Enter, Night

but could only murmur, and even that effort caused his eyes to roll back in his head.

“Thank you,” Elliot said, then died.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Gold Nugget diner was nearly deserted, and Christina couldn’t decide if this pleased her because of the privacy it afforded, or made her feel more conspicuous in Billy Lightning’s company. Ultimately, she decided she didn’t care, which proved to be a relief to both her and Billy as they picked at their Salisbury steak special. The waitress assured them that the tapioca pudding was included in the price, then asked them if they wanted it after the meal, or with it.

“After, please,” said Billy, speaking for them both. Though ravenous, not having eaten since Adeline’s aborted jellied eel luncheon, Billy was still too upset to do more than move it around on his plate. Also, he hated tapioca pudding, which reminded him of St. Rita’s, where it was considered a special treat for the residents, even though the milk used to make it was usually sour and the tapioca often rancid.

In the background, a radio played softly. Christina caught the strains of B.J. Thomas singing “Rock and Roll Lullaby,” a song about a teenage mother and her child, which made her think of Morgan. The smell of grease in the air was oddly warm and comforting, not off-putting.

Christina had dressed carefully, and had applied lipstick. She told herself that it was because she was tired of Adeline making her feel like the bottom of a grimy lunch pail by swanning through her empty mausoleum in Mainbocher dresses and diamonds. But the truth was, Christina wanted to look pretty tonight, for Billy.

Odd, that, Christina thought. She’d mostly forgotten what it felt like to care.

They had spent an hour or more discussing Adeline’s bizarre behaviour at lunch, but Christina was sick to death of talking about Adeline Parr.

“So, Billy,” she said. “Tell me about you.”

He shrugged. “I’ve told you about me. There’s not much else to tell.”

Christina smiled. “I don’t believe that for a second,” she chided him gently. “You’ve lived such an impressive life. I can’t even imagine what it took to become what you’ve become. What drove you? Was it your father? I know he was a professor, too-did you always want to be like him?”

“Becoming like my father wasn’t something I really thought of when I was a kid,” he said. “I suppose having a father who was an academic, who valued learning, was an inspiration. But no, I didn’t always want to be like him- that came later.”

“So, what did you want to be?”

Billy paused. “I wanted to be dead,” he said. “I wanted to not exist. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to be safe. Since it appeared I would never be safe, as a child, and since pain was a daily part of my life, I didn’t see a lot of merit in being alive.”

Christina was confused. “Billy-I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”

He shook his head. “Never mind. I’m sorry I brought it up. I don’t usually talk about it. Please forgive me-forget I said anything.”

“No,” she said, reaching for his hand, laying her own on top of his. “Tell me. What are you talking about? I want to know… that is, I want to know if you want to tell me. Do you? I mean… I’d like us to be friends, you know?”

“Friends,” he said. He tested the word, probed for sharp edges. Finding none, he said, “I’d like that, too, I guess. I mean, yes. I would like us to be friends, Christina.”

“So… tell me,” she said. “What happened when you were a child, Billy? What made you wish you were dead? Death is obviously very much a part of my life these days since Jack has been gone. Yours, too, to be fair. I can tell you miss your dad as much as I miss Jack. I wish they were both still alive, still here for us. I can’t imagine anything better than life right now.”

“Do you know what my least favourite colour in the world is, Christina? Red. I hate it. I absolutely loathe it.”

“I’m glad I didn’t wear red tonight, then,” she said lightly. She paused. “Why red?”

“Red is the colour of the uniforms we had to wear at St. Rita’s when the priests took us out on Sundays, or to show us off in public. Do you know what a residential school is?”

“Not really. A school for Indian children, right?”

“Yes,” he corrected her gently. “That’s right.”

“I’m sorry,” Christina said. “I don’t know much about them. We were taught that the schools were an example of the generosity of the Church and the Canadian government. Charity. They told us that we were lucky to have been born white.”

“Yeah, the priests taught us that you were lucky to be born white, too.” Billy realized that it sounded cruel when he said it. He forced himself to smile because it wasn’t Christina’s fault and she was obviously trying to understand.

“I remember when we were in school here, we had to memorize that poem from Kipling. The one about other children. What was it called?”

Billy smiled bitterly. “You mean, ‘Foreign Children.’ That was the title. ‘Foreign Children.’ They taught it to us, too. But we had to learn to recite it after we were punished. After the strap. Or worse. ” Billy looked away and recited. “Little Indian, Sioux or Crow/Little frosty Eskimo/Little Turk or Japanee/O! don’t you wish that you were me?”

“Billy…”

“You asked,” he said with another shrug. “You wanted to know me. Well, this is part of me. The government took me away from my birth father when I was a little boy. My mother had just died. My dad was all I had. I still have nightmares about that day-I was six years old. The priests shaved my head and put me in a dormitory with twenty other little boys. The first night, all I heard was crying from the other beds. When my hair grew back, they put a bowl on my head and cut around it. The priests started every day with a sermon about the love of Christ and the grace of the Catholic Church. They taught us that the price tag for acting like an Indian was an eternity of torment in Hell. But that was just after we were dead and away from the priests-they made sure that we had a taste of what was coming to ‘bad Indians’ in the afterlife right then and there. One kid I was friends with was given thirty lashes with a leather strap for speaking his own language. The food was rotten- literally rotten, sometimes. But not eating it could get you chained to the dining room table for days at a time.”

“Billy, my God. My God.”

“I ran away once,” Billy said. “Do you know what they did to me when they caught me and brought me back to St. Rita’s? The principal pushed me down a flight of kitchen stairs. And when I couldn’t get up, he and another priest dragged me to his office, stripped me naked, and beat me unconscious. Afterwards, they took me to the infirmary and found out I had a broken arm. They weren’t sure if it was the stairs, or the stick they used to beat me with.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I got off easy. Other kids ran away and didn’t make it. They’d bring their bodies back frozen with parts missing. I don’t need to tell you how godforsaken cold it gets up here in the winter, or how hungry the animals get when the snow comes.”

Christina’s horror couldn’t have been more obvious if someone had written it across her forehead with a grease pencil.

In many ways, Billy was appalled at himself for telling Christina about St. Rita’s. She could not possibly have expected to hear what he was telling her when she asked him about his childhood. On those levels, he was ashamed of himself for using the truth as a cudgel, always knowing that, if push came to shove, he could always exonerate himself using her sheer decency and his terrible childhood history to grease those wheels.

On several other levels, including his own heart’s measure, he wanted this woman to know him. He wasn’t sure why, but he did. And he wanted her to know the worst as well as the best. He could see that she was impressed with his credentials-maybe too impressed, in that it seemed to cost her some dignity, maybe causing her undeserved shame about her own relative lack of formal education. He didn’t want Christina Parr to think his life began as a tenured college professor without also knowing about what he had endured at St. Rita’s, and how the blows of that hammer and chisel had helped shape his life.

“Didn’t you say anything? Didn’t anybody check up on the children? How could this happen right under the