Will she find the one thing hidden inside them that I wish the world to understand? Dear Mrs. Waugh, can I trust you to locate it, recognize its importance, and explain it to Tante Claudette?

The injustice of it has, if Tante Claudette wants to know the truth, been driving me mad.

Sophie doesn’t listen to what I say. My mother failed to listen, my father couldn’t listen, my military superiors had no idea what listening was, or if they did, they didn’t care. They did not hear, none of them heard my plea, my cry, my heartfelt question.

Eleven, eleven, eleven. When, for pity’s sake, might I have my eleven stolen days returned to me?

What I would have done with those days. Were they truly too much for a soldier to ask?

Had they not been pilfered, the course of my life, and of history, might have…well, for a start, dear Tante Claudette, you’d be très contente, for the whole of Canada would have remained French.

Every river and its tributary, every mountain and hill. Every street in every town and city.

French.

Ah, my beautiful, beloved, lost French world! Can you perceive it, Mrs. Waugh, as you study my letters? Is it plain enough or have you only a glimpse? Wait till we meet again, soon, I hope—I’ll tell you about Hotteterre, about La Pompadour, about Montparnasse in the rain studded with umbrellas, those graceful apparatuses Parisians knew long before doddering Londoners….

—

BUT DO I YET TRAIPSE the Gaspé? Look at its birches now, reminding me of loneliness, of being lost, of my eternal homelessness.

Partridge, ptarmigan, trout.

Homespun wool, barley.

Potatoes, rhubarb, herring.

Melancholy, eternally mine.

How Mrs. Waugh perked me up last September. Near closing time at the library that day, she went to the washroom and I sidled over for a look at what she was up to. Her notes were a mess. They were not official-looking. In fact, they were covered with drawings and marked to near indecipherability by arrows and asterisks and rough pencil sketches of other library patrons, including a surprising likeness of myself. I had not been in the slightest aware that Mrs. Waugh had been sketching me.

Was it her sympathetic rendering of my face that made me do the thing I did next?

I think so. It was easy to swipe one of her expired requisition slips and make another in her name, ease it into the pending requests box on the counter, and wait to see what she would do when they gave her my most precious possession. It too had been stolen from me, like my eleven days. And now it was entirely forbidden for me to touch it, though it belongs to me, a gift from the only one who loved me: red, pulsing, alive, an animal locked up in the hall of memory and longing.