigo that made me forget the cold, as the river, stifled beneath the ice, murmured, Come, come.

  Heather has also heard the words, Come, come, whispered by what could only have been death, but resists with all her strength, because, if Jackson is still on the run, it cannot be her time yet.