by Michael Rowe
That implacable, dry voice, impatient, professorial and peremptory:
What did you do with that boy, Jeremy? Tell me again.
Weeping in reply: He’s just a friend. We’re friends. It only happened once. We didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I’m sorry. It only happened once. I’ll never do it again. I’m cured now. Please, please, please let me go home. I want my mother. No more tests. They hurt too much.
And, coming full circle, Dr. Gionet’s oily, coercive compassion again: How are you going to be better, Jeremy, if you don’t trust me? You do want to be normal, don’t you? Don’t you want to be cured?
At night, locked in his cell-like room, he’d cry himself to sleep, wondering what he’d ever done to be sent to this place.
On the nights he was allowed to sleep through till dawn instead of being woken every two hours by the recording, he dreamed a mosaic of familiar images—Parr’s Landing itself, swimming with Jack in the cold black water of Bradley Lake beneath the centuries-old Indian paintings of the legendary Wendigo of the St. Barthélemy settlement etched into the granite cliffs that stood sentinel around the lake. He dreamed of his mother’s house. In those dreams, he explored the vast dim rooms on the upper floors of the house. They were dreams of secrecy, as though he were hiding, though in the dreams it was unclear what he might be hiding from. He dreamed of his mother—dreams of guilt and chastisement and shame, dreams from which he sometimes awoke gasping for breath, feeling as though he’d been caught in flagrante delicto committing some terrible crime for which the punishment was being sent away forever.
The worst dreams were those of Elliot McKitrick, because Elliot berated him as Jeremy wept, telling him that Jeremy had ruined Elliot’s life forever by being so weak and sick and such an invert and leading him astray, destroying Elliot’s chances for a respectable life among decent people. And in those dreams, Elliot’s voice wasn’t Elliot’s voice at all—it was the voice on the tape.
After six months, Jeremy lost twenty-five pounds he could barely afford to lose. He had dark circles under his eyes and almost-healed burns on the most private parts of his body. But Dr. Gionet had pronounced him cured and he’d been allowed to return home.
Adeline welcomed him home as though he’d been away visiting relatives which, as it turned out, was what she’d told everyone in Parr’s Landing who’d asked where Jeremy was.
On his first night home, Jeremy and Adeline ate dinner in the mahogany-panelled dining room at Parr House. Although it was just the two of them, Adeline ordered the table to be set formally with Viennese damask and Georgian silver, as though Jeremy were a visiting dignitary instead of her seventeen-year-old son who had just returned under the cover of darkness from a private psychiatric hospital.
“I expect things to be different now, Jeremy,” Adeline said. “With the boys, and your . . . incident. They will be, won’t they? I missed you so much while you were away. It was hard enough when your brother got that slut in the family way and ran off without a word. The detectives said he was in Toronto, living openly with her. Openly. Can you imagine?”
This line of lament—her abandonment by Jack five years before; the “slut”; Morgan, the “bastard granddaughter,” whose existence Adeline had discovered when she hired a private detective in Toronto to find Jack— was one Jeremy had heard many times before from his mother. He’d long since learned to let his mother’s invective run its course, especially on this one topic of family betrayal.
“And apparently they have a five-year-old. My only granddaughter, born illegitimate. But still, never even a photograph!” Adeline looked pained. “Can you imagine? Your old mother hates to be left alone, darling.” Adeline paused delicately as though she were waiting for him to hold a door open for her, or pull her chair out. She laid the sterling silver fork in her hand elegantly against the gold rim of the plate. “You won’t disappoint me, will you, Jeremy? You are cured, aren’t you? Dr. Gionet assures me that you are, and that we won’t have any more trouble. Because if we do,” she added, “he has also assured me that there will always be a place waiting for you at the Doucette.”
Jeremy ran away that night.
He hitched a ride with the driver of a supply truck returning to Wawa from a round-trip delivery. From Wawa, he’d hitchhiked to Toronto over the course of four days of near-starvation and beneath a thick coating of accumulated highway grime. Most of his rides assumed he was a runaway of some kind, but because he was frail and small, his rides took pity on him, especially those men who were travelling with their wives.
After two days, he became aware of a solidarity of sorts among night drivers. Night drivers seemed more inclined to understand, even sympathize, with the notion of escape, or flight, or adventure in a way that those who travelled openly and respectably in the propriety of daylight might question. Jeremy answered as few questions as he possibly could without being rude—easier at night, somehow—though he willingly participated, as best he could, in any conversations his benefactors chose to initiate, seeing it as the least he could do under the circumstances.
But Jeremy still held back as much personal information as he could. He knew his mother would find him eventually, if she chose to, but he was determined to leave as sparse a trail as he could. In his mind, he entertained cinematic, paranoid fantasies of police interrogations of the drivers who moved him farther and farther away from Parr’s Landing. At seventeen, those interrogations seemed entirely feasible in a world where a seemingly omnipotent magna mater like Adeline Parr could lift a telephone from its cradle and, with one call, condemn her own son to six months of torture and sadistic psychological experimentation—all with no more effort than it took her to order a freshly killed animal from the butcher shop on Martin Street in Parr’s Landing.
The last eight-hour leg of his journey from the town of Thunder Mouth was in the back of the red Volkswagen bus driven by the lead singer of a folk quartet from Saskatchewan—three men, John, Wolf, and David, and their “girl singer,” Annie—who were moving east to follow the burgeoning music scene that was in full flower in the coffeehouses of the run-down Yorkville section of Toronto. They told Jeremy about a club called The Purple Onion where they had been invited to perform. Annie told him he reminded her of her baby brother, Victor, back in Estevan.
When they stopped at a Red Barn on the side of the road just before Durrant, Annie bought him a Big Barney and fries, and a chocolate milkshake. Jeremy was certain that nothing he’d ever eaten before in his life had tasted as good as that hamburger. She watched him devour it as though he’d never seen food before and quietly ordered him another one. He ate that one slower, but only marginally.
Back in the van, he fell asleep in the back seat to the sound of them singing “Jimmy Crack Corn” in four-part harmony. When he woke up, it was early evening. They had arrived in Toronto and were driving down Yonge Street. Looking out the window at the shops and the people, he touched the breast pocket of his jean jacket where the carefully folded piece of paper with Jack and Christina’s address was, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. If he’d believed in God, he would have said a prayer. He felt entirely safe for the first time since he was a small child.
At Bloor Street, the musicians let him out. Annie tucked a five-dollar bill into his pocket and told him to come see them play sometime.
“I’m sorry we can’t take you right to your brother’s, but we’re running behind schedule as it is,” said Wolf, squinting down at the map in his hands. “The neighbourhood you’re looking for is called Cabbagetown. According to this, it isn’t far. Just walk east till you get to Parliament, and then turn right. You should be able to find Sumach Street real easy. If you can’t, just ask.”
“Thank you guys so much,” Jeremy said. “And thanks for the burger, Annie.” Impulsively and clumsily he reached out and hugged her. Inhaling in the caramel scent of her hair and skin, taking the soft, warm, nurturing femaleness of her, he marvelled at the difference between her hug and the agate-hard britt
leness of his own mother’s hibernal embrace. Jeremy held tightly to Annie for a moment, and then let go.
“Be safe, little man,” Annie said, ruffling his hair. “Have a big life.” Then she climbed back in to the waiting van and the door slid shut.
The red Volkswagen turned right on Bloor, towards Yorkville; Jeremy turned left on foot towards Cabbagetown, each in the direction of their respective destinies.
Arriving at the house on Sumach Street, Jeremy rang the doorbell. Jack answered the door. Before Jeremy even had a chance to speak, Jack pulled him into the house and hugged him as though he would never let him go. Behind him came Christina and five-year-old Morgan. When she saw that everyone else was crying, Morgan companionably burst into tears, which made all of them laugh.
Late that night, in front of the fireplace, he and Jack talked while Christina and Morgan slept upstairs. Jack wept when Jeremy told him about what they’d done to him at the Doucette Institute with the express permission of their mother. He, in turn, explained to Jeremy that his mother had tried to pay Christina’s parents to force her to get an abortion. When they refused, Adeline Parr had warned them to be careful, because a mining town was fraught with potentially fatal accidents. Christina’s parents told Christina what Adeline had said, and Christina, in turn, told Jack.
Jack confided to Jeremy that they believed that Christina’s life— and the life of the baby she was carrying—would be in danger if they remained in Parr’s Landing. So they’d escaped that night much like Jeremy had.
“I’m so sorry I left you,” Jack said. “Forget our mother. Forget everything you knew before. You can be yourself here. If you want to be . . . well, you know, if you want to be with . . . men, that’s OK with me. It’ll be fine with Christina, too. We’ve known . . . homosexuals before, you know. There are some right here in this neighbourhood. They’re nice fellas, run the antique shop on Parliament. We’ll make our own family here. A new family. You don’t have to go back.”
“What if she comes looking for me? What if she tries to force me to come home?”
“You’re turning eighteen in a couple of days, Jeremy. Remember, last year they lowered the age of consent from twenty-one to eighteen. She can’t touch you even if she wanted to, from a legal standpoint. She can’t make you go back.”
“You know she hired detectives to find you and Christina,” Jeremy said fretfully. “She knows where you live and everything. She’ll know I’m here.”
“Let her,” Jack said defiantly. “I don’t care. Also, she didn’t try to get me to come home, remember? She just wanted to know where I was. She wants to be in control. That’s always been the most important thing for her, our whole lives. Besides,” he added, “I don’t think she’ll come looking for you. She’s probably happy to have you out of the way. You can’t embarrass her here.”
“She sent me away. She can do it again. If we get any hints that she’s after me, I’ll have to leave. I just can’t go through that again. I’d rather be dead.”
“Don’t worry, Jeremy. I won’t let her.”
Then Jack held him as Jeremy wept against his shoulder. When Jeremy’s sobs had subsided, Jack took his brother’s hands in his own.
“Stay here, Jeremy. Be an uncle to Morgan. Be Christina’s brother-in-law. Love whomever you want. I don’t care, and neither does Christina. I’ll protect all of you. I’m never, ever letting you go again.”
It was a promise Jack kept faithfully for the next ten years. He kept it right up to that night in February, nine months ago. Driving home from an out-of-town sales call in Guelph in a sudden snowstorm, he hit a patch of black ice on an eastbound highway while trying to avoid an oncoming snowplow. The car fishtailed, then spun into a three-sixty, crashing into the guardrail. He hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. The outward trajectory of his body was stopped only by the steering wheel, which crushed his chest and lungs in a fraction of a second.
Jack Parr died of thoracic trauma and internal bleeding while waiting for an ambulance from Guelph that finally arrived twenty minutes later. By that time, Christina had been rendered a destitute widow, Morgan had been rendered a half-orphan, and Jeremy had been rendered the only son of Adeline Parr, the long-abandoned ogress of Parr’s Landing.
CHAPTER SIX
“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.”