The Almost Wife

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  “I’m here.” His voice had gone dull. “Did she say anything else to you?”

  “No, not really. She was pissed that I had chased after her. And she wanted me to stay away from her van.”

  “What did she say to Olive?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure she had much of a chance to say anything. Olive jumped into the van and then I chased after them. It was only a matter of minutes before we nearly hit that deer.”

  “Good. Good. That’s good.”

  I locked gazes with Olive. “You know who she is, don’t you?” I asked Aaron.

  “What’s that?”

  “That woman, Sarah. You know who she is.”

  He took a beat too long to respond. “No. No, I don’t. I imagine Madison got a friend, or maybe hired someone, to help her. Perhaps she felt having a stranger pick up Olive would make her harder to trace or would deflect the blame away from her.”

  “So you think Madison was trying to kidnap Olive?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.”

  “Why were you worried about what this Sarah woman said to Olive?” I hesitated. “Do you know her? From where?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kira, don’t go hormonal on me.” When I stayed silent, reining in the hurt, he softened his voice. “Look, I’m just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding, though of course he couldn’t see me. “I get it.” He was scared, scared of losing Olive.

  “I thought I had worked things out with Olive,” he said, “and she runs off like that. I spent all that time with her, getting her to trust me again. This is a nightmare.”

  “Look, Aaron, I know what Olive is going through. My own mother pulled the same kind of shit on me.”

  She had taken the gifts my father had offered me during our infrequent visits and thrown them in the garbage. He’s only trying to manipulate you, Kira, she said. He’s giving you these gifts because he wants something from you. The sick bastard. Has he touched you yet? He hadn’t, but she said he would, he would try to touch me. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew it was bad, that he would hurt me in some way. He was an affectionate man, a hugger, and often wrapped an arm around me or hugged me goodbye. After that, I never let him touch me again.

  “But we’re still in the early days here,” I said to Aaron, glancing at Olive. She rocked and rocked, staring straight ahead now. “You’re on the right track. We just need to keep Olive away from Madison long enough that she learns to fully trust you and heals up completely. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “I’m heading up there,” he said. “I’ll rent a car and drive. I should be there in the morning.”

  “No, Aaron, really, there’s no need.”

  “Don’t let Olive out of your sight. Sleep in the same room if you have to. And for god’s sake, keep her away from Madison and that other woman.”

  “I will. I’ll keep her safe. I promise. But you don’t have to come up here—”

  “Phone me if either of those nutjobs turns up again.”

  “We’ll likely be out of cell range soon. I’ll have to phone from the landline once we get to the cottage.”

  “Text me the address now, then.”

  “But you don’t need to—”

  “Look, Kira, I’m sorry about losing it earlier. You know I love you.”

  “I love you too. But—”

  He hung up.

  “Shit.” I banged a hand on the hood of the truck, then turned away from the girls to stare at the bridge over the North Channel, the ribbon of water between us and the way home.

  I had managed to keep my old life separate from my new one up to this point. Aaron had never come to Manitoulin with me.

  Olive rolled down her window. “What is it? What did he say?”

  I hesitated, then plastered on a smile. “Your dad is on his way,” I said cheerfully. “He’s driving here overnight.”

  And in the morning, my two worlds would collide.

  11

  Evie slid into sleep as we drove past the town houses of Little Current, many festooned with Canadian flags. On leaving town, we were surrounded by farmland. There was one deer warning sign after another along this road, featuring the image of a graceful leaping deer and, under it, the warning Night Danger. I kept glancing at my side and rearview mirrors, looking for that gray minivan, but the only cars were following at some distance.

  In the crew cab behind me, Olive hugged herself.

  “Are you ready to tell me who that woman is?” I asked her. “How you know Sarah? Why you ran to her?”

  “I told you everything,” she said, her voice brittle, on the edge of tears. “I was just looking for a ride.”

  “I saw her back in Toronto,” I said. She’d been casing our house, I realized now. “I assume Madison was with her then too?”

  Olive turned away, looking past Evie out the window. “How would I know?” she said.

  “Is she a friend of Madison’s?”

  “No.” She paused. “I don’t know.”

  “Madison hired her, then? To pick you up?”

  “No! I told you, I don’t know who she is.”

  I hesitated, rubbing the steering wheel with my thumbs, my eyes on the road ahead. “Does your dad know Sarah from somewhere?”

  She stopped rocking for a moment. “What? Why would he?”

  “Why would you go with her, then?”

  “I told you already!” she cried. “Why do you keep asking?”

  “I’m just not sure I believe you.” I was certain Madison was involved, somehow.

  “You never listen to me. Just . . . leave me alone,” she said, and her rocking grew more agitated, as it always did right before she freaked out, thrashing and screaming to be let out of the vehicle. That was the last thing I needed right now. I dropped the subject, for the moment.

  We glided through a farm landscape pockmarked with aging gray barns, many of which had been toppled by a powerful microburst more than a decade before. A few of the old outbuildings that still had roofs sported top hats of darkly glimmering solar panels. Giant white windmills swam lazily in one farmer’s field. Everything moved more slowly here on the island. No one hurried to get anything done. The locals called it “island time,” like it was a whole other time zone. And it was.

  As we neared the village, there was a string of cars behind us, heading to the beach, I imagined. Madison and that woman, Sarah, were likely among them, following us in the minivan. I turned off the main road, taking a less-traveled route to the village, and watched through my rearview mirror to see if any of the vehicles followed, but the road seemed empty.

  There were even fewer houses out here, and the road was lined with heavy bush. We drove through nothing but trees for a time.

  “There’s nothing here,” Olive said, looking out the window. “Nothing,” she repeated.

  It felt like an insult against this landscape that was so much a part of me. I wanted to push back, set her straight, tell her she knew little about this place or me. I felt jacked up. Pissed. At Madison for following us up, at Aaron for putting me in this position, at Olive for running off, at myself for choosing to bring her up here in the first place.

  “Yeah, but it’s my nothing,” I said.

  “What?”

  “This section of bush we’re driving through right now. It’s mine.”

  A hundred acres of it, on one side of the road. It had been my father’s hunting property, and I owned it now, though until Olive insinuated it was devoid of interest and worth, I didn’t think of it as mine. My father had left the land to me. I could have sold it, as my mother wanted, when I became an adult, but for reasons I couldn’t articulate even to myself, I had resisted (not an easy thing to do against my mother). In any case, I didn’t want to face my ghosts there, or deal with the contents of that haunted cabin. So the hunt camp had sat empty all these years. Occasionally a hunter approached me for permission to track deer on
the land during the November deer hunt. I always said no. I liked the thought that deer and other wildlife had this sanctuary, a place of safety and refuge, even if it wasn’t one for me.

  “There was a cabin there,” I said. “I expect it’s still there. And an old barn my father used to hang and butcher the deer—”

  “Butcher the deer?” Olive looked horrified.

  “Just like a butcher cuts up beef or chicken,” I explained. “My father hunted for food more than sport. Anyway, my dad had a nice little camp here: the cabin, the barn, a tree stand, even a sauna.”

  “A tree stand?”

  “Like a tree house. A platform high up in the trees, hidden so deer won’t see the hunter.” Or smell him as he hunted. As a child, I had played in that tree stand. It was my own personal tree fort. “I imagine it’s all still there,” I said.

  Olive had stopped rocking. “You imagine? You don’t know? If you’ve got a cabin and sauna here, don’t you use it?”

  She must have been envisioning the buildings as far swankier than they were. Even years ago, the cabin smelled musty, of mice, and the old barn was sinking into the earth.

  “My father took me hunting there.” My mother hated that he did that, and argued with him over it, even before they were divorced.

  I looked out into the bush, into the past, at my mother zipping up my winter coat just before my father was due to pick me up for that last hunting trip, though I was far too old to need her help. Dad and I would stop at the Scandinavian bakery in Sudbury, as we always did before a hunt. Then we’d drive to Manitoulin, to this hunt camp. Everything would be so much easier if the asshole wasn’t in the picture, my mother told me as she tugged my toque down into place. You wouldn’t have to go over to his filthy cabin again. He couldn’t hurt you. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? We’d be free of him.

  “I doubt I’ll ever go to that cabin or forest again,” I said, more to myself than to Olive. “My father died there, in those woods.”

  That got Olive’s attention. She sat forward in her seat. “He died there?”

  I craned my neck to look down the old hunt camp road as we passed it; it was now hopelessly overgrown with grass and young trees. I wasn’t sure I could have driven down it, even in this truck. The weathered sign my father had erected was still there, a plywood cutout of a leaping deer, though the paint had long since weathered away. Beyond it, just before the corner that hid the cabin from view, the old barn, miraculously, still stood. It had been there for decades before my father bought the land.

  “How did he die?” Olive asked.

  “He . . . it was a hunting accident,” I said. And in that moment I was a girl again, standing over my father’s body. A pool of blood oozed onto the snow from the back of his head. My eyes abruptly clouded with tears, and I shook my head to clear them.

  “Look out!” Olive cried.

  I jarred to attention and saw the doe first, standing in the middle of the road, then another, smaller deer that turned its eyes on me from the ditch and vanished into the forest. I swerved left to avoid its mother, but the doe leapt right in front of the truck. I had only an instant in which to react, but remembering my father’s instruction, I took my foot off the brake and plowed through. If I braked too quickly, I knew the deer would go right through the windshield, injuring or killing us. There was a thud and a grisly splat as blood and tissue hit the glass. I felt the shudder as the truck’s wheels rolled over part of the animal’s body. Thud, thud.

  Olive sucked in a gasp of shock. Beside her, Evie startled awake and cried out. I slowed and pulled over, cut the engine, and we sat, stunned, for a moment. My body vibrated. It was a wonder the airbags hadn’t deployed. I flicked on the emergency lights and opened the crew cab door to check on Evie, but she seemed unharmed. Scared by the impact, but unharmed. I shushed her, gave her a soother and smoothed her hair, and she settled.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Olive. She didn’t look okay. She was clinging to the seat in front of her with both hands. Her knuckles were white. “Are you all right?” I asked again.

  She turned to me, wide-eyed. “Is it dead?” she asked.

  Her voice quivered like it often did when she was about to lose it. Please don’t let her lose it.

  “Stay here with Evie,” I said.

  I marched back to the deer. Its hind end was smashed. Bone protruded and blood spilled from the wound. The deer was missing part of its front leg, an earlier injury that had healed. Somehow, the handicapped doe had survived the harsh Northern Ontario winter with the injury. It was probably shot by some hungover city boy up here for the November hunt. An experienced hunter would never have let an animal hobble away, bleeding. Nathan kept his beagle in part for that purpose; he’d trained Buddy as a blood-tracking dog, to hunt down wounded deer.

  The truck door banged shut and then Olive was there with me, staring down at the deer. “Is it dead?” she asked again.

  “Watch yourself.” I held out an arm to get her to back up. “It’s still alive. It could kick you.”

  “How?” she said, looking down at the animal’s broken body. Then she bent over, bracing her hands against her knees, as if she was about to throw up. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  She held up a hand as she spit, shook her head. “Seeing that—” She waved at the bloody mess.

  The deer roused, lifting its head, struggling feebly to right itself. “I have an emergency kit in the side pocket of my luggage,” I said. My father had trained me to take a basic outdoor survival kit wherever I went. “Grab it for me, will you?”

  “Why?”

  “Just grab it.”

  The deer settled its head to the ground, its breathing labored. I wanted to smooth a hand over its neck, to comfort it, but of course that would only scare it further. It looked up at me with one frightened eye. And for a terrible moment I was there again, standing over my father’s body. The blood that oozed onto the snow from the back of his head.

  Olive was suddenly there, pulling me back to the present, offering me the emergency kit, and I took it from her, my heart banging against my chest. In the truck, Evie cried out in the way she often did before falling asleep.

  “What will happen to the fawn?” Olive asked. She was in tears now, her lower lip trembling.

  “I didn’t hit it,” I said, opening the kit. “But it was probably still nursing. If it learned to forage on its own, it may survive.”

  Though it had looked so young—too young to make it on its own. I found the folding survival knife in the kit and flipped it open. Seeing it, Olive jumped back.

  “For god’s sake, I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. Then I softened my voice. “I’m going to put this poor animal out of its misery. Go back to the truck. I don’t want you to see this.”

  I straddled the deer’s neck, pulling back its head, then ran the blade of the knife across the underside of its jaw, cutting the jugular in one quick stroke. The knife was sharp, and there was little resistance. Blood pumped from the doe’s neck, pooling, oily, across the road. It kicked its front legs again, trying to right its wrecked body, then finally settled, its torso collapsing like a balloon losing air as it passed away. I put a hand over my mouth, the tears stinging. This deer had been alive only moments ago. It had its quiet, secretive forest life ahead of it, and I had taken that away, left its fawn orphaned.

  “How can you just do that?” Olive cried.

  Still holding the knife, I swung around to find Olive standing behind me. She had seen everything. I took a step away from the deer and toward her, one hand out. “It was the kindest thing I could do for the deer. It was in pain. I had to euthanize it.” Euthanize it? I had killed it, slit its throat, in front of a thirteen-year-old city kid who had lost her share of pets but never seen one die. My god, why hadn’t I made sure she went back to the truck?

  “Get away,” she said, backing up. “Get away!”

  Then, just like the fawn, she swung around an
d fled across the ditch, disappearing into the bush.

  Exactly like that young deer. Here, and then gone.

  12

  Olive!” I called out. “Olive, please come back!”

  I went to the truck to make sure Evie was asleep before calling again. “Olive!”

  We weren’t far from the road to the hunt camp, just a short, brisk walk. Another short hike into the woods and I’d be there, in the clearing where my father died. I took a tentative step forward, lost footing and skidded down the slope into the ditch, grabbing a sapling to recover my balance.

  “Olive?”

  I listened for her, but the buzz of insects and the rustle of leaves as the wind picked up masked her movements. I knew she was close. She couldn’t have gone far.

  “Olive, come on. You can’t wander around in the bush like this. For god’s sake. You hear me?” When I still got no reply, I tried another tack: “There are bears here. A young bear was hanging around the campsite just outside the village. It’s likely in this patch of bush now.” A blackfly bit me and, too late, I smacked it. “The blackflies will get you if a bear doesn’t.” A mosquito found me, then another, and another, and then a cloud of them swarmed me. There’s going to be a thunderstorm, I thought as I batted them away and scratched the welts from their bites. Mosquitos and blackflies, drawn out by the moisture in the air, swarmed before a storm. “Olive, honestly, you’ll be eaten alive out here.”

  The wind quickened, passing through the trees, setting every bush in motion. She could run through that bush now and I wouldn’t hear her.

  I raised my voice, but it was carried away on the wind. “Why are you doing this?” I called out, knowing she likely couldn’t hear me now. Olive had seemed terrified of the knife, of me. I realized for the second time that evening that I had no idea what was going on in her head.

  “Olive, please!” I listened, but heard only the wind blowing through the trees, the groan of branches rubbing against each other. I stepped farther into the bush, ducking beneath a bough. Shapes formed and disappeared again within the shadows. I tried lightening my tone. “If you want to see your boyfriend, we can make that happen.” If that was, in fact, what she wanted—if she was telling the truth about that—though I was sure she wasn’t. “He can come over to our place for a visit. Do you hear me? Olive?” I wished now that I hadn’t taken her phone from her. But then, there was no reception here.