Enter, Night (25 page)

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.

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?”