Enter, Night

She crossed the floor quickly and climbed the stairs, taking two at a time. Outside Morgan’s door, she knocked and called out softly, “Morgan? Are you still up? It’s Mom.” She opened the door as quietly as she could and peered inside.

Morgan lay in her bed-fast asleep, by the look of it. The room was freezing. Christina went to the window to close it, but found it tightly shut, the latch securely in place. So where the hell is that cold coming from? She looked at the glass. It was dirty, smudged with fingerprints. Christina rubbed at them with the edge of her sweater. What on earth was Morgan doing this evening? Planting a garden? Adeline would be furious if she saw this. Christina rubbed again, harder, but the smudges still didn’t come off. She pressed her fingers to the window, aligning them with the smudges there. She frowned.

The marks were on the other side of the glass. Christina looked down at the moonlit lawn. Morgan’s room was a twenty-foot drop to the ground.

What the hell? How can there be fingerprints on the other side of the glass? Impossible. She shook her head and gave herself a mental swift kick in the rear end. Well, then, obviously they aren’t fingerprints, you idiot-unless you think maybe Morgan was hanging from the outside wall by a trapeze harness, trying to get into her own bedroom.

Christina crossed to the bed and pulled the blankets up to her daughter’s neck. She leaned down and kissed her softly on the forehead. She deeply inhaled Morgan’s scent. When she slept, Morgan still smelled like a baby to her mother.

She paused outside Jeremy’s door one floor up, then knocked. Light streamed from under the door. From inside, Jeremy said, “Come in?”

She pushed open the door open. Jeremy was sitting up in bed, wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, reading. Self-consciously, he reached for the sheet to cover himself, which made Christina smile in spite of herself. He blushed.

“Don’t worry, I can’t see anything,” she said. “Your mystery is still intact.”

He laughed. “Old habits, I guess. This isn’t the house in which to be caught naked, as you know. Bad consequences.” He tried to smile, but failed.

“Are you OK, Jeremy? I mean, really OK?”

He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. How was your night?”

“It was really nice,” she admitted. “Billy was a perfect gentleman. He told me about his life. He went to a residential school in Sault Ste. Marie. It sounded awful. Brutal. I had no idea. It makes his success even more amazing. But mostly he was just a really, really nice man. He reminded me of-” she trailed off, embarrassed by the treason implicit in what she had been about to say. “Well, he was a nice man.”

“Christina,” Jeremy said gently. “Do you… did you enjoy spending time with him? I mean-that way? It’s OK if you did, you know. It doesn’t mean you’re being disloyal to Jack. It just means that you’re human.”

She paused, struggling for composure. “It’s too soon, Jeremy,” she said. “Even if I wanted to enjoy it that way, it’s still too soon. But thank you for saying that. I know what you meant, and I appreciate it.”

He smiled. “I’ll always be here for you, Chris. No matter what. I know how much you loved my brother, and I know how much he loved you-and all of us, especially Morgan.”

“God, how did everything get so messed up? How did it all come to this?”

Jeremy paused, then said, “Chris?”

“Yeah?”

“Chris, we’re leaving tomorrow.”

Christina raised her eyebrows. “Really? That’s news to me. Last I heard, we were dead broke. Did you win a lottery?”

“No,” he said quietly. “But today, when you were talking to Billy Lightning on the driveway, I went into Adeline’s room and looked around. I found some money. A lot of money. She keeps it in the bottom of her vanity. There’s almost a thousand dollars in twenties. More than enough to get us the hell out of Parr’s Landing and back to Toronto. I would have taken it this afternoon, but I didn’t want to risk her finding out.”

“Jeremy!” Christina was shocked in spite of herself. “You can’t do that! What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that Adeline will be the death of us, and I’m thinking that it’s time we face it,” he said calmly. “This town is a bad place. After this afternoon-after Elliot-I realized that. We need to leave. If we don’t, either the town or my mother will eat us alive. She’s enjoying torturing us, you know. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel it?”

“But you can’t steal almost a thousand dollars from her!”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, she’ll have you arrested and thrown in jail.”

“We’ll be gone before she even knows the money is missing,” he said. “And once we’re outside of northern Ontario, she has no power or authority, whatever else she’d like you to believe. And when we’re gone, we’ll never, ever come back.”

“Jeremy…?”

“Never mind, Christina. I’m deadly serious. Pack your things tomorrow, just don’t let her see you do it. Morgan’s, too. We’ll make a dash for it mid-afternoon. We’ll tell her we’re… I don’t know, having a talk with Morgan’s principal. We’ll think of something.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure this is the only way?”

“Aren’t you sure yet, Christina? Do you really want to risk Morgan turning into someone like Elliot? Someone broken and ashamed of who they are? Because my mother will do it to her, you know she will. She’ll destroy your daughter just like she’s tried to destroy everyone else who isn’t the person she demands they be.”

Christina looked hard at her brother-in-law. “OK. I’ll pack tomorrow morning.”

“You don’t even need to bring everything, just what’s necessary. We can pick up anything else once we’re the hell out of here.”

Near midnight, Finn still heard his mother crying in the living room, but he didn’t think he could bear to come upstairs from his room to comfort her, nor did he believe she wanted him there-not after she’d shouted at him and sent him to his room in such a fury an hour before. He knew that her worry over his father not being home was the source, but he also knew he could be of no comfort to her at that exact moment.

The house felt huge and empty to him with just Finn and his mother in it-the ceilings higher, his bedroom walls farther from the bed, the autumn darkness outside deeper, the shadows longer, the silence as soft as a thunderstorm.

Anne hadn’t ordered him to stay in bed all night, something quite unprecedented in his twelve years of bedtimes. And both of them were on tenterhooks, listening for the sound of his father’s car in the driveway.

Finn had left her-at her request-alone after dinner, sitting in the orange corduroy slip covered easy chair that Anne had angled facing the front door, almost as though she were afraid that she if she didn’t see Hank’s car pull into the driveway in addition to hearing it when he pulled in (a sound she was acutely attuned to, after seventeen years of marriage), it wouldn’t be real.

They’d eaten dinner in silence after Finn’s preposterous announcement that a vampire had killed Sadie. Anne had stared at him open-mouthed and then said, “Oh Finnegan, stop it. Please, for heaven’s sake.”

But the look in her eye wasn’t botheration, which Finn was accustomed to from his mother when he went on about vampires, or his Tomb of Dracula obsession.

No, it was horror-not horror at the thought of vampires snatching up Sadie, but rather at the idea that Finn would even joke about something like that at a time like this.

Then she’d turned back to the stove, her posture rigid enough to snap in a high wind. Finn sensed that his mother was waiting for his father to come home before she even broached the topic of his preposterous comment with him.

As excited as he was by his new awareness of what had happened to his dog, Finn felt shamed by his mother’s silence. He knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, because he suddenly saw the strain on her face that Sadie’s death had caused. Selfishly, perhaps, he hadn’t considered that anyone could be as affected by Sadie’s death as he was. Sadie had been Finn’s dog, Finn’s great love, and Finn’s grief.

But at dinner, as she pushed her chicken pie around on her plate, his mother appeared to be maintaining her composure by frayed, bloody tendons.

Anne kept looking up at the kitchen wall clock with the carved grapes on a vine, with “Bless This House” in