Enter, Night

“Mother,” Jeremy said. “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Jeremy,” Adeline said, her voice was faint. She fumbled for her water glass, and then took a few sips before shakily putting it back down. “Christina, what did you say his name was?”

Christina looked quizzically at Jeremy who returned her look blankly, as if to say, I have no idea. “His name is William Lightning. Why?”

“You said his father passed away, did you?” Her studied casualness seemed entirely at odds with her pallor. “Did he mention what his father’s… what he taught?”

“I think he said his father was an anthropologist, too. His name was something Osborne. He was part of some archaeological excavation here in the fifties. As I said, Billy-Dr. Lightning-said his father just died. Why, did you know him?”

“I believe we may have met when he was here in 1952 for his dig,” Adeline said. Still deathly pale, Adeline seemed to have regained some of her composure, though her voice sounded unusually brittle, even robotic.

Adeline placed her napkin on the table and pushed her chair away. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some correspondence to attend to this evening. Please don’t dawdle over dinner in my absence. It’s not helpful to Beatrice when you make extra work for her by tarrying.”

Jeremy sighed. “For that matter, we wouldn’t want to risk enjoying Beatrice’s cooking by ‘tarrying,’ much less endanger ourselves by digesting it properly, Mother.”

Instead of lashing back as was her usual wont, Adeline got up from the table without a word and walked out of the dining room. She looked straight ahead. They heard the sound of her high heels on the marble foyer and the sound of the door to Adeline’s study being shut. Then, silence.

“What the hell was that?” Jeremy asked in complete mystification. “What just happened? What did you say to her?”

“I have no idea,” Christina said, equally baffled. “Did I say something that offended her? She just walked out.” Christina turned to Morgan. “Honey, did you notice anything strange about your grandmother just now? Did I say something weird?”

“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “It looked like something hurt her feelings.”

“She doesn’t have ‘feelings,’ Morgan,” Jeremy said dryly. “And if you offended her, Christina, good for you. I don’t know how you did it. For a minute there, it was almost as if she had a heart. Which, as we all know, is bullshit.”

“Mom,” Morgan said tentatively. “Would it be all right if I went out? I mean, since Grandmother is… well, you know… not here for me to ask permission?”

Christina raised her eyebrows. “Where do you want to go, honey? It’s late, and it’s dark.”

“It’s not that late,” Morgan said. She showed her mother her watch. “It’s just a little after seven. I want to go and see if Finn is all right. He wasn’t at school today.”

“You don’t know the town very well yet, Morgan. It’s only been a few days. Why don’t you go and see him tomorrow afternoon?”

“Mom, please! I’ll be back in an hour or so. I just want to make sure he’s OK.”

“Do you even know where he lives?” Christina wasn’t sure if it was the notion of Morgan wandering around Parr’s Landing at night that bothered her, or the fact that she was going to see some local boy Christina hadn’t even met yet. You sound like Adeline right now, Christina chided herself. It didn’t take you very long to start worrying about ‘townies,’ as though you weren’t one yourself.

“I looked up his address in the phone book when I got home today,” Morgan said. “It’s not far from here.”

“Then why don’t you phone him?”

“Come on, Mom,” Morgan said, her voice brimming with teenage scorn. “If I were going to the library to study, you wouldn’t be saying a word. I walked around Toronto at night and you weren’t worried about that. What do you think is going to happen to me here? I’ll only be gone for an hour. I want to take a walk, anyway. I’ll just knock on his door, say hi, and come right back.”

Jeremy said, “Do you want me to drive you, Morgan?”

“No thanks, Uncle Jeremy. I really want to take a walk. I’m fifteen, you know,” she said. “I’m practically an adult.”

Christina sighed. “All right. But be back by nine, OK? And we won’t tell your grandmother where you are, or what you’re doing.” Now it was Morgan’s turn to sigh. “All I’m doing is going for a walk, Mom,” she said. “It’s no big deal, really.” Morgan kissed her mother on the cheek and practically danced out of the room.

“Take a sweater!” Christina called after her, but the front door had already swung shut. Christina hoped Adeline hadn’t heard it. She didn’t relish another lecture on propriety from her mother-in-law. But there was no sound from Adeline’s study. If she’d heard Morgan leave, she gave no indication of it.

“What do you want to do?” Jeremy said. “Shall we watch TV? Do you want to go to O’Toole’s and have a drink? Or go for a drive?” He seemed unsurprised by either Adeline’s departure, or Morgan’s, as though vicious hostility and unexplained behaviour shifts were simply a matter of family life. Jesus, Christina thought. No wonder Jack wanted out.

“Let’s go for a drive,” Christina said brightly. “Let’s go for a drive, all the way back to Toronto.”

Finn was lying sprawled across his bed rereading his Tomb of Dracula comics, trying to recapture some familiar joy in them, when his mother knocked on his door and told him there was a girl downstairs in the living room asking for him.

His cotton pillowcase was soaked and his eyes were red and sore. He hadn’t been able to eat much at dinner, which was already a sombre affair, since neither he nor his parents could forget that there was no furry black presence lying in the doorway where the dining room met the kitchen, front paws folded in front of her, head resting on paws, amber eyes watching the table in case her master dropped any food.

Even the story about the visit to the police station to report the discovery of the bag of knives failed to rouse much of a conversation. When Finn’s father said that hunters probably left the bag, there seemed to be a tacit, general agreement to let it go at that. No one wanted to talk about blood and slaughter up at Bradley Lake with Sadie missing.

As to Finn specifically, the emptiness of that doorway cut him so deeply that he’d had to excuse himself from the table, feeling he might be sick.

His parents excused him and he went up to his room to read, but the familiar images struck him as harsh and garish tonight. If Finn had been older, he’d have realized that he was receiving his first abject lesson in the cruel architecture of love and loss, and how no depicted horror- even in The Tomb of Dracula- could ever hope to match the awfulness of a real one, but he was just a twelve-year-old boy who loved a dog that was missing.

What was the point of being able to turn himself into a bat, or mist, or live in a ruined castle in Transylvania without Sadie sleeping next to him? What use was a crossbow, or a silver compact, or a crucifix in fighting Dracula and his minions without his best friend bounding ahead through the bush on one of their pre-dawn walks out by Bradley Lake, fetching her red ball and bringing it back to him as though it was the most precious token of love imaginable?

“What, Mom?” He leaned up on his elbow. “What did you say?”

“I said, there’s a young lady downstairs to see you,” Anne said. “She said her name is Morgan Parr, and that she’s a friend of yours.”

“Morgan is here?” he said, surprised. “She’s downstairs?”

“She seems a little old to be a friend of yours, Finnegan,” Anne added. “Which one of the family is she? How old is she?”

Finn sat up and wiped his face with his sleeve. “I don’t know how old she is. We sometimes walk home from school together,” he said, finessing the truth a little bit, knowing that his mother would be happier if Morgan were his age. “She just moved here, from Toronto. She lives at Parr House with her grandmother. Her mother lives there, too.”

Ah, Christina, of course-Christina Monroe. That was her name, at least back then. The one that got knocked up by Jack Parr and ran off to Toronto under the cover of darkness. That one. The tramp. So, not a real Parr after all, a shotgun Parr.

Anne Miller, who was not in the habit of gossiping, or thinking ill of other women, immediately regretted her mean-spirited bitchiness, even in thought, and rightly decided it was beneath her. All the girls had crushes on Jack