Enter, Night (7 page)

Christina drove steadily, her eyes on the road. After half an hour, the
silence in the car became oppressive and she turned on the radio, hoping
that music would, at the very least, act as some sort of mental bridge by
which the three of them could come out of their private thoughts and
meet each other halfway. The reception was terrible. She’d forgotten the
degree to which the igneous granite of the Precambrian Shield, covered
with the thinnest layer of soil, interfered with radio transmission in this
part of the country. She turned the radio off and pushed an America
eight-track into the deck, humming along to “Horse With No Name”
until Morgan asked her to stop so she could enjoy the music. Christina
smiled at that, but she stopped humming. At the very least, it meant that
Morgan’s mind was temporarily occupied by something other than how
much she missed her father, or her dread at the thought of starting a new
life in as alien a place as a teenager from Toronto could imagine.

Through the windows of the car, the landscape grew wilder. The
original Trans-Canada route had been Highway 11, called “The King’s
Highway” in a colonial forelock-tug to His Majesty King George V. The
unforgiving terrain of the two-billion-year-old Precambrian Shield had
been so resistant to taming when it was being built in 1923 that the
Algoma Central Railway, which had connected Sault Ste. Marie to various
northern Ontario mining towns, including Parr’s Landing, bypassed
the 165-mile gap between Sault Ste. Marie and the Agawa River. The “Big Gap,” as it was called, had been a treasure trove of virgin timber
surrounded by deep gorges and rivers bracketed by steep-walled granite
canyons. In 1960, the newly completed Highway 17 made the route
shorter and simpler, but no less dramatic than its antecedent highway,
along which Christina remembered driving with Jack—and with Morgan
slumbering in her womb—nearly sixteen years ago. Of course, sixteen
years ago they had been driving in the opposite direction, towards a new
life. Perversely, she reasoned that she was still driving towards a new life,
but in a completely different sense.

Ironic,
she thought.
Ugly, tragic, but ironic nonetheless.

On either side of the car, the highway rose and fell, bracketed here
and there by soaring granite cliffs of rose and grey stone. Forests of maple
and birch planed off from the highway into the distant badlands like
great wings of red and gold. Christina saw the edges of algae-encrusted
swamps laced with dead logs and slippery rock, and deep pine everywhere.
As they approached the town of Wawa, the maple and birch gave way to
a mélange of birch and various other deciduous trees, as well as conifers,
adding the blessed rigour of dark green to a palette from which Christina
felt nearly drunk with colour. Through the window, Morgan squealed
with delight and pointed to a moose standing back from the road beside
a tamarack swamp. As the car swept past, the moose ambled back into
the deeper brush, either cautious or indifferent to their passing.

In Wawa, Morgan made Christina stop the car so she could look at
the twenty-eight-foot tall metal statue of the Canada goose that had
been built twelve years before, in 1960, and dedicated to the town that
had taken its name from the Ojibwa word for “wild goose.” After Morgan
had taken a few pictures with the ancient secondhand Kodak Brownie
127 Jack had bought her for her thirteenth birthday, she said she was
hungry. They drove through the town and stopped at a roadside chip
stand run by a taciturn old man and his wife, the two of them virtually
indistinguishable one from the other, with short-clipped grey hair, ruddy
skin, and wrapped in denim and lumberjack flannel.

Jeremy bought beer-battered fish and salted chips wrapped in
newspaper. Morgan fetched blankets from the car and they sat down to
eat at one of the nearby picnic tables.

As they devoured the surprisingly delicious fish and chips, Christina
mentally calculated how much money she had spent, including moving
out of their rented house on Sumach Street, plus gas, food, and lodging
since they’d left Toronto, and realized she was dangerously close to
depleting what funds remained.

She looked up at the sky, less bright and blue at two in the afternoon
than it had been when they left Batchawana Bay that morning. They
were still about three hours away from Parr’s Landing, off the main
highway and deep into the northern Ontario badlands at that. Christina
felt another flare of anxiety as she realized they would need to fill up the
Chevelle’s gas tank. She hoped they didn’t run out of gas or break down
before they got to Parr’s Landing. She calculated that they would arrive
near five p.m. when it was beginning to get dark.

There would be nothing for miles if anything happened. Christina
had no desire to spend the night on the side of the road, miles from
nowhere in Ontario bush country while the forest came alive around
them in the impenetrable blackness she remembered well from her
childhood.

Beside her, Jeremy Parr,
lost in his own thoughts, remembered the
blackness, too, though his blackness, while different from Christina’s,
was no less implacable.

Jeremy didn’t regret accompanying his sister-in-law back to Parr’s
Landing—not because he was ambivalent about returning to the locus
of the worst emotional pain of his life, but because he knew there had
been nothing else to do. He’d been fired from his bartending job the
previous week, and even if he hadn’t been, there was no way—at least
in the short term—that he would have been able to support the three of
them. Christina had no job skills, and Morgan’s mourning had been such
that there was no question Christina had to be there for her daughter.

Jack and Christina had saved his life. He felt he owed it, especially
to his dead brother, to try to keep Christina and Morgan safe. And right
now that meant going home with his sister-in-law and his niece and
watching over them while they were in his mother’s house.

Jack and Christina had taken him in without question after his
mother had sent him to the private clinic in North Bay to get help for his
“problem” after he tried to kill himself in his seventeenth year. Adeline
Parr had signed all the requisite papers, and Jeremy had been loaded into
a limousine in the middle of the night and told not to resist, or he’d be
restrained.

“This is for the best, my darling,” Adeline had told him, standing
back, delicate and ladylike, as he fought with the two burly orderlies who
were holding him by either arm and pushing him towards the car. “This
is all for your own good, you’ll see. You’ll be safer there, too. The town is
too small, and you’ve made it too dangerous for yourself to live here with
the things you’ve done. When you come back, you’ll be cured. Things will
be different—you’ll see.”

A sympathetic maternal smile never touched her eyes. They
were cold and practical, the eyes of a widow used to issuing orders to
inferiors—orders she expected to be obeyed. Adeline had been entirely
unmoved by Jeremy’s tears and his pleading to be allowed to stay, that he
would be good, that there would be no more trouble with other boys, that
what happened hadn’t been his fault. Adeline had stood in the hallway
of Parr House, immaculate in a black wool suit and pearls and watched
her younger son dragged out of his home in the middle of the night and
shoved into the back seat of a black Cadillac Fleetwood with blacked-out
windows.

Turning to the driver, who had obviously been summoned to wait by
the front door in case Jeremy put up too much resistance, she pointed a
manicured index finger towards the drawing room off the main hallway
and said, “His bags are in the other room. Please see to it that they’re
loaded immediately. Tell Dr. Gionet at the clinic to telephone me if there’s
anything else.”

And with that, she’d turned away, her high heels clicking on the
black-and-white marble entryway, without ever turning back.

At the Doucette Institute, the psychiatrists set about attempting
to cure him of his affliction. For six months, Jeremy endured icy baths,
and electric shocks applied to his hands and genitals while being forced
to watch black-and-white films of naked, oiled, muscular men. He was
strapped to chairs in darkened rooms for hours, and injected with
apomorphine, after which he was forced to drink two-ounce shots of
brandy to induce nausea. When the nausea became nearly unendurable,
the room was heated and bright lights were shone on large photographs
of male nudes, and he was told to select the one he desired the most. At
that point, Dr. Gionet played a tape describing his “illness” in graphic,
sickening detail until Jeremy vomited out the drugs, and was given more.
The tape was played every hour. After thirty hours, detecting dangerous
levels of acetone in Jeremy’s urine, he was sent back to his room to
recover.

But the treatments always began again. Other nights, he was
awakened every two hours by congratulatory messages about how
different his life would be once he’d conquered his “inversion” and been
rendered “normal.” Every morning he was injected with testosterone
propionate and made to listen to records of women’s voices, lush and
frankly sexual voices that, to Jeremy, merely sounded whorish and
insectile through the scratchy speakers of a turntable.

In sessions, his psychiatrist, Dr. Gionet—who, Jeremy noted with
fresh disgust at every session, had terrible pitted acne scars on his face,
and eyes that were even colder and more censorious than his mother’s,
and breath that made Jeremy think of an open grave—forced him, over
and over again, to repeat every graphic aspect of every sexual fantasy
he’d ever had. In the end, Elliot made them up, which seemed to satisfy
Dr. Gionet, who seemed unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy
when it came to what Jeremy told him.

Worse still, he forced Jeremy to reveal every intimate detail of his
discovered friendship with Elliot McKitrick. He made him describe
Elliot’s body—every part of it, what he’d done with it, and what Elliot
had done to him by way of reciprocation.

That implacable, dry voice, impatient, professorial and peremptory:

What did you do with that boy, Jeremy? Tell me again.

Weeping in reply:
He’s just a friend. We’re friends. It only happened
once. We didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I’m sorry. It only happened once.
I’ll never do it again. I’m cured now. Please, please, please let me go home. I
want my mother. No more tests. They hurt too much.

And, coming full circle, Dr. Gionet’s oily, coercive compassion again:
How are you going to be better, Jeremy, if you don’t trust me? You do want to
be normal, don’t you? Don’t you want to be cured?

At night, locked in his cell-like room, he’d cry himself to sleep,
wondering what he’d ever done to be sent to this place.

On the nights he was allowed to sleep through till dawn instead of
being woken every two hours by the recording, he dreamed a mosaic of
familiar images—Parr’s Landing itself, swimming with Jack in the cold
black water of Bradley Lake beneath the centuries-old Indian paintings
of the legendary Wendigo of the St. Barthélemy settlement etched into
the granite cliffs that stood sentinel around the lake. He dreamed of his
mother’s house. In those dreams, he explored the vast dim rooms on the
upper floors of the house. They were dreams of secrecy, as though he
were hiding, though in the dreams it was unclear what he might be hiding
from. He dreamed of his mother—dreams of guilt and chastisement
and shame, dreams from which he sometimes awoke gasping for breath,
feeling as though he’d been caught
in flagrante delicto
committing some
terrible crime for which the punishment was being sent away forever.

The worst dreams were those of Elliot McKitrick, because Elliot
berated him as Jeremy wept, telling him that Jeremy had ruined Elliot’s
life forever by being so
weak
and
sick
and such an
invert
and leading him
astray, destroying Elliot’s chances for a respectable life among decent
people. And in those dreams, Elliot’s voice wasn’t Elliot’s voice at all—it
was the voice on the tape.

After six months, Jeremy lost twenty-five pounds he could barely
afford to lose. He had dark circles under his eyes and almost-healed burns
on the most private parts of his body. But Dr. Gionet had pronounced
him cured and he’d been allowed to return home.

Adeline welcomed him home as though he’d been away visiting
relatives which, as it turned out, was what she’d told everyone in Parr’s
Landing who’d asked where Jeremy was.

On his first night home, Jeremy and Adeline ate dinner in the
mahogany-panelled dining room at Parr House. Although it was just the
two of them, Adeline ordered the table to be set formally with Viennese
damask and Georgian silver, as though Jeremy were a visiting dignitary
instead of her seventeen-year-old son who had just returned under the
cover of darkness from a private psychiatric hospital.

“I expect things to be different now, Jeremy,” Adeline said. “With
the boys, and your . . . incident. They will be, won’t they? I missed you
so much while you were away. It was hard enough when your brother got
that slut in the family way and ran off without a word. The detectives
said he was in Toronto, living openly with her. Openly. Can you imagine?”

This line of lament—her abandonment by Jack five years before; the
“slut”; Morgan, the “bastard granddaughter,” whose existence Adeline had
discovered when she hired a private detective in Toronto to find Jack—
was one Jeremy had heard many times before from his mother. He’d long
since learned to let his mother’s invective run its course, especially on
this one topic of family betrayal.

“And apparently they have a five-year-old. My only granddaughter,
born
illegitimate
. But still, never even a photograph!” Adeline looked
pained. “Can you imagine? Your old mother hates to be left alone,
darling.” Adeline paused delicately as though she were waiting for him
to hold a door open for her, or pull her chair out. She laid the sterling
silver fork in her hand elegantly against the gold rim of the plate. “You
won’t disappoint me, will you, Jeremy? You
are
cured, aren’t you? Dr.
Gionet assures me that you are, and that we won’t have any more trouble.
Because if we do,” she added, “he has also assured me that there will
always be a place waiting for you at the Doucette.”