Enter, Night

“That was my attempt at humour, by the way,” Jeremy said. “I’m hurt that you didn’t laugh. I mean, about the poppers and the dancing.”

“I just doubt that it’s much of an exaggeration,” Christina replied tartly. “And besides, right about now it sounds pretty amazing. Have you thought about it, by the way? I mean, what it’s going to be like for you back home being openly hom… sorry, gay,” she corrected herself, using the word that Jeremy and his friends applied to themselves.

“You said ‘home’ to refer to that place,” Jeremy said. He shuddered. “It’s not my home. Toronto is my home.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do.” He sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. And yes, I’ve thought about it a lot. Of course I’m not going to be ‘openly gay’ there. You don’t get to be ‘openly gay’ way up north. I don’t think they’ve even heard the word ‘gay.’ It’s ‘faggot,’ ‘fruit,’ or ‘queer.’ Or, something worse. Aside from the fact that I’d get killed-scion of the great Parr name or not-who on earth would I ‘be gay’ with?”

“Have you thought about that guy you used to know? What was his name-Elliot? Elliot McCormack?”

“McKitrick. Elliot McKitrick. And no,” Jeremy lied, “I haven’t. I haven’t thought about him in years.”

“I wonder what happened to him?”

“I do know that his father beat him up pretty badly when he found out about us. I heard about it from my mother. Used a whip on him, apparently. My mother said I should be grateful that she loved me enough to send me to the Doucette instead of doing to me what Elliot’s father did to him.” He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what happened in the end.”

Softly, Christina asked, “Did you love him? I mean, ‘love-love’?” Jeremy sighed again. “Oh, what’s love? I fell in ‘love’ a lot in Toronto. I certainly thought it was ‘love-love.’ With Elliot, we were both young.” He paused. “Yes, I did love him, I guess. He was so handsome, almost as handsome as Jack.”

“I sort of remember him. I went to school with his sister. She was pretty, too.”

“Elliot’s probably fat and bald now and married to some water buffalo with seven kids. That is if my mother didn’t have him killed.” Jeremy laughed mirthlessly. “Jesus, why are we doing this? Remind me?”

“I’m doing what I have to do,” Christina said. “I have no money and no place to go. We couldn’t keep staying on people’s couches, and I couldn’t support Morgan by working as a waitress, let alone help her through this grieving period, if I was away every night. Not yet, anyway. That’s why I wrote to her. No, Jack didn’t want me to ever have to do this, but it’s something we should have thought about when he was alive. And frankly, Adeline owes me for what she did. And she especially owes Morgan. She’s her granddaughter, for Christ’s sake.” Christina reached over and touched Jeremy’s knee lightly with her fingers. “You, on the other hand, are being a saint on this earth for coming with us to protect us. Jack would have been so proud of you.”

“How much do you think she”-Jeremy indicated Morgan with a nod of his head, not wanting to say her name in case it woke her-“has figured out about what happened back here before she was born?”

“I don’t know. We’ve always been very careful when we spoke about the family, as neutral as we could possibly be. We didn’t want to plant monsters in her head.”

“Maybe it’ll be different this time,” Jeremy said. “Maybe things will have changed and it won’t be… well, the way it was.”

“What was that Faulkner quote from Requiem for a Nun that Jack loved so much?”

Jeremy closed his eyes. “‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”

They drove in silence for half an hour, the car interred in the northern Ontario darkness as effectively as if it was a mine cart travelling a mile and a half beneath the earth. Then the road abruptly widened and Christina gasped.

“Look,” she said.

Jeremy looked. He drew in a sharp intake of breath.

It was as though the night sky had begun bleeding muddy orange light from a rip in the clouds, threaded now with skeletal fingers of luminous red and yellow. And the clouds now parted like stage curtains, revealed the low full moon, vast and sovereign, and seemingly large enough to touch the edge of the earth.

Beneath the moon, the town of Parr’s Landing rose out of the blackness, stretching to meet it. Beyond the town, the vast forests and the cliffs above Bradley Lake held Parr’s Landing in the same stony centuries-old embrace.

This was the same view the Indians had for a thousand years before the arrival of the French and English. It was the same view the French Jesuits first saw when they arrived on the shores of New France, travelling by canoe and overland to build the doomed mission of St. Barthelemy to the Ojibwa in the seventeenth century.

It was the same view Christina Parr had seen every night for the first seventeen years of her life, and the last vista of Parr’s Landing she’d seen when she turned her head, like Lot’s wife, that night almost sixteen years in the past when she’d fled the town with Jack Parr.

Unlike Lot’s wife, however, Christina hadn’t been turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for looking back. But for its part, Parr’s Landing might as well have been petrified by her backward glance for all it had changed.

Faulkner was right, she thought.

“Wake up, Morgan.” Christina called gently over her shoulder. And before she could stop herself: “We’re home.” Then she turned the Chevelle left on Main Street, onto Martin Street, and began the steep uphill climb towards Parr House.

PARR’S LANDING

CHAPTER SEVEN

Adeline Parr heard the sound of wheels on the gravel below her bedroom window and thought: Now it begins. She sighed. I hope it’s not all too awfully unpleasant.

She stared intently into the bevelled mirror of the nineteenth century Biedermeier burlwood dressing table at which she sat and took her own measure in the glass. The result was pleasing, if slightly severe, and it suited her purposes admirably. She adjusted her pearls, and then took a piece of tissue paper from the enamelled box and expertly blotted the lipstick on her bottom lip till it, too, was flawless. By habit, she glanced at the silver-framed photograph of her dead husband and smiled at it as though waiting for Augustus Parr to tell her how beautiful she still was.

Her gold Piaget watch read eleven-thirty. She sighed again. Adeline stood up and smoothed her dark grey skirt, crossed the floor of the bedroom, and closed the door behind her. Then she went downstairs to greet the adventuress who had stolen and murdered her favourite son; her bastard granddaughter; and her great mistake of a second son.

The smile Adeline had been practising froze on her face when she first laid eyes on Morgan, hanging shyly behind her common slut of a mother, in the doorway of Parr House.

Adeline barely registered Christina, but she felt her heart might stop when she saw Jack’s face staring back at her. Jack’s face, except it was the open and trusting face of a young girl, with none of the rage Jack had shown Adeline before he left. The girl’s hair was the same as Jack’s- thick and dark brown, with caramel highlights when the light hit it just so. Her eyes were the same as Jack’s, too: dark brown, almost-black irises with pupils like dark pools.

“Welcome, Morgan,” she said. “I’m your grandmother, Adeline Parr. It’s nice to meet you.”

Adeline extended her hand and Morgan shook it politely. Under other circumstances, she would have been delighted to see that the girl had been inculcated with some measure of good manners, but she was still privately