Enter, Night

“Yes,” she said, brushing the leaves out of her hair. “That’s what I mean. Exactly. She doesn’t have the antibodies for this town. Morgan is a city girl.” She grew serious again. “These kids can probably smell it on her. They always could smell difference. They’re terrible when they find it, too. You know that better than anyone.”

“Yep,” he said quietly. “I do.”

“See, that’s what I’m worried about. We don’t belong here-either of us. And Morgan really doesn’t belong here. She belongs at home in the city, with me there for her every afternoon when she gets home from school and wants to cry over her dead father, or talk about how she feels about it.” She began to cry, at the same time thinking, Jesus, enough with these waterworks, already. I can’t keep doing this. “I’m failing her. This isn’t what Jack would have wanted. I just know it.”

Jeremy rolled towards Christina. His expression was so sad that she instinctively reached for his hand and squeezed his fingers before he even had a chance to speak. When he did, his own voice was thick. “Christina, I’m so, so sorry,”

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “About what?”

“About-all of this,” he said. “About not being to be able to take care of you both. About letting things get to the point where we had to come back here. I was so busy making my own life that I didn’t have a contingency plan. I’ve been beating myself up about it since we arrived here. I’m so sorry.”

“Hey,” she said softly. “Shut up. OK? It wasn’t your job to take care of us. Jack didn’t expect it from you, and neither did I. All three of us moved away from here to get on with our lives, and to get away from all the… the bad shit here.” Christina propped herself on one elbow and looked Jeremy in the eye. “Jack always took care of everything. I guess, in a way, we were still kids in our own minds. Not smart of us, I know. But he would have hated to hear you blame yourself for this. If he were around, he’d be busy blaming himself for not taking out insurance because somewhere in the back of his mind he still thought of himself as a rich boy. And I’d be busy blaming myself for not making it a priority myself, and for not reminding him that he lost that ‘rich boy’ status when he married me.” Jeremy said dryly, “You two were always ideally matched.”

“You know what? There’s no one to blame, and it’s a waste of time.

It’s nobody’s fault. We couldn’t have predicted what happened. And,” she added, “nothing would have stopped Adeline from simply offering to help me out when I called to tell her about Jack’s accident. All she had to do was say, ‘What do you need, Christina? What does my granddaughter need? It’s yours.’ But she didn’t. She let me beg, like some sort of sharecropper instead of the mother of her son’s only child. Then she condescended that I could come back here with Morgan and live off her charity. “You on the other hand,” she said, squeezing his hand, “offered to come back here to this place in spite of all the terrible memories it holds for you. You did it for Morgan and me. Which makes you the one person in this whole sad story who offered to step up to the plate. We’ll never forget it, either of us. So let’s not hear any more about blame, OK?”

Jeremy squeezed back. “OK,” he said. “Thanks, love.”

“Now, what are you going to do about Elliot McKitrick? You’re going to meet up with him sooner or later. It’s a matter of time. How’s that going to be for you?”

Jeremy was silent for a moment. The he spoke. “It’s going to hurt like hell,” he said. “One way or another, it’s going to be a killer.”

Morgan’s new homeroom at Matthew Browning Memorial High School smelled like chalk, wet wool, some sort of disinfectant, and old wood to her. It didn’t smell like Jarvis Collegiate back home. It wasn’t that it smelled bad, it just smelled foreign and fundamentally inhospitable. It wasn’t just that the ceilings seemed too high, or that the architecture of the place made her think of the 1950s-an era she didn’t know, but had read about in magazines, and could picture. It wasn’t that the contrast between the wild autumn northern light coming through the arched windows contrasted sharply with the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling threw an industrial pall over the scene.

It wasn’t just that everything looked even older than it was, or that the Queen looked preternaturally girlish in the yellowed picture hanging in the wooden frame on the wall adjacent to the blackboard (as opposed to the more matronly representation of Her Majesty on the wall of her homeroom at Jarvis), or that in the brand new black- and-white picture next to it, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau looked like a French movie star.

It was all of these things and none of them, rolled into a tight ball of dislocation. She was an alien in an alien place, where none of her markers of familiarity lined up.

Being an intelligent girl, Morgan was able to recognize that her response was an emotional one. Being a confident girl, it didn’t throw her as much as it might have thrown someone less sure of herself. Her mother would have been surprised at just how much of her father’s daughter Morgan Parr actually was.

Some of the boys had looked at her with frank interest. A smaller number of the girls had assessed her as a sexual threat, and she felt a chill drift of hostility coming from them. But the majority of the students, both male and female, regarded her with the curiosity reserved for the interjection of something brand new, even foreign, into their social ecosystem.

When the teacher, Mr. Churchill, had introduced her as “Morgan Parr who has transferred to our school from far-away Toronto,” she wasn’t sure what had caused them to raise their eyebrows more-the fact that she was from someplace as far away as Toronto and therefore, by definition, exotic, or her last name, which was as familiar to them as their own.

But if she’d had any real doubts or fears about fitting into a new school, they’d been dramatically allayed by her visit to the principal’s office when she had arrived at the school that morning before the start of classes. She’d opened the door to the outer office and found that she was expected. The sixtyish woman with a mauve-rinsed marcel wave and the kindly face sitting at the desk had smiled warmly at Morgan.

“Welcome to Matthew Browning Memorial, dear,” she’d said. “We’re so glad you’ve made it here safely. Your grandma told us you were coming. We’ve been expecting you. We’ve all been looking forward to it.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Morgan said shyly. Privately she tried to picture the adamantine Adeline Parr as anyone’s “grandma,” least of all her, and suppressed a fit of spontaneous giggling with effort.

“My name is Miss Quinn. I’m the secretary,” the older woman said, beaming. “Why, you look just like your father, dear. He was one of my favourite students. He was always so polite, with a smile for everybody. I knew him ever since he was a little boy.” A pained look crossed her face. “We were all so sorry to hear that he’d passed. So very sad.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Morgan said again, charmed by the older woman’s familiar and loving evocation of her father. She was unused to the feeling. Usually, mentions of her father by strangers distressed her. But there was something soothing and motherly about Miss Quinn, and Morgan was surprised at the sense of comfort she experienced in hearing her father mentioned by the older woman. She caught a whiff of Evening in Paris as Miss Quinn crossed the floor to knock on the door marked Mr. R. Murphy, Principal.

“I’ll just let Mr. Murphy know that you’re here,” Miss Quinn said.

She opened the door and stepped inside. A few minutes later she came out and said, “Go on in, dear. Mr. Murphy wants a few words with you. I’ll get your papers all filled out for you in the meantime.”

Morgan stepped into the office. The principal rose from his chair when she entered. He gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Hello, Morgan, I’m Mr. Murphy, the principal. Please sit down. We’re all very glad to have you joining us here at Matthew Browning, even this late in the season. We all wish it could have been under different circumstances, of course. But still, we’re delighted to have you.”

“Thank you, sir,” she replied.

She waited for Mr. Murphy to continue. “I don’t need to tell you that I don’t usually invite the new students in here for a chat before they start school. Heck,” he added with a good natured, avuncular chuckle. “I’ve known most of them, one way or another, since they were boys and girls. But your grandmother, Mrs. Parr, met with me and discussed your… ah… specific circumstances.”

“You mean the fact that my dad is dead?”

“Yes,” he said. “That, in addition to the fact that you’ve come to us from Toronto, although both your parents were originally from here. Your father was one of the star pupils of this school, in addition to being from our finest family-your family, now.”

“Yes,” Morgan said sweetly. “Mine and my mother’s. My mother drove us here. She and my Uncle Jeremy, of