Enter, Night

noses of the authorities? I mean, didn’t anyone tell?”

He shrugged again. “We didn’t tell,” he said flatly. “We didn’t say much of anything at all. If anyone did, after the inspectors left, the punishments were brutal. It was worse to tell than not to tell. They wouldn’t have believed us, anyway. Everyone knew Indians were lazy, and that they lie. Especially bad Indian kids.”

“What about your mother and father? Did you ever tell them about it after you were adopted?”

Billy shook his head. “No, I didn’t. I kept it to myself. They loved me so much, I didn’t want them to have those images in their heads. It would have been too horrible for them. Sometimes I wanted to tell them, but I always stopped myself in time. At St. Rita’s, we learned the value of keeping quiet. Some lessons are hard to unlearn, even today. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I’ve never told anyone about his before. Christina, I’m sorry-please, don’t cry. I’m sorry I even brought it up. It wasn’t fair.”

“You didn’t bring it up, I did,” she said. She blew her nose on the paper napkin beside her plate. With the clean end of it, she dabbed her eyes. “I wanted to know. Now I know.”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“I don’t know where you buried all of this, Billy. I don’t know how you got past it.”

“I was lucky,” he said. “Two wonderful people took me out of it and did their best to raise me as their own. They didn’t try to make me ‘not be an Indian.’ They just loved me as I was. When they found out I was interested in history, they bought me books and took me to museums. They gave me the best education they could afford. And then they encouraged me to reclaim my Ojibwa heritage, and to be proud of it. But you know,” he said thoughtfully, “all it takes sometimes is someone like your brother’s friend-that G.I. Joe white cop, McKitrick-to look me up and down the way he does, like I was just a dirty, falling-down drunk, mouthwash-swilling nitchie, and suddenly it gets really hard to remember who I actually am. Or to have to sit in that funeral parlour your mother-in-law calls a dining room, eating her creamed snake, or whatever the hell she served me for lunch today, and listen to her tell me how ‘grateful’ I should be to the priests who ‘founded’ this town-her words, not mine-in 1631 for saving my soul and making me civilized. All I could think of was my birth father not being able to keep me safe from the government when they took me away from him. Thank you very much, Mrs. Parr.”

“My mother-in-law is such an asshole!” Christina gasped. Shocked at her own audacity, she burst into horrified laughter. Billy, equally shocked at her use of the very unladylike word “asshole,” joined her.

They doubled over, their laughter leavening the horror of Billy’s story as nothing else could have. Instinctively, he reached for her hand and held it. When their eyes met, they realized they’d breached some perimeter of distance that neither of them had believed was permeable. Christina didn’t pull her hand away from Billy’s until she saw the waitress shambling over to their table, and then she withdrew it reluctantly, her cheeks warm with flush.

But when the waitress asked in a bored voice if they wanted their tapioca now, all bets were off and they laughed till they wept.

When the waitress asked them what was so funny, their laughter redoubled, and all Billy could do was wheeze, “Nothing, nothing is funny. Nothing is funny.” Which, naturally, made them laugh even harder-so hard that Christina excused herself from the table to powder her nose before she had an accident.

Adeline Parr was outraged. Why, there’s a man standing in my driveway! She gathered the collar of her cashmere bathrobe close, instinctively pulling away from the window. And he’s staring up at my bedroom, bold as can be. It’s nearly ten o’clock at night. For the Lord’s own sake.

Adeline found it very difficult to believe that any of the locals would dare trespass on her property at any time of the day or night, but the fact remained that there was someone standing in her driveway. The moon and the stars that broke out from behind the rain clouds were bright white. They lit the driveway and the grounds with resolute clarity, and there was indeed a man standing there, looking up at her bedroom window.

The figure wasn’t Jeremy-he was upstairs in his room. Adeline could hear her son’s radio playing behind his closed bedroom door. Her whore of a daughter-in-law wasn’t at home. She was out cavorting in some gutter somewhere. Jeremy had given Adeline some codswallop about Christina visiting high school friends for the evening, but Adeline knew better. The whore was getting her bug scratched in some basement or back alley somewhere. And Beatrice and her husband lived in town, so it wasn’t either of them.

So, who on earth was standing in her driveway?

Adeline shrugged off her bathrobe and took her twenty-year-old sable coat off the padded hanger in the armoire. She slipped it on over her nightgown and stepped into a pair of shoes. Then she stalked out of the bedroom and swept down the stairs.

As she crossed the marble foyer, she wondered if she shouldn’t perhaps alert Jeremy or Morgan that there was a man outside and that she was going to investigate it herself. Yes, indeed, she thought. Which member of my illustrious, stalwart family shall I call to protect me from intruders? My pansy son? Or my fifteen-year-old granddaughter, who’s already showing the moral laxity of her mother, the whore?

Adeline smiled to herself. She realized that, at the end of the day, it would always be up to her to settle things. It had always been that way and always would be.

Her husband had been weak. One son was a pervert and the other had been a traitor. Adeline had only ever known one real man in her life, and even he hadn’t been man enough to leave the simpering titmouse to whom he was married, much less his jumped-up adopted redskin brat, now a so-called “professor.”

In the meantime, there’s a man standing in my driveway.

When Christina came back to the table, Billy saw that she had indeed powdered her nose. Himself the son of a fastidious woman, the gesture touched him and reminded him of his mother, in the best possible ways.

He checked his watch and said with mock reproach, “It’s well after ten. Didn’t you have a nine o’clock curfew, Mrs. Parr?”

“Good God, is it, really?” Christina looked shocked. “I didn’t even wear a watch! I have to get back home. I want to see my daughter before bed.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe I let the time get away from me like that. What was I thinking? God, I’m such an idiot!”

“I’d guess you were thinking that you needed a break, Christina,” he said gently. “Don’t make this into something it wasn’t. You’re entitled to some time off from being what everyone else in that house needs you to be, for good or bad. Remember that.”

Billy walked her to her car. As they said goodbye, he had the preposterous notion to kiss her on the cheek-a notion he overrode, shaking her hand instead. He told himself it was because of gossip, but he suspected it was really that he wouldn’t want to stop kissing her. He wanted to take her away with him, back home to Toronto, even back home to Michigan with him. Somewhere he could watch over her. Anywhere, as long as it wasn’t here.

Adeline pushed open the front door of Parr House and stepped out onto the portico.

“You there!” she called out. “What are you doing on my property? Identify yourself at once!” She waited, hands on hips. But the man in the driveway didn’t move, nor did he speak. “Are you deaf? Answer me! This is Adeline Parr and you are trespassing on my land. Identify yourself at once.”

When the man still didn’t move, Adeline stepped off the portico and took a step towards him. She leaned forward and squinted, but the moonlight was behind him and she couldn’t see his face.

“This is your last chance to identify yourself and state your business,” Adeline said coldly. “In one minute, I shall go back inside my house and summon the authorities. And you’ll find out exactly what it means to trespass on my land.”

The man took a step towards her. Then another. Adeline squinted, but the shadows seemed to follow the figure as he walked towards her. The moonlight seemed to fall around him without once touching his face, or lighting on his clothes. He was dressed in from head to toe in black, however-that much she was able to ascertain, if only by the way the night seemed to fall away from him as he moved, the shades of black separating and reforming themselves in his wake. She felt dizzy watching him… drift? No, he was walking, she was sure of it. He was wearing some sort of long black robe-that’s why he seemed to be floating, his feet not appearing to touch the ground. She hadn’t been able to see his legs.

Is that… a priest? Why is there a priest on my front lawn in the middle of the night?