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There’s a song in her step, a gleam in her eye. She’s just a little bit less present than people expect her to be. Not that they were expecting much, the few out of towners with high ambitions for this little mountain hideaway are far more interested in the woods and the waterfall than the owner’s daughter. Growing up, their eyes seemed to glance right off her, like she wasn’t solid enough to get a proper visual on. They hurried into rooms with her father for business meetings, or went walking through the woods in search of rare birds.
There are owls in these woods, Audrey’s never liked them. For her seventh birthday her uncle sent her a birdwatching guide for the northwest coast, she doesn’t remember much from it except how relieved she had felt to be alone with it, ripping out every page that held a round face with wide eyes. Those birds were trouble, she wanted nothing to do with them.
What she does remember from that summer is the amount of time she spent creeping up on various wildlife, edited birdwatching book in hand. At first it had been hard, she carried a song within her that was almost impossible to shake, and it seemed there wasn’t a creature within the limits of Twin Peaks that didn’t know how to hear her coming. There were always deer prints on the ground, and never any deer in the glade. It was frustrating, it tested her patience beyond belief.
Audrey Horne was a very smart little girl with very distracted parents and a very distracting brother. She knew all there was to know about how to handle frustration. You have to still believe in yourself, even when the world won’t spare you a second glance. The staff at the Great Northern listened to her but only as a courtesy, given that she was the boss’s daughter. She would have time enough to earn their respect, but at seven years old it was enough to swallow her frustration and press her nose back to the path ahead of her.
Aged nine there was a robbery at the Great Northern, and Audrey held her mother’s hand while Deputy Harry Truman ran through the details of the case. He didn’t take any notes, but would spare a glance to the new corporal at his side, a Nez Perce guy with long hair and sharp eyes. Truman wondered at the silence of the intruders, the corporal demonstrated how a man might walk without making a single sound.
Or a little girl. The next time Audrey went trekking through the woods she went silently. It wasn’t perfect, she didn’t know how to cover her scent or camouflage amongst the trees, but she ticked off twelve new birds from her birdbook that afternoon, so she could only consider it a success.
The trouble with animals is that once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. It was a useful training exercise, but by the age of twelve there was little that she needed from the natural world. She knew how to track and to snoop, she knew how to hold her breath for the longest time to be sure no one noticed you, she knew how to spot when something wasn’t quite right. Which was tricky, because once you developed the habit it was easy enough to see that there was very little in all the wide world that was quite right. There were thieves and murders and all other sorts of criminals. There were sordid secrets barely kept out of the stream of gossip. There were her father’s eyes, glazed over and unresponsive when she spoke to him and she knew he was thinking about almost anything else.
People, it transpired, were a lot less predictable than deer, and a lot less eerie than owls. They couldn’t turn their heads all the way round to see you coming, and that gave Audrey a head start. Through the servant’s tunnels and the walls, she began to track the day to day lives of the staff and guests of the Great Northern.
It was thrilling, to watch a man lie so brazenly about how he was cheating on his wife, only for him to cower when she called him on his bluff. In her more romantic moments, Audrey might have said that she saw the best and the worst of people through the cracks in badly placed wall panels, in truth she saw little more than the worst. Cheating and lying was common enough, sometimes guests would turn violent or use the hotel as a base for illicit dealings with gangsters coming across the Canadian border. It was harder to know what to do in those instances, because the cheaters and the liars could be left alone but more than that?
The first time Audrey saw a man raise a hand to his wife she ran, with very little care for who might hear her feet pounding through the secret hallways of the Great Northern. Fear was not something she chose to look in the eye more often than she had to. She didn’t understand the pounding of her heart, the difficulty of breathing with so much hidden behind her eyes. She didn’t know what to do so she called the Sheriff's office, because they had to know.
“Hello,” the voice was not familiar enough to be Harry’s, but she had heard it before. The Nez Perce officer who had helped with the robbery, what was his name?
“H-Hawk? Corporal Hawk?” Audrey stammered down the line. She hated the way that sounded, so frail and meek. It was the work of a moment to straighten her spine, clear her throat and ground herself, “we have a situation at the Great Northern.”
The police came, they took away the guy in a cop car and the wife in an ambulance. Corporal Hawk thanked Audrey for sounding the alarm and her father seemed irritated by the bad publicity.
No one heard her running through those hidden corridors. She was safe.
Audrey learned a lot from that first encounter with something a little too much for her to handle on her own. She saw the way some men looked at women like they weren’t really people, then she saw the way some people look at anyone like they’re not really there. She held her brother’s hand and understood that his vacant stare was different from the all-consuming blankness of a person in shock.
It seemed no crime could go unreported at the Great Northern, unless it took place within the confines of Ben Horne’s office. That would be a challenge for further down the line, Audrey was still so young, about to turn fourteen and heading off to highschool.
There were no secret passages at Twin Peaks High. You had to face everyone out in the open, huddle in with the herd when you went off for a smoke. Audrey had never considered herself friendless, she had grown up amongst an ever changing cast of guests and a semi-present staff who had provided her with all the company she ever needed. She wasn’t looking to pour her heart out to anyone, just to have some fun. It transpired that while she had been learning how to read a man like a book, her peers had learned the art of locking shoulders and shutting her out.
“That’s Ben Horne’s daughter. She’s so weird.”
“I was at middle school with her, she never had any friends.”
“She spends all her time in the woods.”
“Come, sit with me,” Shelly smiled. She was older than Audrey, just passing through her final year as a student. She didn’t seem to mind so much that not everyone was built for talking, though she tried.
Audrey tried to try back, but she found the conversation hard to follow. She didn’t care about anyone’s personal life, except that where it helped her better understand their behaviour in the present. She was unfussed by what people wore, except where they concealed things beneath their clothes. She tried to explain herself to Shelly and Shelly gave her a half smile like she didn’t quite believe it, before asking if she’d managed to make any friends her own age.
“Bobby Briggs is beautiful, but dense. I think he’s probably a good person underneath it all but he tries too hard to play it cool. Mike Nelson is a thug, I don’t know what Donna sees in him.”
What Audrey saw in Mike Nelson was contempt, a fist too easily raised. She didn’t like him one bit.
Shelly nodded, “ok. What about Donna?”
“She can’t understand why the spotlight never shines on her. A real romantic, just waiting for the world to sweep her off her feet. Well, the world or James Hurley. Who’s a boring blank slate if ever I saw one. He doesn’t even have a personality, how do you get to be so boring?”
Before Shelly could respond, Audrey felt the prickling heat of unwanted attention on the back of her neck. She turned in her chair and saw Laura Palmer across the cafeteria, smile on her face like she knew the world was built by fools. Their eyes locked, and for a long moment it was as if the whole world were contained in that smile.
“You ok?” Shelly asked.
Audrey turned back to her food, blushing. Shelly was a good person, she didn’t say a thing to anyone.
Laura Palmer was out of Audrey’s reach at all times. The only comfort in that was knowing that she was just as distant with everyone else, though most were too blind to see it. Audrey would sometimes see shapes, blonde hair, a wicked grin, staying in various rooms of the hotel. She had no idea what to make of the way her stomach lurched every time, hoping she might have cracked some part of the code. What did it mean to see fire in someone else’s eyes and feel it in your stomach? What did it mean when a smile was not a smile?
The school toilets always stank of smoke, Audrey was not above using them as a refuge for herself when the need arose. She would see groups of teenagers head in over lunch and come out reeking of it. Laura never did anything so unsubtle, but she always had a whiff of smoke about her.
“Can I borrow a cigarette?” Audrey asked, heart in her mouth on the rare occasion she caught up to Laura before they hit the school gates.
She never needed a cigarette, but it was fun to ask. Sometimes Laura would be cold, sometimes unbearably warm. Miss Twin Peaks through and through, once she was old enough. She would deny as she saw fit, and Audrey tried to see the whirling cogs of motivation flashing behind those brilliant blue eyes.
There was nothing to see. Laura Palmer was a vast, untapped ocean and the very thought of diving in deeper made Audrey’s heart beat double time. She would go home at the end of the day and when her mother asked about friends and schoolwork, Laura’s name always got dropped.
Laura’s name sent Ben Horne into a frenzy, not a poker face to be spied on that man. Audrey thought she could see a pair of big blue eyes staring back at her from between the boards of her bedroom ceiling. She sort of wanted to talk about Laura for hours and she sort of wanted to forget she existed. It was a kind of madness, she had to assume, because she didn’t want the two of them to sit down over lunch and discuss the problems of each other’s social circle. She didn’t want the giggly, over the top friendship that Laura shared with Donna.
Sometimes she would see Laura and Bobby Briggs making out on the green at lunch time. Neither quite into it, but both having enough fun to keep up the charade Audrey thinks, maybe, she could manage that. It looks easy, you just need to like the way someone looks.
Audrey wasn’t stupid, she knew what a lesbian was, and she knew that boys looked nice sometimes when they smiled. She didn’t think she was a lesbian, but she supposed she had never been offered the chance to be one. It was infuriating that she could not step out of herself, set her body about its day and look for the signs. That would have been so easy, she’s sure she could spot the traces of that kind of thing on her face.
Then again, if she was as good as Laura, perhaps she couldn’t. Day in, day out, the laughter was never behind her eyes and the sulks never really in her moods. Laura Palmer was like an owl, her head turned all the way round to stop you catching what she was really thinking.
A year passed, Shelly left school. Audrey sat alone, quite happy to eat her lunch in peace. It had come to her attention that puberty has pushed her from an awkward gangly pre-teen into a rather pretty young woman. She was being objective here, of course, no need to over sell herself. But she had a nice figure and wide eyes, lipstick seemed to do the rest. That autumn, she looked around and saw that not every stare she received was so hostile. Boys in particular, looked at her like she had grown a new head, and that this one was worth looking at.
Laura stayed giggling in the corner with Donna, making out with Bobby in the hallways, using the bathroom as a bathroom and nothing more. Audrey begged cigarettes off her, made friends with anyone she could find outside of Twin Peaks High and let them fade into the backdrop of her life like the vibrant splashes of paint she was determined to reduce her to.
Audrey was fifteen, she didsn’t know what’s coming. This was bigger than learning to see into Laura Palmer’s soul, this was as much of Laura Palmer as she was ever going to get. Looking back it will feel like she was the only one who was really looking, but she couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
“It’s ok,” Denise Bryson will tell her. One day, many years from now, when Audrey has learned to bare her feelings, “you did what you could.”
By the time Denise sits her down to talk to her about the Laura Palmer case, Audrey will understand a whole lot more about herself. She will know that she is not a lesbian, and she is not not a lesbian. Growing up in Twin Peaks should have taught her all she needed to know about duality, but sometimes you have to take a step back to see that you can have it all.
“You waiting for someone?” Audrey should have jumped out of her skin, had she not trained surprise out of her system she might have done. She watched her shoulders in the bathroom mirror, reassuring herself that they did not move.
She turned. Laura Palmer was standing in the doorway with a tube of lipstick clutched in her hand, and all the world in her eyes. Audrey breathed deep, sets her feet on the tiles. She knows how to duck out of here without making a sound.
But she doesn’t, and neither does Laura. They stand there, long past the point that silence has curdled into something awkward and belligerent. Both of them willing to stay the course. And in that moment Audrey knows – whatever’s coming, whatever she doesn’t see when she looks at this girl, she knew Laura Palmer best. For the simple reason that she was the only one who ever cared that there was something below the surface.
There’s a tickle in her throat, Audrey coughs to clear it and the moment breaks. Laura marches over to the mirror next to her and starts applying lipstick, carefully covering every inch of exposed skin at her lips. Audrey can’t stop staring, at that mouth, at those eyes. She feels like one of the boys in the cafeteria, unable to see that they are obvious beyond belief, but she doesn’t know how to stop.
Laura puts away the lipstick, and moves to start fiddling with her hair, “see something you like?”
It takes a moment to collect herself, watch herself in the mirror, make sure she shows what wants to be seen. Audrey lets her mouth twist into a smirk and steps into Laura’s personal space. “Maybe.”
For the briefest moment, there is a fire about Laura that cannot be explained. When the earth cools it’s just the two of them, staring dead ahead at each other, trying their very hardest not to be seen.