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.
“No, not that, not snow,” says Heather quietly, halted by the new scent in the wind, her memory absorbed by a blizzard that whipped her skin till it was red and the roar of the snowmobiles that once chased her. Gun, she thinks, gun, quick, and she struggles back up the slope, catching her breath as she moves level with the carpet of dead leaves, before finally making her way back to the spot where the Buick stopped, its path blocked by the mass of trees.
Vigilantly looking around, she supports herself on a branch and opens the Buick’s trunk, which squeaks like an old rusty door. Lying on the worn carpet in the back of it gleams the gun she expected to find. Not far away, the blade of the axe she dropped as she made her way out of the car sparkles amid the shards of glass.
I was right. So was Holy Crappy Owl. The little woman isn’t innocent. She came here as a scout, to spy on me and gather information about Heather Thorne, about how I live, about the set-up of the house. She also used the opportunity to note the arrangement of my study, which she could see out of the corner of her glazed eye as she was sitting at the kitchen table.
As for the son, he’s not the innocent victim of a cunning mother. He, too, is in it up to his neck, pushed into it by the brute of an older brother for whom he feels limitless admiration. I never should have opened up my house to this teenager looking too ordinary to be true, nor to that woman with the too-widely spaced toes, who probably saw the shadow of the bombyx on my desk and my manuscript, open to page 102 and the scene where Heather writes the note implicating Ferland and McMillan.
I was in the Canadian Tire of the town nearest to me that afternoon, shopping for new windshield wipers. Since I was already there, I decided to buy some of the hardware we needed to strengthen the fences, you can never have too much. I was putting it all in my cart when I noticed them — the woman and the son — in the hunting-equipment aisle. They were accompanied by Gilles Ferland, who likely did still hunt as he had a camo jacket in his cart, as well as a decoy for calling moose and a few other items plainly indicating that he didn’t plan to spend the fall sitting in his living room.
I slipped into a side aisle so they wouldn’t notice me and wondered what I should do. And that was when the small woman walked past the end of my aisle with her son, recognized me, and dodged away. I needed to catch up with her before she disappeared so I could be sure that Ferland was real. I noticed her heading toward the exit. She was shod in tall, dirty boots, like the kind you wear fishing, but I couldn’t help seeing the outline of her toes under the rubber, the toes of devils, hypocrites, and liars.
“Mrs. Ferland!” I shouted as she passed through the closing doors. Hearing my voice, she turned around sharply, grabbed her son by the arm and dragged him into the parking lot. By the time I was outside, a red truck was squealing its tires on the wet asphalt.
This incident happened a few hours ago and I’m still in shock. I repeat to Holy Crappy Owl that he was right, that we were taken in, and Holy waggles, “I told you so, I told you so, it was written,” as the two sad sisters go to sleep in a corner of my study, the head of one resting on the other’s shoulder, and P. snores on the second floor, unaware that he was also deceived and now I am a genuine danger to him.
Heather frantically munches her way through the few pistachios remaining in the bottom of the container she always keeps in her car. The phosphorescent clock on the dashboard tells her she’s been there for around six hours, which is confirmed by the light slowly brightening the sky, but she’s convinced that she’s been in the clearing a lot longer than that, that young tree shoots will soon poke their way through the Buick’s floor to lick at the windshield and surface through the rusty roof, and that the place she’s in is not unknown to her, and it’s possible that the clock has shown 6:15 numerous times since the accident, even if her thigh is not yet healed, even if her scratches are still bleeding. Her knowledge of the surrounding area is far too intimate for her to have only spent one night there.
She gets out of the car and sits down beside a pine tree, the gun between her legs and the axe by her side, wondering just what she should do: wait for her suspected assailant, or look for somewhere to take shelter? But where can a woman with no idea who she is, or where she comes from, find shelter? She clings to the few words that might give her some semblance of identity: “My name must be Andrée, Andrée A. I’m an injured woman, fleeing.”
Repeating the words, she tries to view them from without and to see herself as separate from the words and not one entity with them. She strives to anchor herself in some sort of reality, but can’t make out her body, her face — still can’t see her face, even though she’s spent ages staring into the side mirror of the car, which broke from the impact of the accident and is dangling down the door: blue eyes, the iris encircled with yellow; fine, mid-length hair, naturally wavy; pale lips, and a high forehead partly hidden by uneven bangs. But all this is getting muddled, the lips are stretching out or thickening, the nose is lengthening, the face is becoming a mask, a caricature.
“Jesus,” she spits out suddenly, which teaches her something else: she’s an injured woman who swears when things go wrong. And things are definitely going wrong, very badly wrong. Her injured leg is preventing her from concentrating and representing herself clearly in the world: me, me, maybe Andrée, lost, Andrée A. She doesn’t know what the A stands for; for indecision, maybe, or to feminize a name whose gender is determined by a silent vowel.
As for her surname, she doesn’t even know its first letter. But she feels that her father is close by, in this forest that will soon reveal her real name to her. She can sense his presence in the smells around her, in the sun warming her feet shod in heavy boots, men’s boots, made for walking far away from the noise of inhabitated places, but which are currently no use whatsoever because of the wounded leg that will force her to crawl if she decides to leave, or to improvise crutches or a cane with broken branches. But it is becoming increasingly clear that she won’t leave, or at least not before she is certain that, wherever she goes, she’ll be able to confront the men who hunted her down. Her memory is empty but alert. She can sense the attackers’ imminent arrival.
How could I not have recognized Ferland’s wife, who challenged me with her weary gaze on the day before Christmas Eve from her living room window? Despite the distance, I observed the oval of her face, the blackness of her dyed hair, how much smaller she was than her sons. I’d seen her hand grip the younger boy’s shoulder, move a stray lock away from her forehead, but I didn’t put it all together.
Gloria Ferland, as I will call her now for expediency’s sake — and because it’s impossible to separate her from Gilles, her dreadful husband — Gloria Ferland is one of those women whose face you forget as soon as you turn away, its evasive and empty eyes, too unremarkable for the memory of them to stick, the ordinary lips. Hers is a mask that dissolves when other people aren’t looking and disappears when the door closes on its banality. Gloria Ferland is the sort of person only distinguished by some lack in their physiognomy which, most often hidden, defines their entire identity.
Unsettled by this observation, I wake up Holy Crappy Owl to tell him the little woman is called Gloria, and that you have to see her feet to understand her true nature. Crappy, barely emerged from the universe of his mad dreams, immediately snorts with laughter. “Gloria! Gloria! Gloria!” he screeches before intoning a song of his own invention about Gloria’s feet.