Enter, Night

There was an unfamiliar sticky wetness inside his pyjama pants. For a moment, he was terrified that he’d peed the bed, something he hadn’t done since he was a little boy, but the wetness was localized in his bottoms, not anywhere else in the bed, which was dry and warm with sleep. Then the dream of Morgan Parr naked in Bradley Lake came back to him.

Oh, yeah. That.

He smiled shyly and rolled over on his stomach, grinding the mattress with his pelvis. It had been a very good dream. Suddenly self conscious about staining the rest of the sheets by accident, he took off his pyjama bottoms and carried them downstairs to the laundry room and buried them underneath the rest of the family’s dirty laundry, before taking the stairs two at a time to get back to his room quickly, in case his mother saw his bum. Safe in his room, he pulled on a pair of clean underpants and some jeans. He took his sweater from where he’d left it on the chair by his desk. He put it on over his T-shirt and went to look for Sadie.

Finn remembered the howling he’d heard last night and remembered putting Sadie outside in the yard when she’d started howling herself. He hated leaving her in her doghouse overnight, but he hadn’t been about to wait around for her to come back in when he was cooking a dream like the one he’d been having.

He opened the back door and peered into the pre-dawn gloom of the fenced-in yard. The doghouse Finn and his dad had built for Sadie when she was a puppy was in the far corner of the yard.

“Sadie,” he called softly. “Good morning, Sadie! Come, girl! Want to go for a walk?” Finn waited expectantly for Sadie to slither out of the doghouse like a long black breadbox, stretch, and wag her tail, shaking her entire hindquarters along with it. But she didn’t come through the doorway of the doghouse, nor was she anywhere else in the yard. “Sadie!” Finn called again. “Sadie, come!”

Finn stepped out of the house and crossed the yard. The grass was wet between his bare toes. He jogged over to the doghouse and leaned down to peer inside. It was empty. Again he looked around the yard, but there was no sign of the Labrador anywhere. The fence was too high for her to jump-his parents had learned that lesson when she went into her first heat and almost wound up becoming another Parr’s Landing unwed mother statistic.

Fighting rising panic, he ran back to the house to look for her. Perhaps his parents had gotten up in the night and let her in. Yeah, that must be it. She was probably upstairs on the landing, or down in the rec room, behind the couch where the heating vents were. Sadie liked to sleep there in the winter sometimes.

Finn searched the house from the basement to the top floor, but there was no sign of his dog anywhere. The only place he hadn’t checked was his parents’ bedroom. They wouldn’t be happy to be woken up at six in the morning, but this was an emergency. He approached their bedroom door. Before he knocked, he said a prayer to himself.

Please, God, if you’re real, let my dog be sleeping in my parents’ room. Please don’t take my dog away from me. Let her be all right.

Finn knocked on their door. There was no answer, so he knocked again. From the other side, he heard his father’s querulous sleep voice asking him what he wanted. His heart sank, because there was no scratching on the other side in response to his knocking.

He turned the knob and pushed the door open. His parents were cocooned in their blankets, each of them with their own set. He looked on either side of the bed, but there was nothing on the floor but their bedside rugs and a pair of his dad’s grey sweatpants balled up in the corner near his dresser.

“What is it, Finnegan?” he demanded, not bothering to lift his head from the pillow, much less open his eyes. “This better be good.” When there was no answer, because his son’s throat was working too much for him to form the words needed to answer, he opened his eyes and sat up. “Finnegan? What is it, son?”

“Sadie’s gone, Daddy,” Finn said. “She’s gone from the yard and I can’t find her anywhere.” And then he burst into tears.

Billy Lightning woke from a fitful sleep full of bad dreams in his room at the Gold Nugget. His head ached, and his back felt as though he’d been sleeping on a blacktop highway.

He’d woken twice in the middle of the night: once because he’d heard what sounded like a thousand dogs howling all at once outside his window, and once again because of the nightmare he was having, a familiar one that usually visited him during periods of profound stress. He’d had it constantly through his childhood at the residential school. It stayed with him until the second year of his adoption by Phenius Osborne and his wife, after which time it visited him more and more rarely. It didn’t come back till he was at the University of Toronto doing his undergrad. It occurred less frequently throughout his Masters and PhD studies as his sense of his own vulnerability to exploitation diminished and, for all intents and purposes, even disappeared.

In the dream, he was six years old and crying for his father. Not Phenius Osborne-whom Billy considered his real father-but rather his biological father, Tom Lightning, the man from whom he had been forcefully taken by the truancy officers who would deliver him into the hell of St. Rita’s Catholic Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie-the man who had been compelled by law to leave him there so Billy could be saved from being an Indian.

It was always the same dream, by turns poignant and awful, like the most scarring nightmares are, pregnant with symbolism overlaid with memories as fresh as cuts.

The narrative of the dream was always the same: he was standing at the gate of St. Rita’s, which was locked. On his side of the gate stood Billy and his father, flanked by the two truancy officers. On the other side, two priests in long robes, both pale with hard faces, were walking towards it with keys. In the dream, the priests were enormous, gigantic, moving in inexorable slow motion towards Billy, swinging the ring of keys like a pendulum.

In the dream, Tom pleaded with the truancy officers to let him take Billy home, explaining that his mother had died the previous year and that it was too soon, too soon! for this. Tom begged the two men to let him bring Billy the following year, when he would be seven, or maybe even the year after that, when he’d be eight. With Billy clinging to his father’s leg, the truancy officers told Tom to be a good Indian and let them do their job, or they’d have to arrest him, which they didn’t want to do.

In the dream, the sound of the iron key in the lock was like a freight train, and the gate swung open with torturous slowness. When the priests reached for him, he clung even tighter to his father’s leg and screamed, and he kept screaming as they pried him away and dragged him across the threshold. The dream always ended with the same mental images weighted with symbolism-the expression of decimated impotence in Tom Lightning’s eyes as the truancy officers restrained him and he was forced to watch while Billy was dragged across the threshold of the school, the burn of the priest’s grip on Billy’s shoulders and wrist. And most importantly, the searing sense of his own irrelevance in the face of forces beyond his control-powerful forces that had identified him as inferior and damaged and powerless.

He knew why he’d had the dream-he had it a week running after his adoptive father’s murder in Toronto. In that instance, it had obviously been about losing another father. He’d had it last night because he’d been forced to deal with the two white policemen, the younger of whom had come just short of calling him a criminal.

Billy stood up and walked into the bathroom. He switched on the overhead light and studied his face in the mirror above the sink. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his face was puffy. “You look like crap, Dr. Lightning,” he said to his reflection. “You need to get it together, and quickly. You’ve got a lot to do.”

He stripped off his T-shirt and turned the shower on. He needed breakfast and really needed coffee.

When there was no answer at Donna Lemieux’s door at ten in the morning, her mother, Madeleine Tarrant, rapped on the glass of her front window. Still no answer. She cupped her eyes with her hand and peered in. The lights were off in the living room and the cat, Samantha, was crying in the kitchen, which meant she hadn’t been fed-which meant that Donna had likely not been home last night. And yet her car was in the driveway.

Madeleine thought, Well, my stars. What are we to make of that? Donna not being home at ten in the morning after a shift at O’Toole’s the night before was not, in and of itself, a problem. The problem-if you wanted to call it a problem, and Madeleine was not ready to do that just yet-was what an unlikely occurrence it was. While Donna was no prude-not by any stretch, and never had been-as far as her mother knew, Donna had always focused on work in the years since her worthless drunk of a husband, Lucien, had run off and left her and moved to God knew where.

She hadn’t “gone steady” with anyone for years, though she certainly was popular with the men who came into O’Toole’s. On the other hand, most of them were married and Donna had gone to school with their wives and, as far as Madeleine knew, was friendly with most of them. All the single men of datable age were likewise accounted for in Parr’s Landing.

In the past, when Madeleine had expressed regret that Lucien hadn’t at least left her with a grandchild, Donna