She cocks her ear, tries to figure out where the voice attempting to seduce her originates. She realizes that it is very close by: behind her back, near her neck, caressed by an icy breath, on the ground over which a wind is blowing that wants to drag her onto paths that are folding up and closing to push her toward the centre of a labyrinth where the whisperings will devour her.
No! She will not give in. She turns around sharply and forges on, exhaling hot breath as she flees, and the voice diminishes, caught in the sweeping embrace of a golden larch in the middle of its last rustlings.
* * *
According to P., Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, the uncanny, should be translated as “intimate strangeness” and not “worrying strangeness,” because the worrying aspect of the strangeness in question is entirely the product of its familiarity, of what comes from the depths of our being and we call “intimate.”
The anxiety I feel in front of a mirror has to do with the familiarity of the reflection I am looking at, with the disconcerting resemblance between the image thrown back at me and the idea I have of a face — my own — that I’ve never seen except in photos people say are of me, or in mirrors reflecting my mimicry.
* * *
I drive on the highway with P., who put a CD in the car’s player at the junction of the 610 and the 10, which we renamed Jake Bugg’s Highway, what with our having listened to Bugg’s first album a dozen times or more as we drove along it under pouring rain or heatwave suns prompting us to turn the AC up to max.
But today, P. has chosen a Steve Earle album, The Low Highway. A slight aroma of tobacco is floating in the car, and Earle has just started singing “Remember Me” in his Texan accent. I have to force myself not to cry, because this is the way I’d like to be remembered — “on some sunny day,” “on a stormy night,” under skies washed clean and brooding winds blow.
I blink away the tears that are blurring the road and say, “That’s what I’d like to have written on my gravestone,” but P. doesn’t hear me. P. is singing the first words of my epitaph, “Remember Me,” along with Steve Earle.
* * *
Howard W. Thorne is pacing up and down outside his house, stirring up dust, visible in the thin rays of light, that has accumulated over the course of the preceding week. A moment ago, he tried to start reading The World According to Garp again, in memory of Heather, because he has nothing more to offer her now but thoughts. But he can’t do it. Every time he reopens the book, he breaks off at page 132, unable to proceed — as if the book stops at that page and there is nothing else to be added.
Sometimes, he also has the impression there’s nothing else to be added to his life — that he moves around, alone and in limbo, and that no soul awaits its release. Nobody has visited him for a very long time, nobody has come to spy on him from the undergrowth, nobody has skirted around the house while he is out. It’s as if his entire existence has suddenly been forgotten, as if he’s been abandoned on page 132 of a novel that will never go further than that page.
Tired of going in circles, he pours himself a glass of Wild Turkey, stations himself at the window and waits for some event — a storm, a blizzard, a squealing of tires at the end of the drive — to pull him out of his torpor.
* * *
The village cemetery looks like an enormous ice field, out of which, almost perfectly ordered, headstones have shot up, as if someone had cultivated them in order to remind people that whatever is put into the ground always ends up resurfacing.
I am standing in front of my father’s grave. It’s covered in a thin layer of ice which is fraying in the rain, and I can read, through the thin gaps that separate sections of it, the first letters of the word “Remember.” I raise my head and notice the same letters in relief on all the stones in this field of ice. Surely it is the same on the mountain, where a block of pink granite immortalizes Heather Waverley Thorne’s name.
I lift my hood up over my wet hair, trace the final letters of “Remember” on my father’s tombstone, and tell myself it’s time the rain stopped, time Heather returned to the ground, and for the pieces of the jigsaw I’ve been scattering for the past two years, in my study and on the roads around the village, to finally fall into place.
Tomorrow, Heather will find Jackson and, in so doing, sign her death warrant.
IX.
Heather exits a tiny clearing and finds the arrow she’d scraped into the moss and the three birches she was using to orient herself. She climbs the strongest of the three, which nevertheless bends under her weight, but all she can see ahead of her are branches, branches, and more branches. She calls Jackson’s name anyway, and a faint howling reaches her from what, judging from the position of the sun, she thinks is the south. She climbs back down the tree feeling as though her thigh wound is opening up even further, but she runs and runs and runs. Toward the sun.
Toward Jackson.
* * *
I’ve opened a bottle of the Ardèche wine I’ve been saving in the basement for a special occasion, and clink my glass against P.’s. “To us,” I say, smiling at P. in a manner that elicits his own tenderness and the myopic sweetness of his light brown eyes, and then I swallow the Ardèche wine remembering the thousands of moments of tenderness that have accumulated between us, and I smile again, if a little sadly this time, because this meal we are beginning might be our last if the rain turns, as I have predicted, into an endless snow thrashing in the raging wind.
“To us,” P. replies, and a sharp gust rattles the house from foundations to attic.
* * *
I wait for P. to fall asleep, then I borrow an old backpack of his into which I stuff a change of clothes — wool socks, scarves, mittens, sweaters — slipping among them a flashlight, new batteries, a hunting knife, and wooden matches. Then I clip an axe to the rings on the straps and head to my study to wait for the storm as Vince and Réal Morissette, sitting at Vince’s table, listen to the stove clock ding — one ding per minute, every time the second hand reaches the twelve — stringing out endless time made more oppressive by the atmosphere in the room. In front of them are two bottles of beer, two glasses, two plates, and two rare steaks, but neither brother is eating. Occasionally they bring the glasses to their lips, but they don’t touch their knives or forks. The wind outside is screaming, and the tension in the dimly lit room is palpable. A kilometre away, standing in front of a window outside which the branches of a Virginia pine are waving, Howard W. Thorne is in the throes of an anguish that doesn’t allow him any kind of coherent thought, and he hears the sound of barking approach.
* * *
The wind is whistling furiously at the tops of the trees, but here on the spongy ground where the roots snake, its fury barely touches Heather at all. She stops for a moment to catch her breath and sees Jackson appear, a ghostly shadow slipping into the undergrowth. So she shouts again, but the more she shouts the further away the shadow gets. Then a path appears in front of her, which leads to a gravel road. She heads along it, panting like a lame dog, and sees Jackson in the middle of the road, a fuzzy shadow pierced by the flight of a solitary thrush. “Jackson,” she murmurs, but a rumbling can be heard beyond the mound on which the animal is standing, the sound of a truck being driven at top speed by two drunk young men, who run it through the vanishing body of Jackson, my love.
The throbbing of the engine as it continues on its way is followed by a wail resonating from the mountain to the village and the 2nd Line.
Holy Crappy Owl stiffens at the end of his string, rigid with horror, “Jackson, boom, boom, dog, blood,” he squawks, as a few sheets of paper blow around the room: “Heather on the 4th Line,” “Heather and the caterpillars,” “Heather drinking at a stream.” I gather them up and try to arrange them in some sort of order despite the trembling of my hands. Howard W. Thorne is still standing in the dark and drops his glass. A trickle of amber alcohol runs over the worn rug and soaks into the fi
nal pages of The World According to Garp while Vince Morissette, his stomach gripped by fear, quickly gets up from the table to run to a black window lashed by the wind.
Heather looks in vain for Jackson’s body in the ditches and undergrowth where he might have taken shelter if he was hurt, but there’s no longer any sign of the animal, not even a spot of blood on the road. All that remains of Jackson are the infinite tears of the woman kneeling by the road, her hands dirty, her eyes red, and her face so pale you’d think all her blood was draining out from the wound on her right thigh, a long diagonal cut across the limb, staining her pants with a dark spot spreading toward the knee.
Struggling to her feet, she moves a few steps forward and notices a house among the trees. In one of its windows, she can make out a photograph. She draws closer and realizes the picture is of a young girl pointing a gun straight ahead of her. She scrunches her eyes and peers at the young girl, increasingly certain that she knows her. She cups her hands around her eyes and presses her nose against the cold window but the young girl’s face blurs as the glass mists over. She takes a step back and wipes the mist with the back of her hand. The contact between the leather and wet glass produces a squeaking sound that makes her shiver, and she looks at the photograph again.
After a few minutes that seem like hours, Heather stumbles, her breath halting. She has just recognized the young girl, whose face she has recently seen in the forest, deformed by the Buick’s broken mirror. A single name goes through her mind, one name pushing its way in: Heather. She stands there with her arms dangling, repeating this incredible truth: “My name is Heather, Heather Waverley Thorne.”
* * *
The first snowflakes are beginning to fall. I grab the backpack I’ve borrowed from P. and, after petting the cats, turn out my study light and leave without looking back. I’m afraid of seeing the cats’ silhouettes against the house windows and wanting to retrace my steps at top speed in order to take them in my arms, consigning my manuscript to the garbage and then lying down by P.’s warm side in the ordinary progression of days. But I know that in Herb McMillan’s bedroom, my computer is blinking, and the narrative, whether I like it or not, will continue just as it has been written, in the middle of a storm that will block all the roads before dawn.
I lower my head and walk into the wind, brush the car off quickly, throw P.’s backpack inside, and go into reverse without another glance at the house and its inhabitants. The road is already white, and in the headlights the evening is nothing but shimmering sparkles.
* * *
Unable to bear his silent house any longer, Howard W. Thorne has jumped in his truck to go look for the barking. Ahead of him, a few snowflakes are mingling with the rain and forming a curtain of crystalline reflections interlaced with the white flakes falling softly from the black sky, reducing visibility and revealing the road only a little at a time — as if it didn’t exist until the headlights penetrated each new zone, erasing itself once the vehicle had passed, sinking into a void only other headlights have the power to fill.
In the pitch black surrounding him, Howard W. Thorne is conscious of a new worry surfacing within him and is burdened by a feeling of imminent catastrophe concealed in the darkness enveloping the snow.
Standing in front of the bay window in his living room, Vince Morissette has a sensation exactly like the one that made Howard W. Thorne go out to check the sides of the roads. He turns off the ceiling light, the better to see in the night, and mumbles, “Here we go, it’s starting again, an accident’s going to happen soon, on the mountain or in the woods.” He smooths his hair back in a gesture of powerlessness, and carries on watching the snow being plastered against the window by the wind.
Behind him, his brother is a broad silhouette motionless in the archway leading to the living room. He is hoping the snow will bury the whole of the region and, at the same time, engulf Heather Waverley Thorne’s cries in the cottony whiteness of a finally consummated winter.
* * *
Heather didn’t have any trouble finding the ammunition she was looking for. She slips the bullets for her gun into a canvas bag and goes upstairs to look for warm clothes in the bedroom that used to be hers. Nothing has changed since the last night she spent in the house, she’s not sure how many years before, not the thin cotton curtains, not the Virginia Woolf novels, not the teddy bear called Hector William, but she doesn’t have time to delay because the storm outside is growing in strength.
* * *
Exasperated by his brother’s silence, Vince Morissette brusquely turned around: “What do you know about all this?” he asked, but Réal Morissette, faced with an imminent event that has already happened, finds it impossible to tell true from false. In fact, he knows better than anybody, ever since the woman agreeing to be called Beverley showed up in their lives, that the drama which shook the village thirty-five years before is due to happen again and that nobody can predict its outcome nor foresee the consequences. Who can actually determine if the repetition of this event will just be a simulacrum, or if the new drama will gloss over the earlier one, striking from memory the savage winter in which a teenager disappeared?
He lowers his head and says quietly, “I don’t know anything anymore, Vince. All I know is that something’s going to happen, tonight or tomorrow, and I don’t want to be mixed up in it. Good night, brother, and be careful.”
Unable to look his brother straight in the eyes, Réal Morissette, with death in his soul, grabs his coat, pulls on his boots, and goes out into the incipient storm. He’d done what he could to keep the woman Vince misguidedly believes to be Beverley, Beverley Simons, a young girl whose eyes are too gentle to provoke mourning, away from the house, but his plans got screwed up and from that point on the rest was beyond his control. He gives Vince a last wave, and his brother makes a movement as if to follow but reconsiders. He needs to be at home when Howard W. Thorne comes knocking on his door to ask for his help.
Through the window where he can see the blizzard starting, Vince watches as his brother’s tail lights become smaller in the blowing and increasingly heavy snow. And Réal takes advantage of Vince no longer being able to make out his truck to park on the ever-less-visible shoulder and wipe away the tears blurring his vision. “Heather,” he says softly, putting his head in his hands, “Waverley.” And then he sees the young girl again, stretched out on a camp bed and white as the death that had insinuated its way into her veins. “Tabarnak, Gilles, tell me you didn’t do that.” And Gilles Ferland started to bawl, yelling and swearing, “Yes, I did it, fuck, I did it, I couldn’t see straight, I went crazy, Réal, crazy like I’d lost my fucking head, like it wasn’t me in charge anymore.”
“We can’t leave her like that,” was all Réal Morissette had said, cursing the day he’d become friendly with Gilles Ferland. Then he’d washed the young girl, her grazed hands, her body, and her blanched face, saying, “Christ, you’re beautiful, Heather,” before taking her back into the woods where maybe someone would find her and dig her a proper grave. In truth, Réal Morissette’s only crime had been going to see Gilles Ferland in his cabin in the woods on December 11, 1980, finding Heather Waverley Thorne there, a sleeping beauty in the forest, and keeping his mouth shut — his great big fucking mouth — because he knew nothing in the world would ever resuscitate Waverley’s unbearably dazzling smile.
* * *
As soon as he was back in the house, Howard W. Thorne smelled something new, or rather something old and familiar, a perfume from the past that brought to mind the nearly frozen waters of streams. Immediately, he ran up the stairs to Heather’s bedroom and noticed that the red anorak and several other items of clothing had disappeared. He searched the house from top to bottom and realized that the two boxes of bullets he kept as spares had also disappeared, and then his eyes fell upon a photo of Heather and Jackson. A sharp pain ran through his chest for a moment, and he went closer to it.
During
his absence, the smile Heather was wearing in the photograph had been wiped away, and the yellow-circled irises of the woman who’d been reading Paterson had appeared in the young girl’s eyes.
No longer understanding what was happening, Howard W. Thorne bent down to look at the photograph. You aren’t who you think you are. He grabbed it, smashed it against his knee, and threw it at the dirty wall facing his armchair. His eyes wet with tears, he stepped back, treading on his alcohol-soaked copy of The World According to Garp, and rushed out into the storm.
* * *
The bad weather has redoubled its efforts while I’ve been out. I can barely see thirty feet in front of me and can already feel the resistance of the snow settling on the road. When I get to the mountain road where I’d hoped to find Heather, I see, through the gusts, an approaching vehicle signalling with its headlights. I slow down, open my window, and wait, snow blowing into the car, for the vehicle to reach me. Its driver also opens his window, and I see the defeated face of Réal Morissette, who barely seems surprised to see me.
“Don’t go any further,” he shouts through the shrieking wind. “The roads are going to be blocked before long, though I suppose there’s no point warning you. When it’s written, it’s written, right? Even if you’re barking up the wrong tree, Andrée A., the wrong tree altogether.”
Back Roads Page 19
