Back Roads Read online

  Back Roads

  Also by Andrée A. Michaud

  (in translation)

  Boundary (The Last Summer)

  The River of Dead Trees

  back roads

  Andrée A. Michaud

  Translated by J. C. Sutcliffe

  Copyright © Éditions Québec Amérique, Inc., 2017

  English translation copyright © 2020 by J. C. Sutcliffe

  First published as Routes secondaires in 2017 by Éditions Québec Amérique

  First published in English in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Back roads / Andrée A. Michaud ; translated by Juliet Sutcliffe.

  Other titles: Routes secondaires. English

  Names: Michaud, Andrée A., 1957– author. | Sutcliffe, J. C., translator.

  Description: Translation of: Routes secondaires.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190165421 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190165456 | ISBN 9781487005801 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487005818 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487005825 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8576.I217 R6813 2020 | DDC C843/.54—dc23

  Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future, for our translation activities.

  To P., for P. M.

  All the characters in this novel lived between

  March 1, 2014, and January 19, 2017.

  Then I went back into the house and wrote,

  It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.

  It was not midnight. It was not raining.

  — Samuel Beckett, Molloy

  I must be called Heather. She must be called Heather. I’ve been repeating these sentences over and over for months without managing to figure out what they mean. Little by little, they’ve lost their clarity and become an obsession.

  I must be called Heather. She must be called Heather.

  Fall was nearly over when these few words showed up and imposed themselves on me like an injunction, like some kind of obligation I’d be skeptical about if I were able to think more calmly. I was walking on the gravel road I’d known since childhood, keeping an eye out for furtive movements in the undergrowth, a rustling of leaves or a cracking of branches that would indicate the presence of an animal other than myself in the shifting shadows. With all my senses alert, I was imagining a novel in which I would convey the mysterious power of this undergrowth when suddenly I stopped right in the middle of the road, dumbstruck, murmuring, “I must be called Heather, she must be called Heather.”

  For a few moments, I was nothing more than these two interchangeable sentences, I must be called Heather, she must be called Heather, as if some truth buried under the weight of years had resurfaced in the sweet October wind. And then I felt something bubbling up in me, the sort of relief that follows a long period of waiting, and I was finally able to relax. I had just sketched out the beginning of the novel I’d been seeking in the undergrowth.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I stood there, but the sun was setting when the noise of a car coming over the hill behind me forced me to step back toward the ditch, where soggy leaves lined the thin trail of a stream that widened out a little further on.

  The car slowed down when it reached me, the woman driving it probably curious as to why I wasn’t moving and suspecting some problem, a situation demanding that she stop and help me there and then, by the rapidly darkening forest. When our eyes met, I tried to convey the smile I felt blooming in me, as a feeling of peace filled me at last. But my smile quickly vanished when I realized the eyes looking back at me were my own.

  Stunned by the resemblance, I retreated another step and raised my arms, as if to touch the face I was backing away from — the face of the woman scrutinizing me with widened eyes that were blue, just like mine — wanting to feel its features the way blind people do. And then, seeing her panic-stricken expression — the clichéd image that sprang to mind was of a doe being chased by a pack of wolves — I lowered my arms and signalled to her to carry on, that everything was fine. When her car disappeared around the bend, I went down to the stream, my quaking legs crumpling to the earth, to try to see my reflection in it. Kneeling down at the edge of the water, the trickle of which was too thin to reflect anything more than my fear, I dipped into the surface of the water with my fingertips and murmured a name, Heather, because I had understood, when our incredulous eyes recognized each other, that the woman in the car was called Heather, that she had to be called Heather, and that henceforth our fates would be inextricably linked.

  I.

  Sometimes circumstances conspire to change a life forever. The banality of this statement, as unoriginal as the image I’d entertained of a panic-stricken deer, only renders it more true, especially when you have been feeling no desire whatsoever to change the course of events, nor yearning for an accident or a miracle to turn your world upside down. Expecting nothing, you merely postpone a meeting, stare at the sky — weather’s not good — and jump into your car, planning to take shelter in a movie theatre while rain pours down over the city. And then the bad weather catches up with you and you never make it to the theatre to see that movie you weren’t much interested in seeing anyway, a thriller you’d only selected for the pleasure of admiring the sweat-glistening muscles of its celebrity actor.

  That’s what happened that day. I went to the movies.

  My work was going nowhere. I was moving around in circles and couldn’t summon up any interest in the words lined up in front of me, my thoughts constantly drifting off to the blue sky and the clouds. Instead of concentrating on the page I’d scrawled over too much, or helping P. to repair the fence demarcating a section of our property, I’d jumped into my car, true to the woman wanting to be secluded in the darkness of a cinema with Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, or Clive Owen, and headed for the 4th Line, where I parked in an empty spot near the first bend in the road, the point beyond which my gaze would meet Heather’s.

  Would I have noticed Heather had I arrived ten minutes earlier or later, if I’d decided to go and buy the papers before my walk or go say hi to an old friend? And if I had seen her then, would the meeting have had the same significance, the same consequences?

  Ever since that day in October when I left the house anticipating nothing, I’ve wondered what would have happened if I’d put down the work that was boring me sooner, or if for instance I’d walked somewhere else along the road people around here call La Languette, after the part of the forest it dissects. It’s a route I’d likely walked every Sunday afternoon of the previous winter, looking for shadows in the undergrowth, listening for dry branches cracking, imagining an armed man leaping out of the bleak woods, someone who, not hesitating to shoot, would reduce me to being the victim of a tragic hunting accident, one of those characters you come across in novels only because they actually exist in real life.

  Perhaps it was fear of this man, whose violence was more in keeping with fall, that inspired me to turn left at the entrance to the village and hurry toward another destiny — toward, who knows, my own violent nature. Because I don’t yet know where that decision will lead me, the one I took on that October afternoon
when time weighed so heavily on me, impelling me to get in my car, turn left, park by the first bend on the 4th Line, and leave my vehicle in order to feel the earth beneath my feet, stopping in front of the undergrowth behind which rises a mound where blueberries grow so abundantly every August.

  I don’t yet know because the story has hardly begun and will inevitably be subject to a chain of events to which I’ll have to defer, for the simple reason that being suspicious of even the slightest sunny spell, of the most insignificant of unexpected visits, runs the risk of your no longer being able to tell true from false. All I can do is anticipate the events that will, from now on, determine the fate of a woman named Heather, in other words, my own fate, because I know without a shadow of a doubt the story won’t stop there: the machine is already in motion, and any attempts I make to stop its momentum will do nothing but trigger repercussions — and, I fear, incidents as unpredictable as they are disastrous.

  * * *

  I never again saw Heather at the wheel of her car, an old-model Buick that churned up thick, stagnant clouds of dust in the dense air. Every afternoon for two weeks, I went back to the same gravel road at sunset, ready to wave in a gesture of recognition as soon as the Buick appeared over the hill. But Heather never came that way again, never at that hour when the woods dissolve into shadow, cleaving the world into two opposed universes: one in which cars drive toward the setting sun, still free for a time, and another in which they recede into the forest.

  By the end of the fifteenth afternoon, knowing that I would never again see Heather fleeing in the dusky light, I decided it was time to wrestle with the destiny of a woman who, simply by the fact of her existence, had encroached on my own.

  I went back home, double-locked my study door and then, sitting in front of a brand-new notebook, placed Heather’s car across the road leading to a cabin by the first bend of the 4th Line. After hesitating for a few seconds, I closed my eyes in order to conjure up Heather’s panic-stricken smile, the image of the doe, my pen gliding over the bright white paper. The Buick appeared, and I pressed down on the gas pedal.

  A radio was crackling inside the car, and a young woman was announcing glorious weather for the following day. That’s the actual word she used, glorious, just like the sun, its last rays hitting Heather’s rear-view mirror and blinding her. This was also the last word Heather heard, glorious, perhaps even the last word she murmured, surrounded as she was by the beauty of the setting sun before the trees leaned aside to make space for her car as it skidded in a shower of chromatic sparks; before the branches of balsam pines shattered the windshield as the engine groaned and a squeal of metal announced she’d arrived at her destination, a place from which she could neither move forward nor retreat, in the heart of darkness.

  * * *

  I’ve been trying to sleep for two hours now, but every time I’m about to drop off, I’m yanked unceremoniously from slumber by noises of crumpling metal mingled with Heather’s voice reminding me it’s going to be a beautiful day tomorrow. Glorious, she gasps, glorious . . .

  In the darkness I see my alarm clock’s phosphorescent numbers and wonder about the motives that compelled me to bring Heather back, pressing hard on the gas pedal, abandoning her in the woods, and forcing her to set off on a hike whose destination I do not know.

  The more the night wears on, the more my insomnia-induced anxiety makes me question whether I’ve made the right choices. By the weak light of my alarm clock, the certainty contained within the two phrases, “I must be called Heather, she must be called Heather,” no longer seems as clear as it had at the end of the afternoon when they had, by virtue of their suddenness, seemed as clear as the eye of the cat watching me from the foot of the bed. What had at first seemed an imperative — my name must be Heather, I have no choice but to be called Heather — slowly dissolved in the verb’s imprecision and became nothing more than one possibility among many: I must be Heather, I think I’m Heather, I’m probably Heather.

  I turn these possibilities over and over without managing to conclude anything concrete, because none of the options throws light upon the nature of my relationship with the woman whose name was revealed to me just before fate arranged our encounter. The meeting to which we were both invited ought to have been enough to convince me, but the night draws me into thoughts that aren’t exactly conducive to the reconciliation which needs to happen between Heather and me if I’m not to remain permanently stuck in the mire of that fall day when I decided to set out on the 4th Line.

  For the hundredth time, I recall the colour of the sky when I got out of the car, the yellowish light of the birches contrasting with the shadows accumulating beneath the pines, the barely audible rustling of the branches, and then the silence that had enveloped me when, in the middle of the dusty road, I’d murmured, “I must be called Heather.” For the hundredth time, I softly repeat the decree that haunts me, “I must, I must . . .” and calmness finally joins the silence.

  I’m not mistaken. I really am called Heather. Heather Thorne. She’s called Heather Thorne.

  * * *

  It was completely dark when Heather Thorne emerged from the limbo she’d been thrown into by the impact. In front of her, the clock glowing on the dashboard — the only element linking her with the world she’s come from — shows quarter after midnight, but she doesn’t understand what those numbers mean any more than she understands the blood smearing the windshield. Temporarily, Heather Thorne has lost her memory. She is, temporarily, a purely mechanical object; she owes the meagre consciousness animating the surface of her gaze, as she stares out into the night, to the blood beating in her veins.

  As for my own gaze into the darkness, it’s one of feebleness. Falling stars cast vague patterns on the curtains blowing in the wind, and, with the cat beside me, I sink into peaceful sleep as, far away, the sound of screeching metal that has been drowning out the cries of blackbirds abates.

  It’s quarter after seven when the smell of coffee pulls me out of the forest where Heather, stuck inside her car, watches the glowing clock of my insomniac night. Feeling serene, I go downstairs to join P., who is busy at the kitchen counter. I kiss his neck and say, “Good morning, my darling.” I pour myself a cup of coffee and, after consuming three slices of bread and cream cheese, go outside to see the sun. Truly, the day will be glorious.

  * * *

  A silk moth or hawk moth — I’m not very good on moths, but it’s some kind of bombyx — keeps banging into the lamp lighting my desk. It’s quarter after midnight and I’ve just written the sentence “Why ‘Heather’?”

  I read it again: “Why ‘Heather’?”

  From his armchair, the cat keeps an eye on the bombyx, which is now trapped in the lampshade, crashing into it with a desperate fluttering of its wings, or at least that’s how I interpret its agitation. It’s the survival instinct kicking in, a manifestation of despair. With its wings spread, the little creature hits the lampshade with a strength that pushes living things far away from everything that could pose a danger to it, until a desire more powerful than its fragile will to stay alive makes it come back and throw itself at the bulb. I convince myself I can almost hear the noise of its feet sizzling.

  Why Heather?

  It’s because of the name’s sonority, the warmth I ascribe to it — heat, to heat, to heat up — when really it should evoke a landscape. Heath. Moorland covered in a purple flowering shrub. The flames licking at the name that appeared before me in the October chill are merely an illusion, I know, but I like maintaining this illusion, imagining a spark setting fire to the heather while the roaring blaze smothers the sound of someone yelling my original first name — Andrée, a name whose ambivalence designates me both male and female, an androgynous person whose femininity hangs on a silent vowel.

  It’s Heather’s deceptive warmth that has seduced me, like the light luring in the moth that has just smashed into my desk, its legs beating a
t the air with a mildly convulsive movement. In the morning, I will find it dead in the same spot.

  * * *

  I can hear P. snoring behind the dividing wall, P., who is unaware he is no longer simply my partner, but also that of a woman named Heather Thorne. I’m not telling him. He’ll realize soon enough, when, with shards of glass hanging from her wet hair, Heather comes back from the tiny clearing where her car stopped — if she ever does come back — and he’ll see her talking to me, two identical women sitting face to face at my desk, where, remonstrating at the heavens, they’ll determine their futures.

  Tonight the sky is clear and I can’t sleep. I count the cracks in the ceiling and wonder if my intervention could have saved the bombyx and if it is still possible to save Heather from a night of pain and fear. Of course, I could always rip out the page in which I determine that her Buick will be driven into the forest and instead let it fly toward the setting sun, but in order to do that I’d have to backtrack.

  It’s the writer’s prerogative to rub out her tracks should they get stuck in claggy soil, but that’s a cop-out benefitting only the reader who would not then see the moth underneath her muddy soles. And there will still be a dead moth on my desk, buried under the accumulated mass of other creatures I hadn’t saved from a certain end other than by destroying the page describing their death throes. But this type of rescue is merely an illusion: they carry on dying in the garbage can anyway. So, in the forest, Heather touches her aching head and waits for me to allow the sun to rise and set time in motion again.