“What?” Jeremy was startled out of his reverie. He turned to Christina. “Sorry, Chris, I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“I asked you what you were thinking about. And keep your voice down,” Christina whispered. “I think Morgan’s asleep.” She checked her rearview mirror and saw that her daughter was, in fact, sleeping in the back seat of the Chevelle, with her head leaning against the wadded-up sweater she was using as a makeshift pillow.
“Oh, I don’t know. I was remembering things. I was thinking about Jack.”
Christina was silent, her eyes on the road. Then she said, “I know. I’ve been thinking about him all day myself. This is the one thing he never wanted to happen. But what can you do? Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, right?”
“You know, it could be all right. She might have changed, you know.”
“I don’t see her forgiving any of us for leaving—especially me, since she blamed me for—” Christina looked into the rearview mirror again. “Well, for the way I changed her plans for the family. I also have a feeling she blames me for Jack’s death, too. She didn’t directly say it in the letter, but it was there all the same.”
“Having the surviving son be someone like me wasn’t part of her plan for the glories of the Parr family, either, Chris. Don’t take all of this on yourself. She never forgave me for being queer, let alone for failing her loving attempts to cure me. I still have nightmares about that sadist. Dr. Gionet, I mean,” he said wryly. “Not Adeline. Though she’s been known to haunt a dream or two, as well.”
“Well, I have nightmares about Adeline all the time.”
Jeremy peered into the darkness through the windshield. There was no light anywhere except what was provided by the Chevelle’s headlights bouncing off the gnarled logging road. “It’s pitch black out here. I guess I forgot what it’s like at night. Jesus, it’s Saturday. If I were home I’d be dancing with handsome men at the Parkside or the St. Charles right now, with my shirt off and a bottle of poppers in my nose. Ah, memories. They’re all we’ll have to sustain us out here in God’s country. Where the hell are we, anyway?”
Christina said, “We’re just south of Marathon and about five miles to Hattie Cove. After that, about half an hour.”
“That was my attempt at humour, by the way,” Jeremy said. “I’m hurt that you didn’t laugh. I mean, about the poppers and the dancing.”
“I just doubt that it’s much of an exaggeration,” Christina replied tartly. “And besides, right about now it sounds pretty amazing. Have you thought about it, by the way? I mean, what it’s going to be like for you back home being openly hom . . . sorry, gay,” she corrected herself, using the word that Jeremy and his friends applied to themselves.
“You said ‘home’ to refer to that place,” Jeremy said. He shuddered. “It’s not my home. Toronto is my home.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.” He sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. And yes, I’ve thought about it a lot. Of course I’m not going to be ‘openly gay’ there. You don’t get to be ‘openly gay’ way up north. I don’t think they’ve even heard the word ‘gay.’ It’s ‘faggot,’ ‘fruit,’ or ‘queer.’ Or, something worse. Aside from the fact that I’d get killed—scion of the great Parr name or not—who on earth would I ‘be gay’ with?”
“Have you thought about that guy you used to know? What was his name—Elliot? Elliot McCormack?”
“McKitrick. Elliot McKitrick. And no,” Jeremy lied, “I haven’t. I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“I wonder what happened to him?”
“I do know that his father beat him up pretty badly when he found out about us. I heard about it from my mother. Used a whip on him, apparently. My mother said I should be grateful that she loved me enough to send me to the Doucette instead of doing to me what Elliot’s father did to him.” He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what happened in the end.”
Softly, Christina asked, “Did you love him? I mean, ‘love-love’?” Jeremy sighed again. “Oh, what’s love? I fell in ‘love’ a lot in Toronto. I certainly thought it was ‘love-love.’ With Elliot, we were both young.” He paused. “Yes, I did love him, I guess. He was so handsome, almost as handsome as Jack.”
“I sort of remember him. I went to school with his sister. She was pretty, too.”
“Elliot’s probably fat and bald now and married to some water buffalo with seven kids. That is if my mother didn’t have him killed.” Jeremy laughed mirthlessly. “Jesus, why are we doing this? Remind me?”
“I’m doing what I have to do,” Christina said. “I have no money and no place to go. We couldn’t keep staying on people’s couches, and I couldn’t support Morgan by working as a waitress, let alone help her through this grieving period, if I was away every night. Not yet, anyway. That’s why I wrote to her. No, Jack didn’t want me to ever have to do this, but it’s something we should have thought about when he was alive. And frankly, Adeline owes me for what she did. And she especially owes Morgan. She’s her granddaughter, for Christ’s sake.” Christina reached over and touched Jeremy’s knee lightly with her fingers. “You, on the other hand, are being a saint on this earth for coming with us to protect us. Jack would have been so proud of you.”
“How much do you think she”—Jeremy indicated Morgan with a nod of his head, not wanting to say her name in case it woke her—“has figured out about what happened back here before she was born?”
“I don’t know. We’ve always been very careful when we spoke about the family, as neutral as we could possibly be. We didn’t want to plant monsters in her head.”
“Maybe it’ll be different this time,” Jeremy said. “Maybe things will have changed and it won’t be . . . well, the way it was.”
“What was that Faulkner quote from Requiem for a Nun that Jack loved so much?”
Jeremy closed his eyes. “‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”
They drove in silence for half an hour, the car interred in the northern Ontario darkness as effectively as if it was a mine cart travelling a mile and a half beneath the earth. Then the road abruptly widened and Christina gasped.
“Look,” she said.
Jeremy looked. He drew in a sharp intake of breath.
It was as though the night sky had begun bleeding muddy orange light from a rip in the clouds, threaded now with skeletal fingers of luminous red and yellow. And the clouds now parted like stage curtains, revealed the low full moon, vast and sovereign, and seemingly large enough to touch the edge of the earth.
Beneath the moon, the town of Parr’s Landing rose out of the blackness, stretching to meet it. Beyond the town, the vast forests and the cliffs above Bradley Lake held Parr’s Landing in the same stony centuries-old embrace.
This was the same view the Indians had for a thousand years before the arrival of the French and English. It was the same view the French Jesuits first saw when they arrived on the shores of New France, travelling by canoe and overland to build the doomed mission of St. Barthélemy to the Ojibwa in the seventeenth century.
It was the same view Christina Parr had seen every night for the first seventeen years of her life, and the last vista of Parr’s Landing she’d seen when she turned her head, like Lot’s wife, that night almost sixteen years in the past when she’d fled the town with Jack Parr.
Unlike Lot’s wife, however, Christina hadn’t been turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for looking back. But for its part, Parr’s Landing might as well have been petrified by her backward glance for all it had changed.
Faulkner was right, she thought.
“Wake up, Morgan.” Christina called gently over her shoulder. And before she could stop herself: “We’re home.” Then she turned the Chevelle left on Main Street, onto Martin Street, and began the steep uphill climb towards Parr House.