Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

She squeezed her mother’s hand. “OK, mom, I promise. It’ll be OK, you’ll see.”

The waitress came back to the table. “All done? Can I get you folks anything else?” She looked at Morgan’s plate. “Honey, you didn’t eat very much. Not a big eater, eh? Would you like something else? Some pancakes or something?”

“No, thank you,” she replied. “I wasn’t very hungry. I’m not much of a morning person. But the food was great.”

“Just the bill please,” Christina said, reaching for her purse. “We have to get on the road. We still have a long way to go.”

They took Highway 17north along Lake Superior towards Montréal River.

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.