Enter, Night

What a comfort it might have been to know that, he thought as he reached out to receive them.

As Jordan was absorbed into the massive vortex of spiralling black light, he looked down one last time.

Below him, in the road, Richard Weal had stepped out of the bus with his hockey bag full of bloodstained picks and hammers and saws. He withdrew a bottle wrapped in a dirty towel. Stuffed into the bottle’s opening and held in place by the stopper was a wick made of cloth. Weal took a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit the wick. The flame glowed brilliant blue. He hurled the bottle through the door of the bus. It shattered on impact, igniting a fireball that engulfed the interior of the bus in a matter of seconds. Even before the gas tank blew, Jordan knew his body was burning, and that when the authorities found the scorched out hulk hours later, there would be nothing left of him to identify.

Riding Weal’s shoulders, the great black shape that only the dead could see pressed close to him, whispering to him, rippling and undulating with malignant purpose as Weal picked up his hockey bag and began to walk.

Jordan knew-as he knew everything now, including the terrible end of Weal’s story- that there would be unlocked houses along the route to Parr’s Landing. There would be trusting people. There would be cars driving north with passengers who felt sympathy for a lone man hitchhiking home to a northern mining town to be with his sick daughter or his dying wife. Weal’s bag of hammers and knives and picks would do the rest. All the while, the great black shape folded its wings around Weal and urged him forward.

And then, the part of Jordan Lefebvre that was still tethered to his experience of dying flickered out entirely, his essence becoming one with the souls around him, passing completely from the world of the living into the gloomy country of the dead.

CHAPTER FIVE

Monday, October 23, 1972

That morning at the Blue Heron Motel-thirty miles outside of Sault Ste. Marie on the edge of the northern Ontario bush country, near the village of Batchawana Bay-Christina Parr woke just after sunrise from a dream of her dead husband, Jack. It was a widow’s dream-an inchoate dream of the deepest and profoundest longing. She woke from it with her arms outstretched as though to receive an embrace.

Christina knew that if either of the other two occupants of the motel room had asked her to relate the dream’s narrative to them, she would have been at a loss. The language of her grief was private and even now, after almost a year, Christina was still painfully learning its vocabulary and orthography.

She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at her daughter, Morgan, lying next to her. Asleep, buried in the blankets with her black hair (Jack’s hair) half-covering her face, Morgan looked younger than fifteen. Lightly and tenderly, Christina smoothed it out of Morgan’s face without waking her. Across the room, in the other bed, her brother-in law, Jeremy Parr, snored softly, his bare arm outside the blanket, pulling it in to his body as though he were a cold, small child.

Christina had been dreaming of Jack almost nightly in the nine months since the accident. The dreams varied in scale and intensity like music, from the highest soprano pitch of remembered fragments of joy, to the deepest, lowest basso profundo of grief and loss. From the latter, she would wake up sobbing, her throat dry and raw as though she had been swallowing graveyard dirt, feeling as if she were buried alive, and the darkness of her bedroom a sealed, airless coffin. On those nights, when she switched on her bedside lamp to try to read the book she always kept on her night table for this exact purpose, knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to forget the yawning, empty space next to her on the bed, she wondered whether the pain would ever end, or if this was what she had to look forward to every night for the rest of her life.

Last night was different, though. Last night she dreamed she and Jack were together, walking in a vast green pine forest shot through with gold sunlight. Jack was leading her by the hand. She could still feel the imprint of his palm in hers. She looked at the inside of her hand, half expecting to see his fingerprints. With the insight peculiar to dreamers, particularly dreamers of love, she knew it was one of the forests near Jack’s family’s house in Parr’s Landing, where they’d both grown up. It was a dream of comfort and security, a dream that drew on emotional subtitles that stretched back over the course of eighteen years, including the two years they’d spent together in high school in Parr’s Landing before Morgan had been born. The dream felt like an augury, but of what she wasn’t yet sure. The now familiar ache was there, of course. But this morning it was tinged with something she couldn’t quite identify.

Christina looked at her watch. It was 7:25 a.m. The light leaking through the motel curtains was deep orange, a pellucid autumnal hue that was unique to northern regions where the snow came fast and early and winter ruled for seemingly endless months. The light spoke of stars in the violet-blue early morning sky, of columns of Canada geese streaking south across the vastness of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, while below them, the forests turned the colour of fire and rust and blood.

Then she realized what the dream had been tinged with and the thought came, unbidden and profoundly bittersweet: I’m almost home. My God. I never, ever thought I would come back here.

Christina dressed as quickly and quietly as she could so as not to wake Morgan and Jeremy. She donned a pair of jeans and pulled a bulky sweater over the thin T-shirt she’d slept in. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and ran a damp comb through her thick blonde hair. There were faint purple smudges under her eyes, but all in all, she thought, she looked pretty good for a woman who had just driven ten hours across the country from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie, with a heartbroken and anxious teenage girl and a twenty-five year old gay man at the end of an affair he claimed was the love of his life-and for whom this was as reluctant a homecoming as it was for her.

There was a diner across the street from the motel. Christina sat at a booth near the window and ordered scrambled eggs and home fries. From where she sat, she could watch for Morgan in case her daughter woke up and came looking for her. It seemed unlikely, given how deeply she was sleeping when Christina had left the motel room. Sleep was nature’s best balm. Morgan and Jack had been exceptionally close, perhaps closer than most fathers and daughters, and his death had devastated her.

That, coupled with the sudden uprooting from the only home she’d ever known-in the only city she’d ever known-to move to a town she’d only ever heard discussed in the most negative terms by her parents, had taken a visible emotional toll.

What sort of a mother packs up her grieving teenage daughter and loads her into the back seat of a rusted-out 1969 Chevy Chevelle and drives her to the ends of the earth to start a new life, you ask? She took a sip of the fresh coffee, wincing at the bitterness and adding more sugar. A broke one, that’s who. A broke widow whose freewheeling, romantic, carefree late husband hadn’t taken out life insurance because he thought it was bourgeois, but took out a second mortgage on their house without telling her-one she found out about when the bank foreclosed on it. A woman with no job and no savings, but who had a rich mother-in-law, one who might despise her, personally, but might still feel a sense of dynastic responsibility for her granddaughter out of love for her eldest son, if nothing else.

At least, she thought, I hope she will.

As she ate her breakfast in blessed silence, Christina watched as the light advanced. She’d forgotten how clear that light was, especially in the fall. The mist on the lake was burning off as the sun climbed higher. On the other side of the lake, she could make out a scattering of white buildings underlined by a dirt road at the foot of the sloping, mountainous hills stretching against the blue sky. Alone in the booth at the diner with her thoughts, accountable to no one, and with nothing around her at that moment that had any bearing on her life, she gazed out the window as the sunlight touched the burnished leaves of the line of maple trees framing the motel where her daughter slept.

When she was sure she could see the beauty, she allowed herself to feel hope.

Christina felt a sudden crashing wave of terrible longing for Jack, one that stunned her once again with its ferocity. Tears blurred her vision, but this time she didn’t wipe them away. She rode the pain like a wave, not fighting it, cresting with it instead, allowed it to deposit her, gently and safely, in a rational place.

She paid her bill and left the diner to wake up Morgan and Jeremy. They still had a four- to five-hour drive