Enter, Night by Michael Rowe Read Free Book Online

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