LOCKED IN A NIGHTMARE, Martha was a child again at the Indian residential school on James Bay where she had lived for ten years, from the age of six to sixteen. The priest who had summoned her to his office for “special spiritual instruction” was sexually assaulting her.
In her terrorized state, her little-girl self tried to call for help, but the words would not come. She also knew, within her dream, that she was far from home and no one in the church-run school would come to her rescue even if they heard her cries.
“Please, please don’t,” she finally managed to say, and woke up.
Lying back exhausted, Martha wondered if her anguish would ever end. Although more than three decades had passed and she was now middle-aged, with children of her own, she still remained a prisoner of the priest who had whispered that he loved her as he violated her body. She had tried to forget the trauma of those years by losing herself in the oblivion of alcohol and the ecstasy of religion, but nothing had worked.
While Martha lay awake fighting the terrors of the past, her daughter, Raven, in the next room, was emerging slowly from a restless sleep. Sensing that she was not alone, she opened her eyes to find three spectral figures gathered around her bed, silently gazing at her with expressions of yearning and loneliness so unbearably intense that she was forced to look away. She knew that they were friends from her class at school who had recently taken their own lives. Just six weeks before, she had joined them in a collective vow to die when they turned thirteen. Her birthday and those of the others had come and gone, and she was now the only one still alive.
The apparitions faded away, leaving Raven grieving for the loss of her friends, feeling guilty for having not yet carried out her part of the pact, and uncertain whether she wanted to live or die.
At that same hour, it was early morning in Quebec City. Father Lionel Antoine, the priest who had abused Martha when she was a little girl, was alone in a chapel preparing to celebrate his first mass of the day. Now in his eighties, he was still in good health, at peace with himself and happy to be back in the province of his birth. Living quietly in a home for retired priests and respected by the members of his order, he derived great comfort from participating in liturgical acts of worship, talking about the old days and sharing meals with friends who, like him, had returned from their mission posts across Canada and abroad, wishing to spend their last years at home.
Father Antoine often thought back to the decades he had spent at an Indian residential school in northern Ontario. He had done things to the little girls in his care that had not been proper, but that was in the past. He was certain God had forgiven him and that the incidents had been long forgotten by everyone concerned. What was important to remember, he told himself, was that the little girls he had called to his office in those years had loved him and had wanted him to show his affection for them in the way he had. He had become quite attached to all of them, especially the one who had been his favourite, but whose name he now found hard to remember.