CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Dominique

Dominique drove towards the cottage, up a little hill, and then around bend. She slowed and then stopped her car.

A hundred feet from the driveway to the cottage, on the far side of the road, the back end of a big rusty red dump truck stuck out of the ditch, perpendicular to the road. Black skid marks on the grey asphalt snaked a route from the top of the hill in front of her, past the driveway on the left, with a little loopy swerve, and then a hard right into the ditch. The truck sat motionless and silent. Whatever energy had generated the crash she'd heard was dissipated now – transferred directly into the earth of the ditch, all that momentum absorbed, without even the slightest detectable variation in orbit of the planet Earth. It was as if that truck had always been there, part of the landscape, a hunk of metal and rubber rock dropped by the receding glaciers ten thousand years ago.

She got out of the car. A strand of her black hair stuck to her lips, and she brushed at it absently as she approached the truck. The driver slumped over the steering wheel, blood trickling down his cheek in a twisting rivulet that bordered a big grey mutton-chop sideburn. The man's arms clutched at the steering wheel as if it were the most precious thing in the world, the only thing that might save him, keep him afloat.

Are you OK? Dominique asked softly through the open window, not sure whether he was alive or dead or conscious. The driver said nothing and she asked again, touching him gently on the shoulder.

He looked up at her, and at first smiling, but the smile faded into confusion.

Are you badly hurt?

You have black hair, he said, resting his head again on his arms.

He must be in shock, she thought, probably concussed. I'm going to call for help, she said. Are you OK?

She was a blonde, he answered, and made a clucking sound with his tongue. Oh, sweet Mary, he said. She was a blonde. He wasn't crying exactly, but it looked as if there was nothing in the world he wanted to do more than cry.

It took Dominique a minute or two of questioning, answered in flat monosyllables, to understand what had happened. That he'd hit a blonde girl, that he'd crested the hill to find her standing there, that he'd tried to swerve to avoid her, but he didn't react fast enough. He was changing the radio station, and now how in the hell was he to know there'd be a girl standing in the middle of the goddamn road, what in the hell was she doing there? He'd never had an accident in his life, used to haul truck for a living, back when he was young, big 18-wheelers, across Quebec and Ontario and New York State and Vermont, not so much as a parking ticket all of '65, '66, and '67. Been hauling gravel for two years now and …

Dominique realized it was old Donald Pagé, Donald Pagé former lord of this back country swampland, former cattle farmer and sheep herder and snow plower, and now, unsurprisingly, gravel hauler. And possibly accidental killer of blonde pedestrians.

You stay here, Dominique told him. I'll look for the girl.

I ain't going anywhere, he said, I think my leg is broken.

She tried her cell phone, stabbing frantically at the little buttons, as she raced up and down the road, searching the ditch. The cell phone didn't work. There was no coverage back here – there never had been. She stuffed the phone back into her pocket.

She look up and down the ditch by the truck, but there was no one there. Did the girl run off? Did she even exist? Maybe old Donald Pagé was drunk and imagining things?

She crossed the road.

And as soon as Dominique reached the other side, she saw her. She lay on her back in a patch of goldenrods on the far side of the dank ditch, arms stretched out. Blood everywhere. Dead? Alive? Motionless in any case.

Dominique jumped across the ditch, and scrambled towards the girl. She knelt down, her knees pressing into cool mud.

Evan, the girl moaned softly. Evan.

Alive.

Evan, the girl said again, and Dominique vaguely wondered whether this was a friend of Julian's brother. Julian had mentioned something about Evan coming out here months ago. But her mind was too set on getting things done to let this question slow her down. She notice now a bloody wedding band on the outstretched hand.

It's OK, she said. Very carefully, she moved the red-caked blonde hair from the girl's eyes. She couldn't identify any specific sources of blood – it was everywhere, on the girl's face, on her hands and arms, red stains all over her white t-shirt.

She felt strangely serene, not panicked at all. How am I supposed to be reacting? she wondered, in a parallel part of her mind, while she asked: Can you hear me?

The girl elicited a low, moaning, Yes.

What is your name?

Evan? said the girl into the air, with a pitiful intonation of a question, her voice raising up an octave and then trailing off. I can't see you.

I'm Dominique. My name is Dominique, and everything is going to be OK. Shhh.

The girl lifted one of her outstretched arms an inch or two off the ground, making little motions with her fingers.

Don't, Dominique said softly. Don't try to move. She caressed the girl's blood-soaked forehead gently. I'm going to get an ambulance right now, she said. To go telephone for an ambulance, but you sit tight, you're going to be OK, I'll be right back.

Evan? The girl said. I'm ...

It's OK, Dominique said. Just don't try to move.

...I'm ...

OK, don't try to...

I'm sorry Evan.

OK, OK.

I'm sorry.

It's OK, Dominique whispered softly. It doesn't matter now. It's OK.

Dominique stood up, jumped the ditch, and sprinted towards the house, crunching up the white gravel driveway. She raced up the four steps to the wooden deck, worried that she might slip and crack her own skull. She found the French doors open and grabbed the old phone on the counter inside. She dialed the police station in Knowlton, the number listed on a sticker on the phone, screaming JULIAN as the phone rang at the other end. Julian! … ringgggg … Julian!

A gruff woman finally answered the phone (the receiver seemed unbelievably heavy to Dominique for some reason). There was a frustrating moment when Dominique forgot how to describe where they were: towards Sutton, she said, you know on the on the on the ... you know near ... the old Farmer's Rest? Near Madame Benoit? Mount Echo. Past that... You know? Mount Echo Road.

The woman assured Dominique that she knew exactly where she was, and that Jean would be there right away in the cruiser, was leaving right now – Bye, Jean, she called out, Vite! so that Dominique could hear, and somehow that comforted her, let her imagine a kind man rushing to her aid, speeding towards the dying girl out there. An ambulance would be coming too, the woman said, as soon as they got off the phone. The Provincial Police as well.

Dominique hung up, hurried to the bathroom and grabbed some towels, and pulled a bottle of water out of the fridge on her way out the door.

She ran back to the accident, with her meager supplies and sympathy, all she could offer. She jogged by the old man shouting, You OK? I found her.

I'm OK, he answered. Is she alive?

For now, Dominique called, already heading towards the girl.

Thank God, she heard Donald Pagé say, and Dominique thought, What for?

She knelt down, and gave the girl some water, tried to gently clean some of the blood off of her forehead and eyes. She had no idea what to do next.

Help is coming, she said, but the girl didn't answer.

The police came. Two cars, one the Knowlton police, the other a Provincial Police cruiser with a female cop. An ambulance arrived a few minutes later.

Dominique knelt by the girl, holding her hand. The authorities gently took over, and she was lead away, by the female cop, who asked her a few questions about the accident, and if she needed anything. The cop helped Dominique into the back seat of the cruiser, before she was called away to help with the girl.

Dominique realized she was crying, and she got out of the car to shake off the tears. She thought of offering to help but everyone looked so busy and competent.

Fifteen minutes later, the girl, and dazed old Pagé were taken away in the same ambulance, the siren wailing on the empty road as the yellow vehicle disappeared.

Shortly afterward, a tow truck arrived. For several minutes the cops and the tow truck guy chatted away, laughing– was the tow guy flirting with the girl cop? Dominique stood waiting, wondering why no one was paying attention to her. This was just another day for these people, used to car accidents and dying girls, why should they get upset? How could they get up in the morning if they felt like Dominique felt now every time they saw a bloodied girl? It was another day at the office for them, just as Dominique could still flirt on the phone after spending a day reviewing harrowing refugee statements. We can adapt to anything.

The tow truck guy hooked the gravel truck with chains and winches, while the cops sat in their cars, writing. Dominique stood there wiping the non-existent tears off her dry cheeks, wondering when she would be told what happens next.

The police took her statement a little later, sitting at the kitchen table in the cottage. She told them that her husband was writing out here, that she had just arrived to visit him. She speculated that Julian was out hiking. They found the girl's driver's license, Annabel Hand. Maybe Julian's brother's wife, she said. I don't know.

Do you know where the husband is? they asked. She shook her head.

We'll find him, the one named Jean told her. And tell your husband to call us as soon as he gets in. He handed her a card. Jean Robichaud. He was handsome in his way, he looked like a joke-teller, with a big round jaw, milky skin and a dark beard pushing up from his clean shaved cheeks.

She stood at the door looking after the cruiser as it pulled out of the driveway. She continued staring at the trees, looking west, across the road, where an overgrown, marshy meadow gave way to scrub forest of birch, oak, maple, and spruce, behind which the sun would set in a few hours. A bird – robin? red winged black bird? it was too far away to tell – fluttered around black power lines suspended between tilting telephone poles. Crickets and grasshoppers sawed their lament, wind rustled through the trees, the leaves gently waving in the air, everything exactly the same as it was yesterday at this time, exactly the same as it would have been if the girl hadn't been hit by the truck, exactly the same as it was before Dominique held the dying girl's hand as she gurgled, and then fell unconscious. Exactly the same as it would be tomorrow.

It was Dominique who was different now.

Is she going to die? she had asked the ambulance attendant, a bald man with a big belly and the fair, splotchy face of a former cherub.

I hope not, he answered, pulling up his belt. I'll pray for her, he had whispered, so that his colleague, a pretty little woman, with a huge maroon ambulance-issue jacket that almost came to her knees, couldn't hear. He said this as they lifted the girl up on the stretcher and slid her into the ambulance. When the doors were shut, he'd said, quietly again: It's what we can do to help now. Pray.

She went back inside, wondering what to do next. The fireplace was smoldering still, and she wondered why Julian had a fire on. The thought never crystalized into something complete, and she moved on looking at all these old pieces of art, exactly where she remembered them, the big lamp made out of a giant, green-glass bottle, two feet across; the old rusty wood, iron and leather skates hanging on the wall, that same odd collection of books: The Family Circus Collection Vol. 3, Hoyle's Book of Card Games, The Field Guide to North American Birds, a collection of Rabelais translations, and an old, tattered copy of Peter Pan and Wendy. The same books that had always been here, along with others random books from garage sales and library fund-raisers, unchanged since before Julian's mother and father had died. Unchanged, she imagined, since 1985.

She went up to Julian's old room, found his clothes, and a typewriter on the little desk. Where was the famous text he was writing? She looked in the closet, under the bed, in all the drawers. She found an old Monopoly set, two children's life jackets, a tin filled with rocks, an old pack of safety matches and a Swiss Army knife. But she found no manuscript. She wandered into Natasha's room and looked out the window at the driveway. This room empty, but for a trunk filled with old Hudson's Bay blankets and board games, and a bed no one ever slept in, except the ghost of the female Hand sibling, killed in another car accident, years ago.

Dominique went down the stairs and explored the master bedroom.

This must be where Evan and Annabel spent their nights. She looked with mild curiosity at the clothes of these strangers, sporty and sensible, polar fleeces and fancy cycling clothes, and then at the books on the bedside tables: Chicken Soup for the Businessman's Soul, God's Soldiers, Killer Abs and How to Keep Them, Building Your Congregation: A Practical Guide, How to Say NO to Pornography.

She wondered whether these were Julian's books, whether he planned to build a congregation with his fantasies. Or maybe they were Evan's. Granola Evan the pothead adventurer, why not? Maybe they were both prophets, maybe it was in their genes, a long family tradition, that skipped their father's generation. She wished she'd known about this family trait before she married Julian. Maybe she'd married into a cult.

She lay down on the big king-sized bed staring up at the stained cedar boards of the ceiling, stretching her arms out in an inadvertent imitation of the girl – Annabel Hand, of Tigris, California, aged 23 (birthdate: November 15, Scorpio). She thought back to herself at 23, newly arrived in London, frightened and sure of herself. Nothing but choices in front of her, options, possibilities in every direction.

Where the hell is Julian? The window was open, a breeze rustled in the trees outside first, then sent the blue-and-green striped curtain billowing like the sail of a ship, puffing out towards her, as if it were alive.

She closed her eyes, but could not get the image of the girl's bloody face out of her mind. Evan ... the girl had said, Evan... I'm sorry. What a way to go, apologizing to the wrong person, a, person who had no claim on your absolution.

Well, she wasn't Evan, but she could forgive the girl anyway, for whatever her transgression. I forgive you, Annabel, for whatever you've done. I forgive you.

Dominique wished she had had the presence of mind to say those words when she was holding Annabel's hand.

Somehow it was six-thirty, she'd been lying on the bed for an hour now, and she'd almost forgotten the reason she came out to the country in the first place. Ah, yes, to get her husband back. Or, rather, she hadn't quite forgotten, but her problems with Julian seemed so far away now, this religious stuff, the frightening conversations she'd had on the phone. She wondered why she ever debated about whether to tell him about the pregnancy (Jesus, she was pregnant... she'd even forgotten about that). Of course she would tell him right away.

She walked down to the garden and admired the work that had been done – it looked impressively fecund, full of potential – the raised rows all straight as a surveyor's line, tiny shoots of green coming up in spots, a couple of dozen new wooden posts driven in in rows. Julian had been busy out here, building this garden, and Dominique had a flash of a future for them out here, with child, childs, plural, children, without the terrible stress of her job and it's grim daily grind of global tragedy. Yes, she thought, I could spend time out here, being fed by my garden, walking in the woods every day. Maybe I could start painting? Or antiquing, I could do the yard sale circuit and fix up old furniture, could read all those backlogged books, spend afternoons on the deck there with a cool lemonade and a good book, Julian in the kitchen making something wonderful ... our friends could come out and visit, remark on the quiet, the simple life we built for ourselves out here, at how quickly the kids had grown.

She felt her belly with her hand, caressed it, and it felt the same as it felt yesterday, and the week before and two weeks before. Was she really pregnant? Three tests said yes – the first one terrifying, the second one annoying, and the third one just confusing, and maybe wonderful. But they all said yes.

And now something was growing in her belly, something of her, of Julian, but not her and not Julian. A little life begun. She opened the gate of the garden and walked back onto the grass.

She was crying again – this she didn't like, this new propensity to tears, hormones she assumed as she wiped at her face angrily. Enough of this crying stuff. The main thing was to find Julian.

She walked down past the garden, towards the meadow that the lawn gave out onto – it was once cattle pasture, she knew – probably Pagé pastureland – and there were old apple trees of a former orchard further down, on the other side of the big rock outcropping, all of it in the shadow of Mount Echo out there, green and unmoving, its gentle slopes and rounded angles strangely comforting to her now. Where the lawn ended the grasses were waist tall, a whole collection of wild flowers, and grass and ferns and the occasional bush, all crisscrossed with deer trails.

Julian! She called out as loudly as she could, cupping her hands to her mouth. Julian!

Mount Echo, true to its name, echoed her husband's name back at her, once and twice. Julian! She called again, louder, and heard in response the sad sound of her voice, reflecting off that great, green ripple in the continent, Mount Echo: AN-an.

She did not stray far into the woods around the house. Dominique was not a natural country girl, without a guide in the forest back here she would be lost. She never walked back there except with Julian, and she remembered Julian telling her about a couple of kids who got lost in the swampy backlands here for two days before they were found -- by Donald Pagé, riding an ATV, two decades ago.

On her walks in the woods here, she was always surprised when they emerged again into a clearing with the house in view. She was forever imagining that the house was over to the left, or the right, or in the opposite direction. And where it was always seemed to be in about the last place she would have bet on, had her life been in the balance – which taught her, eventually, to completely discount her sense of direction in the woods, and rely completely on others. Which meant, essentially, that unless she was following a well-marked path (of which there were very few), she got nervous as soon as the house was out of sight. It all looked the same to her, the trees and rocks and pathways, so it was always a relief when the house or road reappeared, and her internal compass was reset to, I know where I am now.

She'd learned to trust Julian. He never seemed to get lost, though one time he misjudged the time, and they had stayed out in the woods too late. They were stuck a mere ten minute walk from the house, but it was pitch black, impossible to see stones or trees or branches. They'd made it back, thank God, holding hands, and cold, and Julian had twisted his ankle falling over a log. At the time, it was all Dominique could do to stop from bawling. She spent those last ten minutes sure they would freeze to death and be attacked by wild animals – bears, coyotes, wolves, lynxes, or even the wolverine one of Julian's childhood had apparently seen out in the woods.

As she inched herself into the woods now, calling Julian's name, she remembered that fear, the terror, and panicked again. What a day, she thought to herself, laughing a little, and not certain that she wouldn't start crying. She retreated back to the known world of civilization. Even if it was abandoned civilization.

There was nothing to do now that she could think of, but wait for Julian. His car was here, his clothes were here, his typewriter was here – though no book, which was a relief. She wasn't sure how she would have coped in her fragile state with reading Julian's mystical tome, especially a draft version in need of copyediting. She climbed back up to the house and considered finding herself one of those badly-hidden bottles of alcohol – brandy and Scotch – that Cedric Hand had kept scattered around the cupboards and nooks of the house and that were still around, in abstract and unacknowledged homage to the gracious old man who enjoyed his nips of spirits now and then. She remembered, for perhaps the tenth time today, with the same feeling of shock and surprise, that she was pregnant, yes pregnant, and there would be no getting drunk now.

She was hungry. She opened the fridge, found some leftover chili, heated it up on the stove and wolfed it down. If Julian was expecting to eat that for dinner, well, he'd have to think of something else. He had a pregnant wife to feed.

The police called to say that Annabel was in critical condition in the hospital in Cowansville, and they'd tracked down Evan, who was there with her. They gave Dominique Evan's phone number, and though she didn't feel like calling him -- she'd only met Evan twice -- she hung up and dialed his number immediately.

She vaguely hoped to get his voice mail, but he picked up on the first ring.

Hi Evan, this is Dominique. She added: Julian's wife.

I know, he said, and she couldn't get a feeling for his voice, for his mood. She continued: I, ah, saw Annabel, I called the ambulance.

I know, he said, I know you did.

How is she doing? she asked, fearing the answer.

Alive, Evan said. Lots of broken bones, and internal bleeding and all sorts of things, but she's alive. Maybe brain damage, but they don't know yet. They don't really know anything. We just have to wait.

Well, she said, into the silence that occupied the space between them. She'd always found Evan difficult to deal with. She felt sick to her stomach talking to him now. Well, God, can I come down to help? Do you need anything? Food?

Can I talk to Julian? he asked suddenly. Dominique recognized the sound of a smoker taking a long drag on a cigarette.

Well that's the thing Evan, she answered. I don't know where he is. Do you? I guess he's out hiking, but it's getting dark now. I expected him back sooner.

She heard him exhaling another breath of smoke, felt the twinge of tobacco craving herself. To be quashed. No more of that.

The last I saw him, Evan said, he was out in the woods ...

He paused.

He was out in the woods ... that would have been around two or so. I have no idea where he is now, and to be honest Dominique, I don't care.

Dominique knew Julian and Evan didn't get along, but surely whatever spat they had had would be eclipsed by this recent tragedy. Surely the comfort of any family member would be welcome now.

Well, she said, not sure how to react. Are you sure there isn't anything I can do? Do you need books? Magazines? Anything?

No, Evan said.

If there is anything ... She trailed off. By the way, she said, changing tack. How is Julian? The was a pause at the other end, and she asked again: How is he doing?

You'll have to ask him, Evan said. And then hung up.

I need to go to sleep, she thought, I can't take any more of this. She could almost hear her eyelids closing. Yes, this was exhaustion.

The phone rang. It was Evan.

Tell Julian I burned his book, he said.

And he hung up again.

Dominique stared at the phone for seconds, maybe minutes, then gently placed the receiver in the cradle.