by Michael Rowe
Then her world went white.
All around her was the scent of hay and clover, and the musk of barn animals. She lay back on the straw and watched the doves wheel and flit above her like angels. She listened to the beating of their wings. Wonderfully, even though her eyes were closed, she could still see: the doves were indeed transforming into angels—the most beautiful angels imaginable, angels with strong, gleaming naked men’s bodies and opalescent-feathered wings.
She felt a warm gust of heavenly air as one of the angels separated from the others and swooped down to where she lay prostrate on the hay. She gazed at the angel’s face, awed by the perfection of its body—a face and body she recognized.
“Elliot,” Donna said weakly. “What are you doing—”
The angel opened its jaws and cocked its head to the side, and Donna saw its two rows of sharp white teeth. She realized then that the angel wasn’t Elliot at all—how had she ever confused them? This angel’s hair was white, and he was wearing a long black robe that covered him from neck to ankles. Rain streamed from his hair, running down from his high forehead and into his eyes, which burned like coals. But Donna didn’t care because she knew at that exact moment she was desired—desired and desirable, more desired than she’d even been by Elliot, or indeed any other man. She felt the angel’s cool lips on her throat for a moment and a sharp, momentary pain. Then a spreading coldness that felt like heat, in spite of the cold rain that soaked her clothes and her skin, as she lay there in the driveway.
When the angel—or whatever it was—enfolded her in its black wings, she gave herself up to its hunger, and knew that whatever it cost to be loved like this, she would gladly pay that price a hundredfold or more.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As usual, Finn woke before dawn.
There was an unfamiliar sticky wetness inside his pyjama pants. For a moment, he was terrified that he’d peed the bed, something he hadn’t done since he was a little boy, but the wetness was localized in his bottoms, not anywhere else in the bed, which was dry and warm with sleep. Then the dream of Morgan Parr naked in Bradley Lake came back to him.
Oh, yeah. That.
He smiled shyly and rolled over on his stomach, grinding the mattress with his pelvis. It had been a very good dream. Suddenly self conscious about staining the rest of the sheets by accident, he took off his pyjama bottoms and carried them downstairs to the laundry room and buried them underneath the rest of the family’s dirty laundry, before taking the stairs two at a time to get back to his room quickly, in case his mother saw his bum. Safe in his room, he pulled on a pair of clean underpants and some jeans. He took his sweater from where he’d left it on the chair by his desk. He put it on over his T-shirt and went to look for Sadie.
Finn remembered the howling he’d heard last night and remembered putting Sadie outside in the yard when she’d started howling herself. He hated leaving her in her doghouse overnight, but he hadn’t been about to wait around for her to come back in when he was cooking a dream like the one he’d been having.
He opened the back door and peered into the pre-dawn gloom of the fenced-in yard. The doghouse Finn and his dad had built for Sadie when she was a puppy was in the far corner of the yard.
“Sadie,” he called softly. “Good morning, Sadie! Come, girl! Want to go for a walk?” Finn waited expectantly for Sadie to slither out of the doghouse like a long black breadbox, stretch, and wag her tail, shaking her entire hindquarters along with it. But she didn’t come through the doorway of the doghouse, nor was she anywhere else in the yard. “Sadie!” Finn called again. “Sadie, come!”
Finn stepped out of the house and crossed the yard. The grass was wet between his bare toes. He jogged over to the doghouse and leaned down to peer inside. It was empty. Again he looked around the yard, but there was no sign of the Labrador anywhere. The fence was too high for her to jump—his parents had learned that lesson when she went into her first heat and almost wound up becoming another Parr’s Landing unwed mother statistic.
Fighting rising panic, he ran back to the house to look for her. Perhaps his parents had gotten up in the night and let her in. Yeah, that must be it. She was probably upstairs on the landing, or down in the rec room, behind the couch where the heating vents were. Sadie liked to sleep there in the winter sometimes.
Finn searched the house from the basement to the top floor, but there was no sign of his dog anywhere. The only place he hadn’t checked was his parents’ bedroom. They wouldn’t be happy to be woken up at six in the morning, but this was an emergency. He approached their bedroom door. Before he knocked, he said a prayer to himself.
Please, God, if you’re real, let my dog be sleeping in my parents’ room. Please don’t take my dog away from me. Let her be all right.
Finn knocked on their door. There was no answer, so he knocked again. From the other side, he heard his father’s querulous sleep voice asking him what he wanted. His heart sank, because there was no scratching on the other side in response to his knocking.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open. His parents were cocooned in their blankets, each of them with their own set. He looked on either side of the bed, but there was nothing on the floor but their bedside rugs and a pair of his dad’s grey sweatpants balled up in the corner near his dresser.
“What is it, Finnegan?” he demanded, not bothering to lift his head from the pillow, much less open his eyes. “This better be good.” When there was no answer, because his son’s throat was working too much for him to form the words needed to answer, he opened his eyes and sat up. “Finnegan? What is it, son?”
“Sadie’s gone, Daddy,” Finn said. “She’s gone from the yard and I can’t find her anywhere.” And then he burst into tears.
Billy Lightning woke from a fitful sleep full of bad dreams in his room at the Gold Nugget. His head ached, and his back felt as though he’d been sleeping on a blacktop highway.
He’d woken twice in the middle of the night: once because he’d heard what sounded like a thousand dogs howling all at once outside his window, and once again because of the nightmare he was having, a familiar one that usually visited him during periods of profound stress. He’d had it constantly through his childhood at the residential school. It stayed with him until the second year of his adoption by Phenius Osborne and his wife, after which time it visited him more and more rarely. It didn’t come back till he was at the University of Toronto doing his undergrad. It occurred less frequently throughout his Masters and PhD studies as his sense of his own vulnerability to exploitation diminished and, for all intents and purposes, even disappeared.
In the dream, he was six years old and crying for his father. Not Phenius Osborne—whom Billy considered his real father—but rather his biological father, Tom Lightning, the man from whom he had been forcefully taken by the truancy officers who would deliver him into the hell of St. Rita’s Catholic Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie—the man who had been compelled by law to leave him there so Billy could be saved from being an Indian.
It was always the same dream, by turns poignant and awful, like the most scarring nightmares are, pregnant with symbolism overlaid with memories as fresh as cuts.
The narrative of the dream was always the same: he was standing at the gate of St. Rita’s, which was locked. On his side of the gate stood Billy and his father, flanked by the two truancy officers. On the other side, two priests in long robes, both pale with hard faces, were walking towards it with keys. In the dream, the priests were enormous, gigantic, moving in inexorable slow motion towards Billy, swinging the ring of keys like a pendulum.
In the dream, Tom pleaded with the truancy officers to let him take Billy home, explaining that his mother had died the previous year and that it was too soon, too soon! for this. Tom begged the two men to let him bring Billy the following year, when he would be seven, or maybe even the year after that, when he’d be eight. With Billy clinging to his father’s leg, the truancy officers told Tom to be a good
Indian and let them do their job, or they’d have to arrest him, which they didn’t want to do.
In the dream, the sound of the iron key in the lock was like a freight train, and the gate swung open with torturous slowness. When the priests reached for him, he clung even tighter to his father’s leg and screamed, and he kept screaming as they pried him away and dragged him across the threshold. The dream always ended with the same mental images weighted with symbolism—the expression of decimated impotence in Tom Lightning’s eyes as the truancy officers restrained him and he was forced to watch while Billy was dragged across the threshold of the school, the burn of the priest’s grip on Billy’s shoulders and wrist. And most importantly, the searing sense of his own irrelevance in the face of forces beyond his control—powerful forces that had identified him as inferior and damaged and powerless.
He knew why he’d had the dream—he had it a week running after his adoptive father’s murder in Toronto. In that instance, it had obviously been about losing another father. He’d had it last night because he’d been forced to deal with the two white policemen, the younger of whom had come just short of calling him a criminal.
Billy stood up and walked into the bathroom. He switched on the overhead light and studied his face in the mirror above the sink. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his face was puffy. “You look like crap, Dr. Lightning,” he said to his reflection. “You need to get it together, and quickly. You’ve got a lot to do.”
He stripped off his T-shirt and turned the shower on. He needed breakfast and really needed coffee.
When there was no answer at Donna Lemieux’s door at ten in the morning, her mother, Madeleine Tarrant, rapped on the glass of her front window. Still no answer. She cupped her eyes with her hand and peered in. The lights were off in the living room and the cat, Samantha, was crying in the kitchen, which meant she hadn’t been fed—which meant that Donna had likely not been home last night. And yet her car was in the driveway.
Madeleine thought, Well, my stars. What are we to make of that? Donna not being home at ten in the morning after a shift at O’Toole’s the night before was not, in and of itself, a problem. The problem—if you wanted to call it a problem, and Madeleine was not ready to do that just yet—was what an unlikely occurrence it was. While Donna was no prude—not by any stretch, and never had been—as far as her mother knew, Donna had always focused on work in the years since her worthless drunk of a husband, Lucien, had run off and left her and moved to God knew where.
She hadn’t “gone steady” with anyone for years, though she certainly was popular with the men who came into O’Toole’s. On the other hand, most of them were married and Donna had gone to school with their wives and, as far as Madeleine knew, was friendly with most of them. All the single men of datable age were likewise accounted for in Parr’s Landing.
In the past, when Madeleine had expressed regret that Lucien hadn’t at least left her with a grandchild, Donna had laughed and asked her mother who she thought would support them? Lucien couldn’t even support himself, let alone a child. But Madeleine knew her daughter, and she knew that behind the dismissal of the notion, there was genuine sadness.
Lately, too, Donna had been talking about getting older and wondering aloud what she had to show for it, which was ridiculous since Donna was still as pretty as a picture and as popular as she ever was. But she was still a small-town woman in her late forties in a town full of married people.
Madeleine unlocked the front door with her extra key and called out, “Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! Anybody home? You home, honey?” There was no reply from anywhere in the house, except for Samantha’s plaintive wailing. “I’ll get to you in just a minute, puss. I promise.”
The sound of her own voice in the stillness of the house startled her.
She went down the hall to Donna’s bedroom and found the door halfway open. She peered inside. The bed was made, the blinds were open. Nothing appeared to be amiss. Donna’s make-up (she used a little too much, Madeleine thought) was lined up on the dresser alongside her bottles of Jontue and Muguet des Bois.
The bathroom was likewise empty—the sink and the bathtub were both dry, as was the mat.
In the kitchen, Madeleine opened a tin of cat food and scraped the can into Samantha’s bowl, which was blazoned with the slogan Frankly, I deserve 9Lives! and a photograph of a supercilious-looking yellow cat that looked nothing like Samantha, who was adorable. As she dropped the can into the garbage, Madeleine caught a whiff of something in the hallway that reminded her of the smell of a dead mouse behind a refrigerator. She fished the empty can out of the garbage and sniffed it to see if it had gone bad. It smelled awful, but that was cat food for you.
She stepped out into the dim hallway and sniffed again. She thought she smelled the mouse-smell, then she wasn’t sure. She felt a prickle of fear as she had a notion. Madeleine walked back through the kitchen to the back stairs, where the entrance to the cellar was. She opened the door to the cellar and peered down into the darkness. She flicked the switch. No light. She flicked it back and forth a couple of times. Still no light.
“Donna?” she called. “Honey, you down there? Hello?”
Of course there was no reply. Donna wouldn’t be in the basement. She hated going down to the basement for any reason at all. And if the light was burned out, forget it. Donna had always been afraid of the dark. She didn’t even have a washing machine down there. Madeleine closed the door to the cellar and went back through the house. She was going to feel pretty darn silly when Donna called her this afternoon and told her she was—well, wherever she was. She felt the prickle of fear again, but forced it down. She was a practical woman, if nothing else.
Madeleine filled Samantha’s water dish and left the house, closing the door behind her. She thought briefly of locking it, then decided not to. No one locked their doors in Parr’s Landing. Then she drove back across town to her home on Blossom Street to make some phone calls.
Billy sat in a back booth at the Pear Tree Café and Breakfast Nook on Main Street eating his breakfast when the young cop parked his cruiser outside and walked up to the counter. Billy heard the cop order two coffees to go: one black, and one double-double.
What Parr’s Landing needs is a doughnut shop, Billy thought dryly. He would have liked to make the joke to the cop’s face, but suspected that Constable McKitrick was lacking a sense of humour where Billy was concerned. He went on eating his breakfast and hoped McKitrick wouldn’t notice him. But the café was small and McKitrick was a cop, and you didn’t get to be a cop—even in Parr’s Landing, Ontario—without at least rudimentary observational skills, so he braced himself.
McKitrick gave the room a once-over. His glance lighted on Billy at the far table and he walked over, leaving the takeaway coffee cups on the counter.
“Dr. Lightning,” Elliot said.
“Constable McKitrick.” Billy replied with cool politeness. “How are you this morning?”
“Very well, sir. Thank you. Still here, I see.”
“Well, I try not to rush my breakfast, constable,” Billy replied. “At my age, it’s not good for the digestion.”
Two red spots appeared high on McKitrick’s cheekbones. “I mean in Parr’s Landing, Dr. Lightning,” he said stiffly. “How long are you planning to stay, exactly?”
“I don’t know, constable.” Billy had already taken as much of this as he was going to take from this stupid redneck cop. “As I understand it, it’s a free country, and I am a citizen of that free country. Are you enacting the War Measures Act in Parr’s Landing, constable? Has there been another October Crisis, except involving visitors to Parr’s Landing this time instead of rogue French Canadians? Or is it just that I’m an Indian?”
“Think you’re tough, do you, sir?” Elliot said, too softly for anyone at the surrounding tables to hear. He leaned in close to Billy’s face. “I’m warning you—”
Billy raised his own face to Elliot’s level and met his gaze. “No, con
stable, I’m warning you. If you continue to harass me, you’re going to find out the hard way that your harassment is a mistake on your part. I’m sure that in this town, your word is law. But I’m not from here, Constable McKitrick. I’m a tenured professor at a major university. I am also well connected. There’s a telephone in my motel room that makes long distance calls. Unless you want to find yourself transferred to some shit ass northern outpost that makes Parr’s Landing look like Paris, France, my advice to you is that you back off.”
Billy was bluffing a little bit, but he was gambling on the cop not knowing by how much. Apparently, it worked: Elliot dropped his eyes and took a half step backwards. Billy leaned back in his seat.
So intent on their standoff were the two men that neither noticed the blonde woman in the dark green sweater until she tapped Elliot on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, are you Elliot? Elliot McKitrick?”
Billy looked up, surprised, and Elliot turned around.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” The woman smiled at Elliot and said, “I used to be Christina Monroe. Now I’m Christina Parr. You know— Jeremy’s sister-in-law? I think you’re a friend of Jeremy’s, aren’t you?”
Billy, whose first thought had been that this woman was too beautiful to be a local, was watching Elliot’s face for a reaction, wondering how anyone who looked like Christina Parr—presumably some member of that family of Parr’s, the local gentry—could have any possible connection to a buffoon like Elliot McKitrick. He was surprised by Elliot’s reaction. In lightning-fast succession, the colour drained from the cop’s face, then returned with a vengeance, rising from the line where his uniform collar met his neck to the top of his hairline. Elliot hadn’t made a sound. But if his reaction had been audible, it might have sounded like the sharp, automatic intake of breath the human body makes when it’s plunged into a lake that’s colder than expected on a hot summer day. Billy immediately liked Christina Parr, if only because she’d inexplicably managed to ruffle this smug bully’s veneer of authority. Billy wondered if they’d ever been a couple, but dismissed the notion, as much out of enlightened self-interest as his growing conviction that Christina Parr was so far out of this cop’s league as to render the notion beyond absurd.
