Unnamed Narrator Timeline and Summary

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• The narrator returns to the remote area of Quebec where she grew up to try to find her missing father.
• When they reach the cabin that had belonged to her parents, she and the others look briefly for her father, but to no avail. They then resign themselves to more leisurely activities—you know, card playing, fishing, and… playing mind games with each other. Your typical couples' vacation?
• Speaking of relationship drama and mind games: the narrator spends a lot of the story ducking Joe's questions about the future of their relationship (and even a marriage proposal), as well as David's inappropriate banter and sexual advances.
• Having found some wacky-looking drawings belonging to her father, the narrator comes to believe that he might not be dead—just insane. However, she soon realizes that the drawings are tracings of nearby rock paintings that he was studying. She goes in pursuit of the original paintings to confirm her theory that that's what he was up to.
• While diving down in the lake to try to find a painting on the side of a cliff, the narrator appears to have some kind of spiritual experience, or vision. She claims she sees the fetus she aborted several years ago swimming below her, although we know that can't literally be true (and she admits as much later). The moment forces her to abandon the false memories she'd been relaying to the reader throughout the novel and confront some of her more unpleasant memories.
• Soon after that incident, Paul comes by to tell her that her father's body has been found.
• The narrator then decides that she wants to try to pursue a kind of spiritual encounter with her parents. So, rather than leaving with the rest of the group, she hides and stays behind after they've gone.
• To lay the groundwork for being able to commune with her parents, she engages in a lot of rituals that seem to bring her closer to nature and further away from the modern world. She gets rid of her clothes, smashes all the modern objects in the cabin, and holes up in a "lair" like an animal.
• After achieving the experience she had desired by seeing both parents, she is preparing to return to the "real" world when Joe returns to the cabin to try to fetch her. We don't know whether the narrator decides to go back with him and resume their relationship, but she does seem to realize now that she loves him. Um, it's a start?