Monday, October 23, 1972
That morning at the Blue Heron Motel—thirty miles outside of Sault Ste. Marie on the edge of the northern Ontario bush country, near the village of Batchawana Bay—Christina Parr woke just after sunrise from a dream of her dead husband, Jack. It was a widow’s dream—an inchoate dream of the deepest and profoundest longing. She woke from it with her arms outstretched as though to receive an embrace.
Christina knew that if either of the other two occupants of the motel room had asked her to relate the dream’s narrative to them, she would have been at a loss. The language of her grief was private and even now, after almost a year, Christina was still painfully learning its vocabulary and orthography.
She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at her daughter, Morgan, lying next to her. Asleep, buried in the blankets with her black hair (Jack’s hair) half-covering her face, Morgan looked younger than fifteen. Lightly and tenderly, Christina smoothed it out of Morgan’s face without waking her. Across the room, in the other bed, her brother-in law, Jeremy Parr, snored softly, his bare arm outside the blanket, pulling it in to his body as though he were a cold, small child.
Christina had been dreaming of Jack almost nightly in the nine months since the accident. The dreams varied in scale and intensity like music, from the highest soprano pitch of remembered fragments of joy, to the deepest, lowest basso profundo of grief and loss. From the latter, she would wake up sobbing, her throat dry and raw as though she had been swallowing graveyard dirt, feeling as if she were buried alive, and the darkness of her bedroom a sealed, airless coffin. On those nights, when she switched on her bedside lamp to try to read the book she always kept on her night table for this exact purpose, knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to forget the yawning, empty space next to her on the bed, she wondered whether the pain would ever end, or if this was what she had to look forward to every night for the rest of her life.
Last night was different, though. Last night she dreamed she and Jack were together, walking in a vast green pine forest shot through with gold sunlight. Jack was leading her by the hand. She could still feel the imprint of his palm in hers. She looked at the inside of her hand, half expecting to see his fingerprints. With the insight peculiar to dreamers, particularly dreamers of love, she knew it was one of the forests near Jack’s family’s house in Parr’s Landing, where they’d both grown up. It was a dream of comfort and security, a dream that drew on emotional subtitles that stretched back over the course of eighteen years, including the two years they’d spent together in high school in Parr’s Landing before Morgan had been born. The dream felt like an augury, but of what she wasn’t yet sure. The now familiar ache was there, of course. But this morning it was tinged with something she couldn’t quite identify.
Christina looked at her watch. It was 7:25 a.m. The light leaking through the motel curtains was deep orange, a pellucid autumnal hue that was unique to northern regions where the snow came fast and early and winter ruled for seemingly endless months. The light spoke of stars in the violet-blue early morning sky, of columns of Canada geese streaking south across the vastness of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, while below them, the forests turned the colour of fire and rust and blood.
Then she realized what the dream had been tinged with and the thought came, unbidden and profoundly bittersweet: I’m almost home. My God. I never, ever thought I would come back here.
Christina dressed as quickly and quietly as she could so as not to wake Morgan and Jeremy. She donned a pair of jeans and pulled a bulky sweater over the thin T-shirt she’d slept in. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and ran a damp comb through her thick blonde hair. There were faint purple smudges under her eyes, but all in all, she thought, she looked pretty good for a woman who had just driven ten hours across the country from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie, with a heartbroken and anxious teenage girl and a twenty-five year old gay man at the end of an affair he claimed was the love of his life—and for whom this was as reluctant a homecoming as it was for her.
There was a diner across the street from the motel. Christina sat at a booth near the window and ordered scrambled eggs and home fries. From where she sat, she could watch for Morgan in case her daughter woke up and came looking for her. It seemed unlikely, given how deeply she was sleeping when Christina had left the motel room. Sleep was nature’s best balm. Morgan and Jack had been exceptionally close, perhaps closer than most fathers and daughters, and his death had devastated her.
That, coupled with the sudden uprooting from the only home she’d ever known—in the only city she’d ever known—to move to a town she’d only ever heard discussed in the most negative terms by her parents, had taken a visible emotional toll.
What sort of a mother packs up her grieving teenage daughter and loads her into the back seat of a rusted-out 1969 Chevy Chevelle and drives her to the ends of the earth to start a new life, you ask? She took a sip of the fresh coffee, wincing at the bitterness and adding more sugar. A broke one, that’s who. A broke widow whose freewheeling, romantic, carefree late husband hadn’t taken out life insurance because he thought it was bourgeois, but took out a second mortgage on their house without telling her—one she found out about when the bank foreclosed on it. A woman with no job and no savings, but who had a rich mother-in-law, one who might despise her, personally, but might still feel a sense of dynastic responsibility for her granddaughter out of love for her eldest son, if nothing else.
At least , she thought, I hope she will.
As she ate her breakfast in blessed silence, Christina watched as the light advanced. She’d forgotten how clear that light was, especially in the fall. The mist on the lake was burning off as the sun climbed higher. On the other side of the lake, she could make out a scattering of white buildings underlined by a dirt road at the foot of the sloping, mountainous hills stretching against the blue sky. Alone in the booth at the diner with her thoughts, accountable to no one, and with nothing around her at that moment that had any bearing on her life, she gazed out the window as the sunlight touched the burnished leaves of the line of maple trees framing the motel where her daughter slept.
When she was sure she could see the beauty, she allowed herself to feel hope.
Christina felt a sudden crashing wave of terrible longing for Jack, one that stunned her once again with its ferocity. Tears blurred her vision, but this time she didn’t wipe them away. She rode the pain like a wave, not fighting it, cresting with it instead, allowed it to deposit her, gently and safely, in a rational place.
She paid her bill and left the diner to wake up Morgan and Jeremy. They still had a four- to five-hour drive ahead of them to Parr’s Landing and whatever waited for them there.
They were on the road within an hour and a half. Morgan and Jeremy were awake, showered, and packed up by the time she got back to the motel. Christina was surprised but pleased. Getting Morgan ready in the morning had been an ordeal more or less from the day she’d turned thirteen. The waitress at the diner smiled at her when the three of them trooped over and sat down at the booth she’d left twenty minutes before.
Christina said, “A couple more hungry customers for you before we get back on the road this morning.”
“Couldn’t get enough of our good country cooking, eh?” The waitress beamed at Morgan and Jeremy. “Is this your hubby and your little girl? She looks just like her handsome daddy. You want some hot chocolate, honey?”
Christina felt Morgan flinch beside her. She opened her mouth to tell the waitress that Jeremy wasn’t her father but her uncle, but before she could say a word, Morgan smiled at the waitress and politely replied, “Just some orange juice, please.”
When the waitress returned to the kitchen with their order, Christina turned to Morgan and said, “That was very nice of you, sweetheart. It was very considerate.”
Morgan shrugged. “It’s not her fault. She didn’t know. And I do look like daddy and so does Uncle Jeremy, so she wasn’t all wrong.”
Jeremy said, “Your father had all the looks in the family. Ask your mother. He was so handsome when he was your age that everyone was in love with him. Your mom was the only girl in Parr’s Landing who’d ever caught his eye. It was like Romeo and Juliet with those two.”
“Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy,” Morgan said. The previous year, her class at Jarvis Collegiate had studied Shakespeare’s play in English Lit. The teacher, Mr. Niven, had run the Franco Zeffirelli version of the film on the reel-to-reel projector in the classroom and Morgan had fallen in love with Leonard Whiting. “Mom and Dad weren’t a tragedy. They ran off and got married. They had me. They got out of Parr’s Landing. Romeo and Juliet never got out of Verona.”
“You’re right, they did get out of Parr’s Landing.” Jeremy’s eyes met Christina’s over the table. “They did. They got away and they met their destiny. And the best part of their destiny was having you.” He reached over and put his hand over Morgan’s. “I’m so very, very glad they did.”
Morgan allowed Jeremy to hold her hand for a brief moment, and then pulled it gently away as though to avoid hurting his feelings. Her love for her uncle was unquestioned. The question for Morgan seemed to be how much of that love she could show without feeling disloyal to her father, at least for now. Christina observed their interaction and saw that Jeremy understood. She sent a silent prayer of thanksgiving for Jeremy’s presence to whichever divinity took under its wing the families of fatherless girls and husbandless wives.
When the food arrived, Morgan took a bite of her toast and asked Jeremy, “Isn’t it weird having a town named after you? I mean, I’m going to see my name everywhere, aren’t I? That’s going to be weird. Wasn’t it weird for you and Daddy?”
“It was weird,” Jeremy admitted. “But you get used to it. Your dad and I never thought twice about it. You won’t either, after a while. And the town wasn’t named after us, it was named after our great-grandfather— your great great-grandfather. He founded the town in the late nineteenth century. That was a long time ago, and nobody thinks about it anymore. We’re just like anybody else.”
“Then why did you leave? Why did you move to the city? If it’s so great, why didn’t you stay?”
Jeremy glanced around the diner, which was slowly filling with people. He lowered his voice slightly. “Morgan, you know why I had to leave. There were . . . problems. I know you know what those problems were. Your dad and mom and I have told you about them. We don’t need to discuss it again here, do we?”
Morgan looked chastened. “I’m sorry, Uncle Jeremy,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“It’s fine, Morgan. But we have to remember that we’re not in the city anymore. Things are a lot different out here. There are things we can talk about in public and things we can’t talk about.”
Time to nip this one in the bud, Christina thought. “Sweetheart, I know you’re nervous about today. I know you’re nervous about meeting your grandma for the first time, especially after everything we’ve told you about her. Try to remember that the bad things we told you about happened a long time ago. Your dad and I were very young and your grandma and grandpa were very mad at us for running away together and having you.”
“They didn’t want you to have me?”
“Morgan, we’ve talked about this before. They didn’t think it was right for us to have you since we weren’t married.”
“But you did get married. You are married.”
“They wanted your daddy to stay in Parr’s Landing, go to university, and take over the mine. When the mine shut down, they blamed him for not being there to help save it. They were mad at both of us, honey. But they weren’t mad at you.”
“I don’t think we should go there. I think we should go home.”
“That’s all in the past,” Christina said, ignoring Morgan’s last comment. “Your grandma Parr was very nice to invite us to come and stay with her for a while.” Christina saw Jeremy wince. She pursed her lips to signal to him to keep quiet. “We need to get back on our feet.”
“Why couldn’t we get back on our feet in Toronto?” Morgan’s bottom lip began to tremble. “Why did we have to come here? Daddy didn’t want us to come back here. He hated it here. He told me so. And now you’re making us move here. It’s not fair.”
“I know, Morgan. But we have to make the best of it when there’s no alternative. And believe me, there’s no alternative. It’ll be what we make of it.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jeremy said. “It’s a beautiful part of the country, Morgan. And your grandma’s house is very old and very big. There are wonderful log beams on the ceiling and lots of paintings on the walls. It’s on the top of a hill with a great view of the town and the river below it.”
She brightened. “So, are we rich? I’d like to be rich.”
Christina and Jack had never been the beneficiaries of any part of the Parr fortune after they’d left the Landing together, so there had been no reason to inculcate Morgan with any illusions of wealth. As a result, it had simply never occurred to Morgan that her new life in Parr’s Landing would be any less hand-to-mouth than her old life in their house in the Cabbagetown district of Toronto.
“Morgan—” There was a warning edge to Christina’s voice.
“Your grandmother is rich,” Jeremy corrected. “Well, she’s not as rich as the family used to be before the thirties. But yeah, she’s rich.” Jeremy looked across the table at Christina. This time, she was the one who winced. “But she’s very stingy, so it doesn’t matter if she’s rich or not. It doesn’t matter to us, anyway. But you’ll get to stay in a beautiful house, one that’s so big you won’t hardly have to see the rest of us unless you want to.”
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Morgan said sullenly. “I always know when you’re lying because you say things like ‘beautiful’ instead of describing them properly. It’s not beautiful at all, is it? It sounds like an old witch’s castle or something. Daddy said she was an ogress. He said she ate her young. I bet it’s a horrible house.”
Jeremy smiled. “I think your father was speaking metaphorically, sweetheart. Did he really say that she ate her children?” He laughed. “Did he actually use that phrase—that exact phrase?”
“Yeah, he did. Why?”
“Because that was my line. That was something I said to him once about your grandma. I was kidding, of course. I don’t think she literally eats her young. Although, she might want to eat her granddaughter. You never know. You’re delicious.” Across the table, Christina felt Morgan relaxing. Jeremy had succeeded in distracting her from her fretfulness. She’d started to giggle. Jeremy continued, his voice ominous. “The winters are very long up here and Parr’s Landing is in Wendigo country.”
“What’s a Windiggy?”
“Not ‘Windiggy,’ Wendigo. It’s an Indian legend. The Wendigo was a cannibal spirit that possessed men and made them eat human flesh.”
“That’s disgusting,” Morgan said, her nose wrinkled in distaste. “I bet it’s fake anyway. There’s no such thing.”
“When we’re settled in, I’ll take you up to Spirit Rock,” Jeremy said. “I’ll show you the Indian paintings on the cliffs above Bradley Lake. You can see for yourself. They’re supposed to be paintings of a real Wendigo. Your dad and I used to swim there when we were kids. Everyone in town has seen them.”
“For real?” Morgan’s blasé façade of adolescent disinterest slipped momentarily. She’d loved legends and stories ever since she was a little girl, something Jeremy had clearly remembered and was now using to his advantage. Christina again met his eyes but this time she smiled. He smiled back.
“Well, the paintings are three hundred or so years old,” Jeremy said seriously. “And they’re pretty faded. But yeah, that’s what they’re supposed to be. There was a Jesuit missionary settlement on the site of the town sometime in the seventeenth century. There are lots of stories about it. Parr’s Landing is a pretty interesting place if you know what to look for.”
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me any of this stuff when I was growing up?”
“Oh,” Christina said, affecting nonchalance. “I don’t know. It’s something you really need to see for yourself.” I didn’t tell you any of this stuff because I didn’t want to think about any of it. I wanted to forget it all. And I never wanted you to be curious enough about it to go find out about it on your own. You were supposed to be my city girl. And instead, here we are. “It’s really a beautiful town in its own way, Morgan. I think you’re going to like it a lot. At least let’s try to give it a chance, shall we?” She looked hopefully at Morgan. She laid her hand on top of her daughter’s, much as Jeremy had done earlier, but this time Morgan didn’t pull her hand away.
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 17 north 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.
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.”
Jeremy ran away that night.
He hitched a ride with the driver of a supply truck returning to Wawa from a round-trip delivery. From Wawa, he’d hitchhiked to Toronto over the course of four days of near-starvation and beneath a thick coating of accumulated highway grime. Most of his rides assumed he was a runaway of some kind, but because he was frail and small, his rides took pity on him, especially those men who were travelling with their wives.
After two days, he became aware of a solidarity of sorts among night drivers. Night drivers seemed more inclined to understand, even sympathize, with the notion of escape, or flight, or adventure in a way that those who travelled openly and respectably in the propriety of daylight might question. Jeremy answered as few questions as he possibly could without being rude—easier at night, somehow—though he willingly participated, as best he could, in any conversations his benefactors chose to initiate, seeing it as the least he could do under the circumstances.
But Jeremy still held back as much personal information as he could. He knew his mother would find him eventually, if she chose to, but he was determined to leave as sparse a trail as he could. In his mind, he entertained cinematic, paranoid fantasies of police interrogations of the drivers who moved him farther and farther away from Parr’s Landing. At seventeen, those interrogations seemed entirely feasible in a world where a seemingly omnipotent magna mater like Adeline Parr could lift a telephone from its cradle and, with one call, condemn her own son to six months of torture and sadistic psychological experimentation—all with no more effort than it took her to order a freshly killed animal from the butcher shop on Martin Street in Parr’s Landing.
The last eight-hour leg of his journey from the town of Thunder Mouth was in the back of the red Volkswagen bus driven by the lead singer of a folk quartet from Saskatchewan—three men, John, Wolf, and David, and their “girl singer,” Annie—who were moving east to follow the burgeoning music scene that was in full flower in the coffeehouses of the run-down Yorkville section of Toronto. They told Jeremy about a club called The Purple Onion where they had been invited to perform. Annie told him he reminded her of her baby brother, Victor, back in Estevan.
When they stopped at a Red Barn on the side of the road just before Durrant, Annie bought him a Big Barney and fries, and a chocolate milkshake. Jeremy was certain that nothing he’d ever eaten before in his life had tasted as good as that hamburger. She watched him devour it as though he’d never seen food before and quietly ordered him another one. He ate that one slower, but only marginally.
Back in the van, he fell asleep in the back seat to the sound of them singing “Jimmy Crack Corn” in four-part harmony. When he woke up, it was early evening. They had arrived in Toronto and were driving down Yonge Street. Looking out the window at the shops and the people, he touched the breast pocket of his jean jacket where the carefully folded piece of paper with Jack and Christina’s address was, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. If he’d believed in God, he would have said a prayer. He felt entirely safe for the first time since he was a small child.
At Bloor Street, the musicians let him out. Annie tucked a five-dollar bill into his pocket and told him to come see them play sometime.
“I’m sorry we can’t take you right to your brother’s, but we’re running behind schedule as it is,” said Wolf, squinting down at the map in his hands. “The neighbourhood you’re looking for is called Cabbagetown. According to this, it isn’t far. Just walk east till you get to Parliament, and then turn right. You should be able to find Sumach Street real easy. If you can’t, just ask.”
“Thank you guys so much,” Jeremy said. “And thanks for the burger, Annie.” Impulsively and clumsily he reached out and hugged her. Inhaling in the caramel scent of her hair and skin, taking the soft, warm, nurturing femaleness of her, he marvelled at the difference between her hug and the agate-hard brittleness of his own mother’s hibernal embrace. Jeremy held tightly to Annie for a moment, and then let go.
“Be safe, little man,” Annie said, ruffling his hair. “Have a big life.” Then she climbed back in to the waiting van and the door slid shut.
The red Volkswagen turned right on Bloor, towards Yorkville; Jeremy turned left on foot towards Cabbagetown, each in the direction of their respective destinies.
Arriving at the house on Sumach Street, Jeremy rang the doorbell. Jack answered the door. Before Jeremy even had a chance to speak, Jack pulled him into the house and hugged him as though he would never let him go. Behind him came Christina and five-year-old Morgan. When she saw that everyone else was crying, Morgan companionably burst into tears, which made all of them laugh.
Late that night, in front of the fireplace, he and Jack talked while Christina and Morgan slept upstairs. Jack wept when Jeremy told him about what they’d done to him at the Doucette Institute with the express permission of their mother. He, in turn, explained to Jeremy that his mother had tried to pay Christina’s parents to force her to get an abortion. When they refused, Adeline Parr had warned them to be careful, because a mining town was fraught with potentially fatal accidents. Christina’s parents told Christina what Adeline had said, and Christina, in turn, told Jack.
Jack confided to Jeremy that they believed that Christina’s life— and the life of the baby she was carrying—would be in danger if they remained in Parr’s Landing. So they’d escaped that night much like Jeremy had.
“I’m so sorry I left you,” Jack said. “Forget our mother. Forget everything you knew before. You can be yourself here. If you want to be . . . well, you know, if you want to be with . . . men, that’s OK with me. It’ll be fine with Christina, too. We’ve known . . . homosexuals before, you know. There are some right here in this neighbourhood. They’re nice fellas, run the antique shop on Parliament. We’ll make our own family here. A new family. You don’t have to go back.”
“What if she comes looking for me? What if she tries to force me to come home?”
“You’re turning eighteen in a couple of days, Jeremy. Remember, last year they lowered the age of consent from twenty-one to eighteen. She can’t touch you even if she wanted to, from a legal standpoint. She can’t make you go back.”
“You know she hired detectives to find you and Christina,” Jeremy said fretfully. “She knows where you live and everything. She’ll know I’m here.”
“Let her,” Jack said defiantly. “I don’t care. Also, she didn’t try to get me to come home, remember? She just wanted to know where I was. She wants to be in control. That’s always been the most important thing for her, our whole lives. Besides,” he added, “I don’t think she’ll come looking for you. She’s probably happy to have you out of the way. You can’t embarrass her here.”
“She sent me away. She can do it again. If we get any hints that she’s after me, I’ll have to leave. I just can’t go through that again. I’d rather be dead.”
“Don’t worry, Jeremy. I won’t let her.”
Then Jack held him as Jeremy wept against his shoulder. When Jeremy’s sobs had subsided, Jack took his brother’s hands in his own.
“Stay here, Jeremy. Be an uncle to Morgan. Be Christina’s brother-in-law. Love whomever you want. I don’t care, and neither does Christina. I’ll protect all of you. I’m never, ever letting you go again.”
It was a promise Jack kept faithfully for the next ten years. He kept it right up to that night in February, nine months ago. Driving home from an out-of-town sales call in Guelph in a sudden snowstorm, he hit a patch of black ice on an eastbound highway while trying to avoid an oncoming snowplow. The car fishtailed, then spun into a three-sixty, crashing into the guardrail. He hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. The outward trajectory of his body was stopped only by the steering wheel, which crushed his chest and lungs in a fraction of a second.
Jack Parr died of thoracic trauma and internal bleeding while waiting for an ambulance from Guelph that finally arrived twenty minutes later. By that time, Christina had been rendered a destitute widow, Morgan had been rendered a half-orphan, and Jeremy had been rendered the only son of Adeline Parr, the long-abandoned ogress of Parr’s Landing.