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.