The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  “Me and Colleen—I mean Colleen and I—saw her on the county road.”

  “Walking south?” asks Dad.

  “Um,” says Madeleine, “she was going to Rock Bass.”

  Claire’s father walks so suddenly toward Madeleine that she starts. He drops to one knee, his face a bit too close to hers—is she in trouble or something? No, it’s Mr. McCarroll who is in trouble. There are lines between his eyebrows, his Adam’s apple looks raw as he swallows and says in his soft southern voice, “Where’s that at, honey?”

  “Um, you turn at the dirt road.”

  “What dirt road?”

  “At the willow tree. Before the quarry.”

  “Quarry?”

  “Where kids swim.”

  “Oh my God—” Mr. McCarroll gets up and places a hand over his mouth.

  Dad is there suddenly. He leans in and asks, as though making himself perfectly clear in a foreign language, “That’s where you would turn right if you were going to Rock Bass?”

  Is he mad at me? “Yeah.”

  Miss Lang and Maman have joined them now, they are standing over her; all the Brownies are staring. Madeleine starts to feel strange, as though she were hiding something—Claire in a sack. Why are they leaning so close?

  Her father says to Mr. McCarroll, “Rock Bass is about half a mile west of the county road, if she was going there she’d’ve turned long before the quarry, Blair, she’s nowhere near the water.”

  Mr. McCarroll nods and frowns. Her father continues, “That puts her there at around four, four-thirty, eh? We can be there in ten minutes.”

  Madeleine says, “Ricky might know.”

  Everyone looks at her again. Mr. McCarroll, his lips no longer stiff but parted now, kneels back down. Madeleine can see his five o’clock shadow; his face, bony and almost as young as Ricky Froelich’s, white scalp visible through his brush cut. He looks at Madeleine in a way that no adult ever has. Supplicant. Like the faces at the foot of the Cross.

  She says, relieved to have come up with the right answer, “She was with Ricky and Elizabeth. And Rex.”

  The adults look somewhat reassured at the mention of Ricky’s name. If Claire was with him, she is bound to be all right.

  Dad pats her on the head. “Good girl,” he says, moving to follow Mr. McCarroll back to the car.

  Marjorie Nolan pipes up, “She was going for a picnic with him.” The men stop and turn again.

  Madeleine says, “No she wasn’t, Claire probably just made that up,” and looks at Mr. McCarroll, concerned lest she has been rude. “Sometimes she just likes to pretend.” Mr. McCarroll smiles at her and goes to his car. Jack follows.

  The car backs over the grass, then fishtails a little as it accelerates out of the parking lot, onto the road, and they’re gone.

  Marjorie Nolan raises her hand. “Miss Lang, could I please have my wings now?” she says, in a sarcastic voice that is intended to be funny. Several girls laugh, and Miss Lang smiles. There is a general sense of relief. They’ll find Claire. If she was with Ricky Froelich, then no harm can have befallen her.

  The two men drive to a spot where the fence has been left unrepaired, and Blair follows Jack along the path to the edge of the ravine. They skid down and walk for a mile in opposite directions along the stream. It is deeper and faster at this time of year, but it wouldn’t come above the waist of a nine-year-old, and it’s well furnished with logs and stepping stones. Still, both men look not only to left and right, they look also into the water as they go.

  Darkness falls and Jack rides with McCarroll well into the night, at a snail’s pace, the headlights of the Chrysler illuminating stark fields on either side of one dirt road after another, in an ever-widening circle that takes in the Huron County seat of Goderich and grazes the eastern shore of the great lake glimmering beyond the dunes. Inland once more, past the lights of farmhouses, pulling in at a gas station to call again—has Claire turned up yet?—the look on McCarroll’s face as he hangs up and walks back to the car: disoriented, as though he had only recently arrived on this planet. Driving, driving, between columns of trees whose shadows grow more animated with the passing minutes, until Jack is able to persuade him, “for your wife’s sake,” to head for home.

  Jack doesn’t mention having seen Ricky Froelich out running shortly after four-thirty this afternoon on Highway 4. At this point, it doesn’t seem necessary to discourage McCarroll by telling him that Claire was not with the boy.

  MORNING

  AT NINE P.M., the Ontario Provincial Police had a local radio station broadcast Claire’s description, and every squad car in the area was alerted; this despite the fact that she was not yet officially missing. For anyone who knew Claire, her failure to show up at the most important Brownie pack meeting of the year was enough to indicate that she was missing. But the OPP didn’t know her. They were able to say things like “You never know with kids, they get strange ideas, she may turn up at a relative’s place.”

  “All our relatives are in Virginia.”

  “Oh. Well, Mrs. McCarroll, it’s a bit soon to jump to conclusions. Our officers are keeping a sharp eye out. Why don’t you get some rest and give us a call in the morning.”

  The morning. It is a far-off country reachable only through night, and Mrs. McCarroll does not know how to get through this one. Sit still, and the night will pass through you and around you. Then it will be morning. And Claire will be “missing.”

  That first night leaves a residue of cold ash within the mother. The light has been on in Claire’s bedroom and the mother has sat on the chair by the bed with her hands folded, looking at the bed. She has smoothed the bed. She has looked in the closet where her child’s clothes are hung, at the bookcase lined with dolls and fairy tales and stuffed animals—Claire’s things are here, it is impossible that Claire should not return to them. Already Mrs. McCarroll has thought, “Why did I close her book?”—Black Beauty—“Why did I pick it up off the floor? I should not have done a wash this morning, I should have saved her crusts from breakfast.” Crumbs are alive and immediate, they say, “The person who ate this toast cannot be gone from the earth.” The clothes, the dolls, the crumbs, the laundry basket all say, “She’ll be right back.” This is her life, in progress, this is a pause only. These crumbs, this turned page, this undershirt in the laundry basket, these are not final things.

  When is morning? Is it morning when you can see the dew on the grass? When the paper lands on the front step? When the lamp by the small bed is drowned in the tepid light from the window? Turn it off. The bedspread remains unwrinkled. Already, life is ebbing from the room. All that was poised, just put down or about to be picked up, appears a little more static; the afterimage of movement fading from objects, the leaves of books exhaling softly, clothes hanging more quietly in the closet. Like a multitude of small scarves flowing from the sleeve of a magician, the room and everything in it is being gently deserted by the spirits and currents that move things. The earth wants it. When is morning?

  If you are waiting for enough light so that the authorites can thoroughly search for your child, morning doesn’t come until six A.M., and right now it’s only five-thirty. Sharon McCarroll didn’t know how she would get through the night, but now the darkness seems gentle in retrospect, because during that empty night it was fewer hours since her daughter had left the house this afternoon—yesterday afternoon. And now another morning has arrived, taking the place of the previous one, blowing over it, depositing grains, beginning a slow obliteration.

  “Don’t worry, hon.”

  He is in his bathrobe. He put on his pajamas last night, in order to comfort his wife with the appearance of normalcy. At midnight he chose to stay home with her rather than roam the countryside in his car—that would only have alarmed her, and lit up the roadside, the damp ditches. Instead, he panicked quietly in the living room, looking in on his wife from time to time in Claire’s bedroom to say, “Do you want some tea, hon?”

  She remai
ned fully dressed, but each time he looked in she did her part to reassure him by smoothing her hair, forming a smile and saying, “That’s okay, hon, why don’t you get some sleep?”

  They have both prayed throughout the night but they have yet to pray together. They have swallowed the retch of emptiness that lunges from the gut, swallowed it back, the howl of something bottomless. Be careful, it smells your despair. Too much prayer can awaken it. Insufficient prayer can awaken it.

  How can she have dozed off? For forty minutes in the chair. Fresh pain of surgery upon awakening, this is not a dream. Rising from the chair, empty bed, my child is not at home. The brief hallway to the kitchen; one hand grazes the wall, her feet hurt, she has slept in her heels that match her scarf because her husband likes her to look nice and now a chorus starts up in her head, it whips through all the acceptable reasons why her child is not at home, patters through lists of what-I-have-to-do-today, what-I-will-do-when-my-child-gets-home, this Christmas we are going home to Virginia, my mother and sisters will not believe how Claire has grown, take the meat out of the freezer for tonight. All staving off the sound of something deeper still—the bass line, slow-wave, the only reassuring voice because the one that promises an end to all this waking and waiting; deep and patient in its refrain until the mother is ready to make out the words it sings so regretfully: “Your child is dead.”

  SHE RODE HER BIKE down the dirt road to Rock Bass. She got off and pulled it through the opening in the wire fence left cordially unrepaired by the farmer, and walked it along the semi-path to Rock Bass.

  She carefully descended the ravine, traversing the slope, holding her bike, skidding a little with its weight. She laid it on the bank, mindful not to crush the sparkly pink streamers, and crossed the water on the stepping stones.

  Claire sat under the maple at Rock Bass, in the worn place where everyone always sat, opened her Frankie and Annette lunch-box and scattered the remains of her picnic in a semicircle at her feet. There was always one chipmunk bold enough to come up and snatch a morsel, but Claire imagined the other little creatures watching and trembling until she had left, when finally they would approach and nibble. She imagined they knew her now and might one day come to visit her at home. They might talk to her and be her friends. Or merely perch on her windowsill and watch while she slept, chattering away softly about the magic gift they were preparing.

  She wiped her hands on a paper serviette which she then returned to her lunchbox. She looked at Frankie and Annette, each beaming brunette head framed in a pink heart. Ricky and Claire.

  She began making her way up the other side of the ravine. This was a good place to look for fallen eggs that needed rescuing. She got a burr in her ankle sock and stooped to pick it out.

  When she straightened up, there were the familiar feet.

  “Hi little girl.”

  “Hi.”

  “Look what I’ve got.”

  “What?”

  “Come here a minute.”

  Claire walked up toward the open hand. When she arrived, she looked into the palm and saw a pale blue egg.

  “A robin’s egg,” she breathed. It was so rare to find one whole.

  “You can have it.”

  The egg weighed nothing in Claire’s hand, because it was empty.

  “I know where there are more eggs, little girl.”

  You could see the pinprick where a snake had sucked out the insides.

  “Alive ones.”

  And so Claire set off. She would never have gone off with a stranger.

  “The nest is on the other side of the cornfield.” And when they had passed through the cornfield—

  “Across the meadow, just inside the woods.”

  And when they got to the woods, Claire said, “No.” Her mother would not let her enter the woods.

  “The cornfield is worse than the woods, Claire.”

  But it turns out that the meadow is worst of all.

  When the squeezing started, Claire said, “I have to go home.”

  “It’s okay, Claire.”

  And she didn’t know, right away, that it wasn’t.

  HOLY THURSDAY

  IT WAS VERY LATE when Madeleine’s father came home. She had placed her new brass wings on her dresser for him to see. He came into her room and she woke up when he sat on the side of her bed, but she pretended still to be asleep. He tucked the covers up around her and smoothed her bangs back from her forehead. “My good old buddy,” he whispered.

  She sighed “in her sleep.”

  He kissed her forehead and crept from the room. She considered calling him back and asking where Claire had been and what she had said when they found her. But she didn’t wish to wreck the moment of being tucked in by Dad when he thought she was sleeping. She would find out tomorrow. She would ask Claire.

  Madeleine pours puffed rice into her bowl, tolerating the dry fodder for the sake of the plastic sword and sheath that come with the bomb-shelter–sized bag. Mike spoons sugar onto his Cap’n Crunch as well as his egg.

  “There won’t be a tooth left in your head by the time you’re twenty,” says Dad behind his newspaper.

  Mike’s eyelashes are crinkled. He has told his parents he singed them “at Scouts” but Madeleine knows better.

  “Maman,” he says, “j’ai besoin d’une chemise blanche pour ce soir, c’est le banquet de hockey.”

  “Oui, Michel, je sais, mange tout, c’est ça le bon p’tit garçon.”

  “Maman.” He groans. “I’m not a little kid any more, okay?”

  She squeezes his face between her hands. “T’es toujours mon bébé, toi, mon p’tit soldat,” she says in a kitchy-koo voice to tease him, and covers his cheeks with kisses. He writhes away but he’s grinning, wiping off the lipstick.

  “Dad?” says Madeleine.

  “Yeah, sweetie?” He turns a page of his paper.

  “Where did you find Claire?”

  The newspaper stays put.

  Mike says, “They didn’t.”

  The newspaper is lowered to the table. Her father gives Mike a look, then says to her, “We’re still looking.” Adding in his reassuring tone—the one that sounds slightly amused—“She probably hid out from the rain somewhere overnight and she’ll turn up all waterlogged and hungry.”

  Mike stares at his plate.

  Jack gives Mimi a peck on the lips, pats Madeleine on the head and heads for the door. “Have a good day, fellas.”

  Mike speaks in French to his mother, so fast that Madeleine can’t follow. Maman replies but less rapidly, so Madeleine is able to ask her, “How come Dad doesn’t want me to worry? How come I would worry?”

  Mimi looks at her daughter and reaches for her pack of Cameos on the counter. She says, “I want you to say a little prayer for Claire McCarroll,” and lights a cigarette. “You too Michel.”

  “Why?” says Madeleine.

  “Don’t ‘why’ me, Madeleine, why is it always ‘why’?” She inhales the cool menthol. “Because it might be difficult to find her. But they will. Now go get dressed. Attends, Michel, je veux te dire un mot.”

  Oddly enough, Madeleine is more reassured by her mother’s testiness than by her father’s gentleness. And yet fear forms in the pit of her stomach, the way it does whenever her mother tells her to say a little prayer for someone. It means they’ve had it.

  Madeleine was delighted when Mike told her to walk with him to school. Now she hurries along beside him and Arnold Pinder and Roy Noonan, taking two strides for their every one. Roy said, “Hi,” to her for which he received a swift punch on the arm from Arnold. Mike gave up Arnold for Lent. Maman and Dad thought that was a very mature decision. They have no idea that he “broke his fast” yesterday, and that his eyelashes got burned when Arnold lit a frog on fire with gasoline in a jar.

  “Mike?”

  He ignores her, going on with what he was saying: “Ricky Froelich’s got one made out of balsa wood, we could easily make our own.”

  Roy say
s, “Yeah, all’s you do is adjust the scale upward and—”

  “We could just go to the scrapyard and steal one,” says Arnold.

  “Mike,” says Madeleine.

  “What?” he says, exasperated.

  “Where do you think Claire is?”

  “How should I know?”

  Arnold Pinder says, “Kidnapped, my dad says—”

  “Shut up, Pinder,” says Mike.

  Arnold bristles, his fist retracts. Mike indicates his little sister with a glance and Arnold clams up. Mike says, “She’s lost.”

  “Oh,” says Arnold, “yeah.”

  Roy Noonan says, “Don’t worry, Madeleine.”

  “You guys must think I’m retarded,” she says, slowing her pace.

  Mike reaches back without looking and grabs her by the wrist.

  “You’re walking with me,” he says, dragging her.

  “Why?”

  “And you wait for me after school too.”

  “As if!”

  “Maman said.”

  At least she has found out what really happened to Claire McCarroll: kidnapped. At this very moment, she is sitting in a cobwebby shed somewhere with her hands tied behind her back and a gag around her mouth. If Madeleine were kidnapped she would get away. She would rub the ropes against a rock like the Hardy boys. She would knock the kidnapper out, or jump from a speeding car and roll into the ditch, then hitchhike home. But it’s impossible to imagine Claire doing anything but sitting there politely with her tied-up hands.

  Madeleine doesn’t consider anything beyond that. There is nothing beyond that. She does, however, wonder when the ransom note will arrive. Do the kidnappers think Claire is rich because she’s American? Maybe President Kennedy will pay the ransom.