And Miles to Go Before I Sleep Read online

  And

  Miles

  To

  Go

  Before

  I Sleep

  Original French title: À train perdu by Jocelyne Saucier

  Copyright © 2020, Les Éditions XYZ Inc.

  English translation © Rhonda Mullins, 2021

  First English-language edition.

  Coach House Books acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada. We are also grateful for generous assistance for our publishing program from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: And miles to go before I sleep / Jocelyne Saucier; translated by Rhonda Mullins.

  Other titles: À train perdu. English

  Names: Saucier, Jocelyne, author. | Mullins, Rhonda, 1966- translator.

  Description: Translation of: À train perdu.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210169478 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210169486 | ISBN 9781552454213 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566644 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770566651 (PDF)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS8587.A38633 A6213 2021 | DDC C843/.54—dc23

  And Miles To Go Before I Sleep is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 664 4 (EPUB), 978 1 77056 665 1 (PDF)

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  And

  Miles

  To

  Go

  Before

  I Sleep

  JOCELYNE SAUCIER

  TRANSLATED BY RHONDA MULLINS

  COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO

  To the memory of Lise Pichette

  On September 24, 2012, Gladys Comeau climbed aboard the Northlander and was never again seen in Swastika, which is not even a town, not even a village, just a community along the railway line.

  So began our journeys, both Gladys’s and mine, because this is the tale of the travels of Gladys Comeau on the trains of Northern Ontario and Quebec, which took her south, then west, then east, then back north. An erratic journey that no one understood and that was tracked by many from the moment the old woman’s disappearance was reported. There were many eyewitness accounts, opinions too; some pointed the finger at her, condemned her, called her a monster. My purpose here is not to put her on trial, but to follow Gladys on her frantic journey by train, to collect the scattered pieces and figure out what may have motivated her. Because while we now know about the detours and U-turns, the nomadic journey of the woman from Swastika, as she would come to be known, has been subject to many interpretations.

  The shockwaves spread beyond her circle of friends and acquaintances, but there was nothing in the paper, there was no police investigation. When people in Swastika tried to alert the authorities, Gladys would reappear on another line, and another call would follow to another conductor. The affair remained private, there was no public attention. Who is going to take an interest in a woman who left her life behind, an ordinary woman, with no great feats or misdeeds to her credit, and old to boot? Me, it would seem, running counter to common sense and my own circumstances.

  I don’t have the heart of a tracker, any particular talent for investigation, or a penchant for mystery, and yet this story consumed me for more than four years. I retraced Gladys’s journey, and I met scores of people who knew her or spent time with her before or during her travels, not to mention the calls, emails, and texts to inquire about departures or arrivals on a particular line, double-check a detail, chase down a name I had missed, that escaped me. I have file folders and megabytes filled with a story that leaks in every direction.

  How did a man who was in no way destined for such an adventure end up wandering off into lives not his own? As I write this, I still wonder whether, as the son of a railwayman, I would have set out on the trail of an old woman if there hadn’t been at the start a lonely station, a train whistle, and the promise of the rattle of the rails lulling Gladys and me, each on our own journey. It is hard to fathom the power of steel gliding over steel. It is familiar music that lives inside me. I admit to being a fan of trains, and that’s what is behind me setting off on the trail of Gladys Comeau. But there isn’t only Gladys; there are all the others who hailed, hounded, and hitched me to this quest or inquest – I don’t know what it is anymore – that I now have to chronicle.

  I have to explore, explain, understand my motivations.

  But I will tell the tale, I will commit it to paper, I promised. Will you still be of this world when I will have finished this chronicle, Bernie my friend?

  Swastika is not an easy place to leave. The village has a population of two hundred, tallies its residents one by one, every one of them counts, so a departure does not go unnoticed.

  Gladys Comeau knew that, having lived there for the past fifty-five years, and she left the way you would mail a letter, the only way to leave Swastika. No suitcase, no new clothes, nothing to suggest a journey or departure, she walked down Avenue Conroy, hung a left on the government road, a right on Rue Cameron, then climbed the eighteen steps to the promontory on which the station is perched. She could have kept going, walked along the platform to the viaduct that straddles the government road, and no one would have been surprised to see her up there, since her morning walk often took her that way.

  The platform of the station offers a view of the whole village. The roads winding through the hollows, the houses huddled together: it is all there in a panoramic view. From this higher ground, you can see the foam of the river as it arrives, follow the water along a park, and then, right before you’d end up back at your starting point, you can see a tiny church in the palest of blues perched on a slight elevation. Swastika has a particular brand of charm, a beauty that is easy to overlook. The station is not part of this aesthetic. It is an ugly brick rectangle that has seen better days, set along the embankment. Back then, the trains would arrive at all hours, as would taxis, trucks laden with gold bars – not even armoured trucks, not even tarped trucks, just trucks – in an endless flurry of activity, and the station was perched on its promontory, its grass lovingly maintained, forming a sort of skirt that descended to Rue Cameron, and, at the centre of its skirt, in red, yellow, and a symphony of colour, begonias, pansies, and marigolds, forming a huge swastika.

  There is no grass anymore, nor other attempts at preening. The windows have been boarded up, and the station is closed except for one room that serves as the waiting area, deserted except in bitter cold, because there are no creature comforts, not even bathrooms, and people prefer to wait on the platform.

  And on the platform that chilly September morning, there were two men and one woman, which pleased the conductor, because often there was no one, and he had to continue on his way. Gladys was a regular on the Northlander. The conductor, one Sydney Adams, recognized her immediately.

  I say conductor knowing full well that the word is no longer used in the administrative jargon of the railway. In Ontario and Quebec, they are now called service managers, the railway employees who greet customers, see to their comfort, ensure everyone gets off at the right stop and that their luggage gets off with them. I have always known them as conductors, and that is what they will remain during this tale.

  But I digress.

  I imagine this story will be punctuated with digressions, flashbacks, personal notes, and other asides. I have a c
onsiderable amount of information, and I have to extract what is most credible in the accounts I’ve gathered over the years. Mostly vague, uncertain accounts, fragmented because they concern a disjointed journey that no one witnessed from beginning to end. Some parts are better documented, for instance the stops along the Sudbury–White River line, because these were stops with people she knew, long-time friends, ‘children of the forest,’ as she called them, who are as nostalgic as she is for a bygone age. They are the children of the school train, charmed children from a charmed time, friends from her childhood, the happiest days of her life. In the interviews they granted me, you can see where Gladys’s irrepressible optimism comes from, how she got along with life despite the setbacks, her refusal to hold a grudge against it. ‘When you have known happiness, it’s impossible to believe that it’s no longer possible.’ It was one of the things she liked to say.

  The friends who were her neighbours painted the same picture: an eternally optimistic woman, determined to be happy, who didn’t buckle where many would have fallen. Some had known her since she moved to Swastika, a young bride head over heels in love, and who formed, with other neighbourhood friends from Avenue Conroy, Avenue Childs, and Rue Westinghouse, a community of support. Some ten people, including Frank Smarz, one of my most trusted allies in this investigation. He is central to the dogged pursuit that began the moment Gladys’s disappearance was reported.

  Frank Smarz (fifty-five years old, welder by trade, and a blueberry- and dandelion-wine buff) is the husband of Brenda, Gladys’s next-door neighbour and close friend, or at least she thought so until that morning in September when her friend left Swastika without breathing a word of her intentions. More than anyone else, she was devastated by Gladys’s disappearance and, while she doesn’t want to admit it, she was deeply hurt not to have been in on the secret. I had to contact her several times before she agreed to tell me her version of the story of Gladys’s disappearance. The other members of the community weren’t so reticent.

  A community of support is the perfect term to describe the neighbourhood friends – ten at most, people of modest means – who over the years developed an easy, open friendship; even they are astonished at how naturally it happened. They have each other over for dinner, help each other out with home repairs, swap tools and clothes (just the women) but never money – an unspoken rule among them, no loans. And if there is the odd hiccup – if there are words, moods, or behaviours that wound, frustrate, or hurt – they let the bad times go by just as surely as the good; time is their surest ally – except in this particular case.

  Gladys was a frequent beneficiary of this friendship. Having been widowed one year after moving to Swastika (a mining accident, common at the time), she raised a daughter on her own, a daughter who was her pride and joy, until one day she found her in a pool of blood, her first suicide attempt. Lisana was twenty at the time, a pretty young woman, a nursing student, smart, cheerful, light-hearted; she was everything you could want in a child you pampered, coddled, moulded with care and love. Gladys was devastated. But she never gave up hope. Her optimistic nature led her to believe that it was a crisis that would pass, a bump in the road of life. She never stopped hoping for better days. Not when she got the second call from the nursing school, not the times she had to go pick up Lisana in Toronto, from a squat, a shelter, a hospital room, and when she brought her back to Avenue Conroy, cared for her, pampered her, then watched her leave, hoping she would never again have to hear a stranger’s voice on the phone telling her that her daughter had given in to her urge to die. The people around her were driven to distraction watching her struggle. Lisana had been resurrected, but for how long? How long before she relapsed? How long would it take for Gladys to understand that there would be no end to it all? Or that there was only one possible end … but no one dared think about that, let alone say it.

  Her neighbourhood friends had nothing but good things to say about Gladys. A courageous woman, extraordinary, a devoted mother, a protective mother, a mother who did the impossible. The epithets gushed forth, admiring, full of praise. But when it came to Lisana, people would shake their heads, looking like they had a lot to say, and you would have to guess at the despair and bitterness behind their dark faces. A lot of blame was laid at Lisana’s door. If it had been up to them, they would have left her to her fate long ago. But no one said so.

  These are people who are wary of their feelings and emotions. The only thing I ever managed to get out of them was facts. During the four years I travelled regularly to Swastika, I felt they trusted me but never considered me a close friend. If they have a secret garden, and everyone does, they tend to it away from prying eyes, maybe even away from their own awareness. Living in such a tight-knit community for so long, you end up forgetting about yourself. But facts, on the other hand, reign supreme. They can be rehashed, burnished, stored a long time in memory, and if a stranger comes knocking at your door, facts can be pulled from their treasure chest and put on display. So I got a detailed, in-depth account of the day Gladys disappeared, leaving behind her one Lisana, whom they wanted nothing to do with.

  It was Brenda Smarz who raised the alarm. Homes are transparent in such a small community; one lives out in the open, and all it took to start Brenda’s worrying was to notice that Gladys’s bedroom curtains hadn’t been pulled back in the morning. At 11:15, unable to contain herself any longer, she decided to go check. She knocked – no answer – then went in and crept as far as the kitchen, where she spotted Lisana at the table with a coffee in front of her, sitting erect, stock still in her chair, entranced by an invisible point on the wall. It scared her.

  Lisana was hardly a young woman anymore. She was fifty-four, but she looked much older, having been so broken by a life she was bent on destroying. ‘She looks her mother’s age,’ people always said. They went on about her grey complexion, absent look, shuffling gait, ‘as if she has the weight of the world on her shoulders.’ The feelings she still inspires in them made the picture they painted all the darker. To hear them tell it, mother and daughter had nothing in common. And yet, they will still say, when you would see them walking down the streets of Swastika, both high-waisted and big-boned, you could almost mistake one for the other. The look of Scandinavians, with blond hair and pale, almost milky blue eyes, but in Lisana’s case, everything was covered in ash, no radiance, whereas Gladys, they were careful to point out, had always taken pains with her appearance. Hair cut in layers, dyed to its original blond with a home kit, complexion brought out with light makeup. ‘Beauty is for everyone,’ she was fond of saying, and while she stopped dyeing her hair and wearing makeup in her late sixties, she wore the marks of time with discreet and elegant resignation. No one would have pitied the old woman she had become if it had not been for Lisana, always at her side, wherever she went, casting a shadow over the pair they formed.

  So Lisana ‘had a black flame burning inside her’ when Brenda approached her, a hard, vicious glow that made her unrecognizable. ‘I thought she was in crisis.’

  Brenda had never seen Lisana in crisis. That is another reason she was angry with her friend. Gladys protected her daughter to the point of hiding her from view when a difficult patch loomed. That’s what she called it, a difficult patch, a bad spell; it was all she would say after shutting herself away with her daughter, for days, sometimes a week, not leaving the house, to hide the marks of the battle they waged. Lisana has had a bad turn, was all she would say. Brenda knew better than to ask her any more. ‘She was as exhausted as if she had given birth to Lisana a second time, but chatty as ever; she talked about her flowers, a joint of meat she was going to roast, things around the house, as if she had just returned from a trip and had resumed her daily routine, but about what she had gone through with her daughter, not one word, not even to me who told her my whole life story.’ And she sunk into a sulky silence.

  So Lisana had a black flame burning inside her, and Brenda got scared. She believed that a crisis was coming
, or the ravages were already being felt. She ran room to room searching for Gladys, fearing the worst, and, not finding her, went back to Lisana. She asked where her mother was, and Lisana slowly turned from the point on the wall she was staring at and said, ‘Gone,’ smiling a smile that would make your blood run cold, a smile as terrified as Brenda herself was, standing before this stone woman, and Brenda flew out of there, leaving Lisana, who had not moved from her chair, absorbed by the horrible smile that had crept over her face.

  It took no more than fifteen minutes for word to spread. ‘Where is Gladys?’ They looked everywhere; the entire community mobilized. They went up and down every street, checked the park, walked along the river, searched Gladys’s house top to bottom, again questioned Lisana, who had relaxed her hideous smile but was of no use because she just kept repeating, ‘She’s gone – She won’t be back – She’s gone,’ in an endless litany that ultimately had to be believed because Gladys was nowhere to be found.

  At the Smarzes’, where the neighbourhood friends gathered, speculation was running rampant. It was also at the Smartzes’ that people would gather in the days that followed and make calls to improbable train lines to try and find Gladys and bring her back to Avenue Conroy. Their house would become command central for her repatriation (the word they used). But for the time being, they were in shock, completely baffled, trying to understand. What was most incomprehensible, most inconceivable, is that Gladys had dumped Lisana on them.

  They knew they had lost precious time trying to understand why Gladys had done what she had done. They did the math: had they not gotten bogged down in pointless questioning, they realized, Frank Smarz’s call to the Englehart dispatcher would have been made well before noon and would have been relayed in time for the conductor to intercept Gladys. That was not their only misstep. Time kept playing against them, often a matter of minutes, wrong route, poor timing, she had just left or had gone in another direction – their messages never managed to get where they were supposed to, when they were supposed to. They felt as though their timing was off from the beginning: ‘All that time, Gladys’s Toyota was sitting there, in front of our eyes, in front of her house, so it was clear she had taken the train.’