by Risa Dickens

I’ve begun cutting pieces out of this early attempt at a novel to look at what the stories are and which ones matter to me. I have two very different feelings about the two main narrative trains, and at first I thought they would work well woven together. The darkness of Jane’s story (and it’s going to get much darker then it is in the draft of chapter 1 below) was going to rub against the bright spots in Gaelle and John’s story. But now I’m trying different ways of adapting John and Gaelle’s story on its own. That link goes to what became of their story when i stripped it out from the larger thing. Now I’m thinking that I might evolve it into a young adult novel.

I’m thinking that the story will be told more from Emilie’s perspective. There will still be portions of the story told from her parents’ perspective- i think the parents will be more developed characters then they sometimes are in ya fiction- but much of what is like that now I’ll change so that it becomes a story being told to Emlie by her parents. I want to have that sense that there are some things these parents are trying to protect Emlie from, and from her perspective it makes the world seem shadowier and more mysterious. Gaelle (mum) just gets evasive and vague, but John (dad) becomes a very imaginative storyteller. He makes everything around them like a fairytale, and so Emilie sees the world like that for a while. The lion statues on the mountain flicker from the corner of her eyes and she imagines them stalking the paths at night with the moonlight on their cement hides.

She gets away from her dad at the park one evening and spends a strange time alone in the woods. I want to make the contradicition between the gypsys and things she’s imagining and the hard reality of homelessness quite clear- to the point that readers are scared for Emilie’s saftey bc of her naivete.

She gets out of the woods, to her parents weepy relief, and her mom tells her what happened to her in there. She was raped and she got pregnant and had an abortion. And Emilie thinks about that baby as her shadow sister, bc she thinks she saw her in there.

(They go away for a year, and while they’re gone…) Gaelle’s older sister gets pregnant- she’s been trying for a while- and then loses the baby. And Emilie stays up all night in her room listening to her parents waiting for word and being sad together, and alone in the dark she thinks about all the people who are missing from the world. There is a war on all along and the more you ask about why it had to happen the more complicated and incomprehensible the answers get. She reaches that point we all reach of realizing that her parents don’t know everything, that, just like her, they’re trying to figure stuff out and fake it to keep afloat when the don’t. Believeing then that nothing is fixed, she suspects that in places like mount royal where time and space seem to fold in on themselves, and where all the complexity of the lives and systems in the surrounding city wash up against its shores and create an almost tangible static, all the people that are missing might find the energy for a shadowy kind of life.

She thinks about the missing people a lot, and the awful fact of her being safe and relatively wealthy and ok when other people aren’t, and it makes it hard for her to eat.

There are parts of the mountain where you can get lost and end up in another part of the city, and parts where it’s being demolished. She meets people there that she suspects are not quite alive, and sometimes she hears angry crying in the woods. Once, she meets a thin and bearded and gentle seeming man and she knows for sure he’s something different from her. Before he can get away, she calls out that she is looking for her sister. He gives her a startled look and then turns quickly into the dense forest and disapears.

Emilie does some research on the mountain – she goes to mcgill libraries with her mum-
So when the pope dies Emilie knows what’s supposed to happen, and she goes up to the cross and meets the mysterious figure who comes to change the hundred bulbs from white to bloody purple. During this liminal time when the cardinals sequester themselves away looking for consensus, waiting for God to point them toward the future, the places that have been marked and claimed by the ancient church are open to older forces, the old Native man employed by the church tells her. It’s a time, he says, looking at her intensely, where she might find what she’s looking for. But remember this if you do; not being chosen, living a whole life as a shadow and the product of a dark and cruel act can make a being, even a little ghostly girl, into all kinds of angry twisted things. And if she’s like that when you meet her you’ll have a choice.

(I’m not sure how Emilie will learn this, but – The choice is in how you view the other. You can defend yourself against them and they’ll be your enemy, or you can run from them and they’ll always be behind you and you’ll always be running, or you can invite them in.
The First people, the ancestors, faced this choice when the white people came, and though there have been centuries of trauma and lies and misunderstandings, those people who have continued to insist upon the importance of hospitality have been changing minds and hearts.)

(getting a little theory here (native pragmatism)- it’s my fallback. it means it’s time to take a break.)