It’s raining on the 4th Line. I forgot to bring my raincoat, and all I have for protection is P.’s father’s cap, the one P. bought for him on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. P. always leaves this cap, which has the logo of the famous Martha’s Vineyard Black Dog sewn on it, in the car in case it rains, as it is doing today. I’m slightly uncomfortable wearing the cap of a dead person who is not a blood relation, but don’t want to retrace my footsteps to put the Black Dog where it belongs, on one of the back seat’s head rests, from where it can watch the road.
I walk with my head bowed, because the cap is too big for me and slips down over my forehead with every step I take, so far that the visor obstructs my view. I grope my way forward, watching the water drip from the visor onto the soaked ground, and tell myself I’m an idiot for wearing this cap that doesn’t belong to me. I don’t know if Heather will be near the Buick, or if she’ll even want me in the vicinity, but I’m taking the chance because I need to see her, to touch her injuries and compare them with my own, and to hear her hoarse voice like my own. Basically, I need to know if there’s really a corpse under the tombstone near H. W. Thorne’s house, or if the young girl meant to be there somehow outlived the mourning of her loved ones.
After leaving a very narrow, snaking path between the trees, I finally see the branches that were broken when Heather’s car crashed through. I hurry in the direction of the accident and pull up sharply a few metres away from the Buick. Heather’s upper body is framed in the broken window that still has a scrap of purple leather clinging to it. And she’s pointing a gun at me.
For an instant, time stops. I can’t hear the rain falling anymore, I no longer feel my clothes sticking to my skin, the mud has no smell, and I don’t see Heather cocking the gun. When a bird, blue, maybe black, takes off from the roof of the car, I think the sound is a shot and crumple to the ground.
A band of yellow bleeding into red appears at the edge of the night, a corona surrounding the darkness as if the sun were setting at the same moment everywhere and spreading the hues of an impossible twilight across the bottom of the sky. If I didn’t know it was an illusion, I’d have thought the end of days had arrived, annihilating the Earth in bursts of blinding colour.
Did Heather really shoot at me, did the bullet really pierce my leather jacket, or did the fear of dying make me anticipate the shot — and the shock its impact would cause?
For several long minutes, I was deaf, as happens to anyone when their senses are exposed to a super-loud explosion, and hurled to the ground with a searing pain in their chests. Night fell and I was still there, curled up on the spongy ground and waiting for coyotes surely attracted by the scent of blood to come shred my flesh.
I no longer remember how I got home, but excepting the bruise marbling my right breast — which hit a root when I fell — my chest is in one piece. I can’t remember any of it anymore, except for Heather’s face, white as plaster, and the noise of the gun that deafened me.