Free Enter, Night by Michael Rowe Page B

haven’t. I
haven’t thought about him in years.”
    “I wonder what happened to him?”
    “I do know that his father beat him up pretty badly when he found
out about us. I heard about it from my mother. Used a whip on him,
apparently. My mother said I should be grateful that she loved me enough to send me to the Doucette instead of doing to me what Elliot’s father did
to him.” He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what happened in the
end.”
    Softly, Christina asked, “Did you love him? I mean, ‘love-love’?”
Jeremy sighed again. “Oh, what’s love? I fell in ‘love’ a lot in Toronto.
I certainly thought it was ‘love-love.’ With Elliot, we were both young.”
He paused. “Yes, I did love him, I guess. He was so handsome, almost as
handsome as Jack.”
    “I sort of remember him. I went to school with his sister. She was
pretty, too.”
    “Elliot’s probably fat and bald now and married to some water
buffalo with seven kids. That is if my mother didn’t have him killed.”
Jeremy laughed mirthlessly. “Jesus,
why
are we doing this? Remind me?”
    “
I’m
doing what I have to do,” Christina said. “I have no money
and no place to go. We couldn’t keep staying on people’s couches, and
I couldn’t support Morgan by working as a waitress, let alone help her
through this grieving period, if I was away every night. Not yet, anyway.
That’s why I wrote to her. No, Jack didn’t want me to ever have to do
this, but it’s something we should have thought about when he was alive.
And frankly, Adeline owes me for what she did. And she especially owes
Morgan. She’s her granddaughter, for Christ’s sake.” Christina reached
over and touched Jeremy’s knee lightly with her fingers. “You, on the
other hand, are being a saint on this earth for coming with us to protect
us. Jack would have been so proud of you.”
    “How much do you think she”—Jeremy indicated Morgan with a
nod of his head, not wanting to say her name in case it woke her—“has
figured out about what happened back here before she was born?”
    “I don’t know. We’ve always been very careful when we spoke about
the family, as neutral as we could possibly be. We didn’t want to plant
monsters in her head.”
    “Maybe it’ll be different this time,” Jeremy said. “Maybe things will
have changed and it won’t be . . . well, the way it was.”
    “What was that Faulkner quote from
Requiem for a Nun
that Jack
loved so much?”
    Jeremy closed his eyes. “‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”
    They drove in silence for half an hour, the car interred in the
northern Ontario darkness as effectively as if it was a mine cart travelling
a mile and a half beneath the earth. Then the road abruptly widened and
Christina gasped.
    “Look,” she said.
    Jeremy looked. He drew in a sharp intake of breath.
    It was as though the night sky had begun bleeding muddy orange
light from a rip in the clouds, threaded now with skeletal fingers of
luminous red and yellow. And the clouds now parted like stage curtains,
revealed the low full moon, vast and sovereign, and seemingly large
enough to touch the edge of the earth.
    Beneath the moon, the town of Parr’s Landing rose out of the
blackness, stretching to meet it. Beyond the town, the vast forests and
the cliffs above Bradley Lake held Parr’s Landing in the same stony
centuries-old embrace.
    This was the same view the Indians had for a thousand years before
the arrival of the French and English. It was the same view the French
Jesuits first saw when they arrived on the shores of New France, travelling
by canoe and overland to build the doomed mission of St. Barthélemy to
the Ojibwa in the seventeenth century.
    It was the same view Christina Parr had seen every night for the first
seventeen years of her life, and the last vista of Parr’s Landing she’d seen
when she turned her head, like Lot’s wife, that night