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
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
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