Anna From Away Read Online Free PDF

on but no party ablaze that night in its windows, and on the high side of the road the white-shingled former church, now Willard’s house, its steeple shorn, no lights in the tall grey windows either. The dirt road, roughened by bad weather, rain and old snow, jolted along the foot of the mountain, potholes, thinly iced, shining like water in her headlights before the tires crunched them. Her high beams caught the breakwater rocks protecting the road on the water side, the strait beyond them black as the sky.
    When she reached the dry highway and swept down the long, forest-lined hill toward the bridge, she wanted only the sensation of coming out of the trees and crossing it in the darkness, to feel a kind of nowhere beneath its girders, free of this strange, demanding terrain.
    But instead, just before highway rose into causeway, she wheeled onto a service road closed off not far in by a cyclone fence, gated and locked. She parked, waited until she absorbed more of the car’s heat, then skirted the fence where it ended at the shorebank. She walked the unplowed road, the sharp squeak of her steps the only sound, until she was near that composition of girders and beams and shadows high above her. Were it not so cold, she would have brought a big pad and sketched out something rapid and rough that might have reflected her mood, the odd atmosphere and perspective, detailing it later, warm in her room. Just the idea of drawing in moonlight had pleased her, the mysterious form her lines might take, but already the cold was working into her limbs.
    The stars were like ice-points, cold tingled her skin and she huddled deeper into her parka. Only faintly was she aware of a car curving down the mountain road she had just travelled, it seemed almost alien in the stillness, not fast, slowing as it gained the causeway, climbed to the bridge above, where, beyond her line of sight, it stopped and sat idling. She could hear the soft rumble of its exhaust, and then a door seemed to open to the sharp yaps of a dog. She looked up at the figure at the railing backlit by headlights, something in his arms. A trash bag? He paused, then flung it upward as if releasing a bird, and Anna saw a silhouette of legs scrambling in air, the animal giving out a single, tortured bark as it plummeted, turning over several times slowly before, with a tiny splash, it penetrated the sinuous currents beneath the bridge. Above, there was yelling, men’s voices. Doors thumped shut. The car turned around, slowly, not in flight, just leaving, what they came to do had been done, and it returned down the causeway, gathering speed back up the mountain highway.
    Crying out, Anna rushed to the shorebank but halted when she felt the slippery, unstable rocks, saw the hushed dark water moving, undisturbed. Gone, over. How could she have come here and seen a dog flung helpless from a high bridge? Was this a way of putting it down, was it hopelessly sick, unwanted, like newborn pups? How horrible if that man was its master. And if he wasn’t, then why? What was she to do?
    She had no connections here: who would she tell? The Mounties? And what could they do without a licence, a description of the man, of the car? She didn’t know even her nearest neighbour, and it could be a toxic story for a stranger to trouble him with. What would people think of her when it got around? That she made it up? And what had she been doing beneath the bridge at such an hour? Could she tell them she had to shake herself out of depression, out of doubt? No. This was hers, alone.
    Inside her car, through the faint fog of the windshield, the atmosphere seemed stained with cruelty. Daylight would drive that away, wouldn’t it? The dog was surely knocked senseless when it hit, it would have died quickly. Its terror lasted but a few seconds. But it swam through her mind, tumbling slowly, just one confused bark, then no sound as it fell, as if it had been too focused on righting itself, finding a