Enter, Night (19 page)

“Wow,” he said. “Parr, just like the town. You sure moved to the right
place! Ha ha!”

“Well, I’m staying with my grandmother. Up on the hill. My family
sort of named the town, or something, so maybe it’s not so weird?” The
girl sounded embarrassed, instead of snooty, maybe even apologetic.
Finn was immediately mortified by what he’d said.

“Sorry, I didn’t know. I mean . . . I’m sorry I laughed. I’m not sorry
that your last name is Parr. Like I said, everyone in town knows everyone
else here, so when someone new comes to town—which they never do—
everyone notices. Especially if they’re kids. Which they never are. So . . .
welcome, I guess. Where you from?”
Stupid, stupid, stupid. You sound like a
babbling idiot.

“Toronto,” Morgan said. “My dad . . . well, my dad died a while back,
and this is where my mom and dad were from. So we came back. Well,
my mother and my uncle came back. I’ve never been here before.” She
paused. “You never told me your name.”

“Finnegan,” he said, and then added before she could, “like the dog
puppet on Mr. Dressup, on TV.”

“We didn’t have a TV at home,” she said wistfully. “My parents didn’t
think it was good for me. I never saw that show. Nice name, though.”

“I hate it.”

“Why? It’s beautiful. It sounds Irish or something.”

“You’re just being nice,” he said. “It sounds like the name of a dog on
a television show. Nobody is named ‘Finnegan.’”

“Well, it doesn’t sound like the name of a dog on television to me,”
she said. “Besides, try living with a name like ‘Morgan.’ My dad called
me ‘Sprite,’ but that just sounded like a soft drink to most people, so
we just kept it between us. No one else is allowed to call me anything
but ‘Morgan.’” She looked at her watch. “Gee, I have to get home. My
grandmother seems to be pretty tough about being on time.” She looked
at him quizzically. “Hey, Finn, do you live far from here? Do you want to
walk for a bit? I don’t know anyone in town. I could use the company.”

“Sure,” Finn said. Then, daringly, “Can I carry your books for you?”

She laughed. “No, I’m OK with the books. They’re not heavy. But
thanks, anyway. I’ll be happy for the company.”

They walked through the streets of Parr’s Landing, with Finn guiding
Morgan. Her directional recall, honed by years of living in a busy city led
her to suspect that Finn was taking her the long way home, but she didn’t
mind. She was less worried about her grandmother’s schedule than she’d
let on, since there was an hour and a half yet till dinner and she had
no desire to see Adeline before then. Finn seemed interested in her life,
and what she had to say. He pointed out local landmarks—the Church
of St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs, the Parr’s Landing Library, Harper’s
where he got his comic books. Finn never stopped talking. After months
in close quarters with only her mother, and occasionally Uncle Jeremy
for company, she was happy for the proximity of another young person,
especially as she’d been more or less ignored by everyone in her class that
day. It was as though she had been marked not only as an outsider, but
also as an off-limits outsider. There had been no overt hostility that she
could detect, but no warmth, either.

She wondered if this had been some of her grandmother’s doing,
though how—or why, for that matter—was a mystery. It would be one
thing for Adeline to be able to order her mother and uncle around, but if
her scope of influence included not just the administrators of her school,
but even her fellow students, her grandmother was in a league of her
own.

Finn, on the other hand, seemed eager for her company. Morgan
hadn’t had a great deal of experience with boys, but as a lifelong pretty
girl, she had been the recipient of crushes before, and was adept at
recognizing them. Unlike other girls, however, she didn’t cherish crushes,
or collect them as tributes. What she felt for the boys who brought their
adoration to her was compassion and empathy. Even at fifteen, she knew
that the boys who were drawn to her were putting themselves out on a
limb. And here was Finnegan Miller of Parr’s Landing, Ontario walking
her home. She
had
seen Mr. Dressup—of course she had, everyone
had—though she would never have admitted this to a boy who was that
sensitive about sharing a name with a dog puppet.

He was cute, Morgan thought. It was too bad he was so young. He
was going to be a very handsome boy when he was a little older. “So, how
old are you, Finn?” Morgan asked as casually as possible. Her fingers
trailed along a hedge as she passed, and she didn’t look at him when she
asked the question.

“Twelve,” Finn replied. He looked down and kicked a pebble off the
sidewalk with the tip of his sneaker. “You?”

“I’m fifteen,” Morgan said lightly. “Just turned.” In spite of her
casual tone, she realized how stating her age, and their age difference,
had set the parameters of their friendship in a way that disappointed
Finn. Morgan hoped that they could still be friends, because so far he’d
been the one friendly face in Parr’s Landing, and she could use a friend
right about now.

“So, Finn, what’s there to do around here? What do you like to do
when you’re not acting as a tour guide for strange girls?” She reached out
and punched his shoulder lightly as a way of letting him know that there
was no mockery in the question.

“Not much,” Finn said. Morgan sensed a lightening. “We have a
movie theatre and two hockey rinks. Well, one hockey rink that’s open,
and the old one on Northbridge Road. Nobody uses that one anymore,
but nobody’s torn it down, either. Hockey’s pretty important in Parr’s
Landing.”

“Do you play? You know, hockey?”

“No, I’m not very good at sports.” He waited for a negative reaction
to this admission of failure at one of the entry-level male social rituals
in Parr’s Landing, but Morgan seemed nonplussed by it. Maybe not all
boys played hockey where she came from. Emboldened by her neutrality
on the subject, he went on. “There are a couple of churches besides St.
Barthélemy and the Martyrs. In the summer time, people go swimming
in Bradley Lake, but it’s too cold now.”

“Is that the lake we passed on the way to school today?”

“It’s the only lake in town, so yeah, probably.”

“Right, over by the cliffs. I can see the cliffs from my house. Well, it’s
not my house—the place where we’re staying for a while.”

“I know your house. Everyone in town knows your house. ‘Parr
House,’ it’s called. It’s the only house in town with a name. It’s really big.
What’s it like living there?”

“I don’t know what it’s like living there. I’ve just moved there. It’s big,
that’s for sure. But I miss my house in Toronto, and I miss my friends.”

“How many rooms are there?” he asked eagerly, ignoring her
reference to her life before her arrival here. “In Parr House, I mean. How
many rooms? Thirty? Forty?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She laughed. “Where did you get a number
like forty?”

“That’s the number of rooms in Collinwood. You know, the haunted
house on
Dark Shadows
? That TV show with the vampire, Barnabas
Collins?”

Morgan laughed. “We didn’t have a TV at home, remember? I told
you.” He looked crestfallen, so she added, “I have heard of it, though.
Some of the girls at school used to run home every afternoon to watch it
right after school when it was still on.”

“We used to get it here on Saturday mornings,” Finn said. “We don’t
get much out here, but we used to get that.”

“You like this stuff, don’t you?” Morgan said, amused. “Spooky
stuff? Castles and vampires and stuff like that?”

“Yeah,” Finn said defensively. “I do. Is that
wrong
?”

“No, it’s not wrong.” Morgan said. “Of course it’s not wrong. Why
would it be?”

“My parents think it’s weird,” he said, sounding embarrassed, though
whether he was embarrassed by his defensiveness or by the fact that he
liked horror stuff was unclear. “I don’t know why I like it, I just do. When
I grow up I’m going to get out of this crappy little town and move to
Hollywood and make movies. Horror movies. I’m going to be an actor, or
a director or something. There’s this comic book I read all the time called
Tomb of Dracula,
” he said excitedly. “I get it at Harper’s Drugs on Main
Street. They don’t get a lot of comics but they do get that one. Have you
ever heard of it?”

“No, I haven’t,” Morgan said, keeping her amusement to herself,
because she could see that his comic books meant a lot to him. She didn’t
want to hurt him by seeming to mock something he obviously cared
about. “But maybe you could show me sometime. And maybe another
time you could come and see the inside of my grandmother’s house, if
you like.”

They had come to the place where the gravel driveway met the edge
of the portico steps a short distance away. “We’re here, Finn. Thanks for
walking me home.”

“No problem,” Finn said. “Man, it’s huge, isn’t it? I’d get lost in there,
for sure.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty huge. Like I said, you’ll have to come in sometime
and look around.”

“Can I come in today?”
Nothing ventured,
Finn thought.
The worst she
can do is say no
. “Or . . . I don’t know. Would that be OK?”

“It’s only my second day living here, Finn,” Morgan said. “My
grandmother is a little weird, especially when it comes to my mom and
me and people in town. I don’t think she’d like it. I don’t know why, and
I don’t really know what it’s about, but I promise—soon.”

“She’s stuck-up,” Finn blurted out. “Everybody in town knows it. She
thinks she’s better than everyone else because she’s so rich and the Parrs
run everything in the Landing—” He stopped himself in mid-sentence,
flushing dark red from the base of his throat to his hairline. If he’d been
a cartoon character, he’d have slapped his own head and bellowed
stoopid
stoopid STOOPID
! But all he could do was privately lament that the earth
didn’t swallow him up immediately and take him down to the very bowels
of Parr’s Landing. He knew he was going to be a virgin till his dying day. “I
mean—God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

But Morgan surprised him by laughing delightedly. “Yeah, she is, a
bit.” She began to laugh again, picturing Adeline’s face at the breakfast
table that morning, her mouth as tight as if she’d been sipping raw lemon
juice from her delicate porcelain cup instead of coffee. She steadied
herself. “You sound like my uncle Jeremy. He thinks she’s stuck-up, too.”
She began to laugh again in spite of herself.

“I’m really sorry,” Finn said. He was still mortified, though awareness
was dawning in him that this girl didn’t seem to imagine him quite the
disaster he himself saw in his mental mirror. “I didn’t mean—”

“Hey, don’t apologize, Finn,” Morgan said kindly. “It’s OK. Really. I
appreciate you being so nice and friendly. Like I said, I don’t know anyone
here, and nobody spoke to me today in school. It’s like I have leprosy or
something.”

She reached out and took his hand. Finn, who had never held
a girl’s hand, or indeed ever had any female other than his mother or
his grandmother touch him anywhere, including his hand, found it
unutterably sweet, soft, and warm. He felt momentarily bedazzled, as
though the late-afternoon sunlight had preternaturally brightened.

“You don’t have leprosy,” Finn said softly. He pulled his hand away
awkwardly.

Morgan smiled and readjusted the strap of her tote bag on her
shoulder. “Goodbye, Finn. Thanks for walking me home.” She looked at
him questioningly. Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Sure!” he said. “I mean—if you want? Do you . . . uh, do you want
me to walk you home again tomorrow?

“That’d be nice.” She raised one hand and half-waved. “See you later,
Finn.”

Morgan walked the rest of the way to the house, opened the front
door, and went inside. Finn caught a brief glimpse of the black-and-white marble foyer of the entry hall, then the door closed. He stood for a
moment staring at the closed door, thinking of Morgan, memorizing her
face.

Then, his chest full of stars, Finn turned and walked down the gravel
drive to where the hill sloped downwards to the soft dirt road strewn
with fallen yellow leaves leading to the town, and home. He half-walked,
half-ran, half-skipped towards home. His hand thrilled where her fingers
had been, and he whistled (something he never had done before) as he
moved through the autumn-darkening streets of Parr’s Landing.

Christina knocked on the
door
to Morgan’s room, then pushed it
open. Her daughter was sitting at the spindly, delicate writing desk in
the corner reading from what looked to Christina like the same Ontario
history book she herself had in her own days at Matthew Browning.

“Hi, Mom,” Morgan said. “What time’s dinner? I’m hungry.”

“I think, in twenty minutes,” Christina said. “I passed Beatrice on
the way up here and she said that it was almost dinner time.” She didn’t
add that Beatrice had warned her to be on time “because Mrs. Parr likes
things just so, and she’s peculiar about people being at the table on time,
just so’s you know.”

“What are you reading?” Christina asked nonchalantly. “Looks
familiar.”

Morgan held up the book,
A History of Ontario
by Margaret Avison. It
was the same one, all right.
Good Christ,
Christina thought.
My daughter
is back in my hometown, attending my high school, and being taught from the
same outdated textbooks as I was. It’s 1972, for God’s sake. Nothing changes
here, nothing.

“It’s really boring,” she said. “It’s from 1951.” Morgan closed the
book and put it down in front of her. “It’s like we’re back in the olden
days here. Even the high school looks like something from TV. It’s so old fashioned.”

“How was your first day at school?”