“I feel like I’m making it up.”
Nina says, “When we invest so much in denying the truth, it can feel unreal when we finally speak it.”
“Wape,” says Bugs.
Nina waits.
Madeleine can cope. People who can cope take responsibility for things. Which means they need to have had them coming. The alternative is too terrifying: that bad things can just happen to them. It will be you the icicle falls on from twenty storeys up. You waiting for the bus when a motorist has a stroke and mounts the curb. To have been available to disaster once means to be permanently without a roof. Unless it was somehow your fault.
“It’s not like I never had a choice, even at nine,” says Madeleine. “You always have a choice.”
“And you’re willing to drive off the road to prove it.”
Sexual violation is a form of robbery. You arrive home to find your house ransacked. All items, the precious and the mundane, the priceless and the merely expensive, have been treated the same way. All items have been turned into the same item. Overturned, flung aside, the picture of your grandparents and the contents of the cutlery drawer. You can still hear the foot-stomps through your house. You can buy a new TV but only time will restore the cushioned peace of your home, heal the rent in the air on the stairs, the aftershock in the living room, all those places where emptiness has been allowed to leer obscenely into your home. Why us? Nothing personal.
“I feel sick.”
“Would you like some water?”
Rape treats the victim like nobody, like everybody, like anybody, bitch! Up the ramp, through the door to the slaughterhouse. The uncountable qualities that make one individual different from another, shocked away; the soul, shocked from the body, looks on in sorrow and pity at what is happening to its sister, its brother—bitch! It will be very difficult for the body to allow anything to inhabit it after that. Very difficult for it to allow the soul to re-enter. The soul may have to be content to follow close, make common cause with that other lonely follower, the shadow. Very difficult for the body to know whether that light request at the nape of the neck, please let me in, is the soul or the shadow. It is the soul. The shadow’s request is more humble, it asks only to be seen. Please don’t turn away, every time you turn away, I die.
“I feel carsick.”
“Put your head between your knees.”
Sexual violation turns all children into the same child. Come here. Yes, you. Children heal quickly, so that, like a tree growing up around an axe, the child grows up healthy until, with time, the embedded thing begins to rust and seep and the idea of extracting it is worse than the thought of dying from it slowly. I’m not hurting you. Once pleasure and poison have entwined, how to separate them? What alchemist, what therapist, what priest or pal or lover?
“I’m not into that ‘repressed memory’ bullshit,” says Madeleine and picks up the pink stone, weighing it in her hand, cool marble, satisfyingly oval. “But you know that story ‘The Purloined Letter’?”
“Yes.”
“I feel like there’s stuff just lying around but I can’t see it.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
“Yeah. Or camouflaged.”
“Like a frog changing colour to match its surroundings?”
“Yeah, or like um, you know, like speckled eggs that hide in the uh … in the….”
“Grass?”
“Yeah.” She is weeping.
“What is it, Madeleine?”
“I don’t know, my eyes are crying.”
“Why?”
“Search me, doc.” She puts the stone back on the table, spins it.
“What were you saying when your eyes started to cry?”
“I don’t remember.” She rubs a tickle from the palm of her hand.
“You were talking about a speckled egg—”
“Not speckled, blue.”
“A robin’s egg?”
Madeleine takes a deep breath and looks down.
The grass is thick with neglected objects no longer confined to the room at the top of her head; she is finding pieces everywhere, strewn underfoot, collecting in the cracks of sidewalks, reflected in the blur of subway trains. The mystery is how they have managed to stay intact long enough to be found, these breakable things, fragile as butterfly wings, perishable as childhood, spilling like fluff from dandelions and cattails—catch one, make a wish, release it back onto the breeze—glittering like stolen silver in a nest.
It is as though she has hit upon the magic words to make these objects glow so that they can be found. But they are not “magic,” they are just words. Not spells, just spelling. Names. Perhaps that is what magic is. Claire.
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
“Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how is it to be managed?”
Alice, Through the Looking-Glass
“DID GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ever do butterflies?” asks Madeleine, settling into the swivel chair, cross-legged, warming her feet in her hands.
“I’m not sure,” says Nina.
“I dreamt I found a Georgia O’Keeffe print like the one you have here, and it made me so happy to know that you and I both had the same picture. Except in my dream it was this incredible butterfly. Huge and bright yellow like the sun.” Madeleine gazes at the serene skull and horns.
She has grieved in the best therapeutic tradition. She has “come to terms with her abuse,” she has wept and called the police. Surely her work here in terracotta-land is done. Me go home now.
“I’m seeing someone,” she says.
Nina listens.
“I’m um … happy. Isn’t that weird?”
Nina smiles.
“I feel like part of me is awake and that part’s really happy. But it has to drag around this other part. This dead-weight like an unconscious patient. It’s me. My eyes are closed, I’m in this blue hospital gown.” She crinkles her face. “How transparent am I, doc?” She waits. “The girl in the blue dress. It’s like she grew up in a coma.”
“In your dreams your legs feel heavy.”
As though something were weighing me down. A body. Mine.
The OPP have not been able to tell her anything but she has been assured they are on it. She doesn’t intend to wait while the bureaucratic wheels grind, however. She has a meeting with a lawyer tomorrow. She is going to bring charges. It’s the right thing to do.
“What kind of charges?” asks Nina.
“What do you mean? Sexual assault, of course.”
Just as Madeleine had never been able fully to comprehend that people and places went on changing after the McCarthys were posted away, so a child’s world, though crowded with fantasy, coloured by faith in talking animals and time travel, is in fact rigidly ordered and unchanging. Policemen are always smiling and uniformed—you never picture one in a lawn chair with a beer. Butchers wear white coats and stand behind counters, they do not shop themselves, or go to the doctor wearing an ordinary shirt. Teachers are unimaginable outside school—you may see them on their way to their car, but they fall off the edge of the earth when they leave the parking lot, only to rematerialize the next morning at the front of the class, appropriately attired.
It was a breach of reality when Mr. March did what he did after three, but reality healed around it like a mysterious nub in the bark of a tree. Part of being able to accommodate this breach—to dilate normalcy—meant applying to it the same rigid laws of childhood physics: this is what happens after three. It happens in the classroom. Up by his desk. Just as the butcher never shops for broccoli, the policeman never plays croquet and the milkman is never without his truck, the things that happen in the classroom after three could never happen anywhere else.
Through the earth-toned portal of Nina’s office, Madeleine has returned to the classroom, she has watched the child, she has lifted the bandage and smelled how rank the wound, exposed it to air so that it too can re-enter time and begin to change, to seal itself. She has l
istened faithfully, but has yet to translate the child’s story into adult language. So she has not truly heard it. She is just one more grown-up who nods and loves but can do nothing to help.
She cups her hands over her face and inhales.
“You feeling faint?” asks Nina.
Madeleine shakes her head. “I still have to do it sometimes. Smell my hands. Weird, eh?” She grins. “My brother used to razz me about it.”
Something so simple will be gained in the translation. Something that adults take for granted as they freely walk the earth, unbounded by bedtimes and the reproach of vegetables uneaten on the plate: Teachers can leave the classroom. They can leave the parking lot in their car. They can drive along a dirt road to a place where the fence has been left cordially unmended by the farmer. They can descend to the ravine at Rock Bass with a fragile blue egg sheltered in the palm of one big hand, then up the other side and, in their brown brogues that the children have only ever seen on asphalt or school linoleum, they can walk across the newly turned cornfield to the meadow beyond, where an elm tree stands….
“Why do you do it?”
“To clean them. To inhale a bad smell off them. Obsessive compulsive, right? You should be paying me.”
“What does it smell like?”
“Well there isn’t really a smell.”
“What do you imagine it smells like?”
“You’re good. Okay, it’s uh, clammy. It’s a yellow smell.”
“Yellow? You mean like urine?”
“No, just … yellow.”
She has yet to translate the bold text and pictures of her child’s story into the fine print of adulthood. When she does, she will be able to tell it back to the child. Tell it gently. The terrible story that the child does not know she knows.
She flexes her fingers, closing and opening her fists, this is the way to feel that your hands will not be chopped off.
“Does that help the smell to go away?” asks Nina.
Madeleine notices her hands swivelling on her wrists. “No.” She relaxes them on the armrests and they go ice-cold. She takes a deep breath and sits on them.
“I think maybe I did it.”
“Did what?”
“Killed her.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I can see her lying there.”
“You saw yourself, we know that.”
“But I have such a clear picture of her.”
“Can you describe the picture?”
“I can, I can—I see the grass tamped down like someone had a picnic there, you know?”
“Madeleine. Can you see her face?”
“We saw a deer.”
“Who did?”
“Me and Colleen and Rex.”
“Can you see Claire’s face?”
“Mm-hm.”
“What does it look like?”
“She’s sleeping?”
“Can you describe her hair? You said she was wearing a hair-band.”
“Barrettes, yeah, and she had on her charm bracelet.”
“What about her eyes?”
“They’re closed.”
“What about the rest of her face, Madeleine? Her mouth, her cheeks?”
“She looks peaceful but she’s pale because, well, she’s dead.”
“Madeleine?”
Madeleine looks up.
Nina says gently, “When people die of strangulation, their eyes stay open. They change colour, they don’t … it doesn’t look anything like your picture.”
Madeleine feels tired suddenly. As though tired were her natural condition and she has been waiting only for something to fall—all the balls, stilled in air, to drop. Am I dying? A voice has asked the question from deep within the tiredness. From the heart of the woods where the eyes of animals shine, from a den where a bone-white girl crouches.
“I’m afraid,” says Madeleine.
“Can you describe it?”
“I’m afraid I know something.”
Pictures, even scary ones, can be reassuring because they are narratively complete, unlike memory, which lies around, some assembly required. Madeleine’s picture of Claire lying peacefully dead turns out to have been a piece of painted scenery all along. “Like Bonanza,” she murmurs.
“Bonanza?”
Yellow Shell sign, intact and filling the screen until Ben Cartwright and his boys burst through on horseback.
“I see,” says Nina.
After a moment, Madeleine says, “I don’t want to.”
“Want to what?”
“See what’s behind the picture.” She blinks spasmodically but keeps her eyes on Nina, paying attention. Concentrate, little girl. “What if it was my dad?” she says, in a voice as small as a toadstool.
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“It would be the worst thing.”
“Madeleine? Why is it up to you to find out what happened to her?”
Madeleine looks up, bewildered—you’ve lost me, doc. “I thought you thought … I knew. Like I’m looking at a clue but I don’t recognize it, because … I don’t know that I know.”
“Madeleine. You may never find out what happened to Claire. But there are things you can find out.”
“Like what?” She feels her forehead wrinkle like a dog’s, earnest and pleading, eyes growing puddly and round as saucers.
“Who you are in all this.”
Madeleine stares at Nina, aware of a corrosive feeling in her stomach. “And anyhow, her underpants were covering her face,” she says.
“I know,” says Nina. Everyone knows that. One of the “haunting details.” “You’ve been carrying a heavy load, Madeleine. Can you imagine putting it down for a moment? And resting?”
Something shifts, yields to gravity. Madeleine sinks without moving and, as though in answer to the new proximity of the earth, tears flow.
“I think I’m dying.” Her words reach her as if someone else has spoken them. Someone she has known all her life but forgotten. A traveller returning. Shawl around her head and shoulders. Mourner.
She doesn’t recognize this self. She has discovered a talent for grief—like walking downstairs one morning and playing Chopin, never previously having touched a piano. Is sorrow a gift? Tears are flowing from every place on her body, sprouting like leaves, she can hear them lightly singing back the rain, she is weeping like a willow.
“Give me your hands,” says Nina.
She does.
“Nina, I know I didn’t kill Claire. But my hands think I did.”
“Why?”
“Because they know how.”
Time stops for grief.
Deep and muddy green, ping of sonar, what is down there? Dark and drowned, keep diving, this is a dream, you can breathe under water. Dive, dive until you know how terribly sad it is that a child was killed.
“What do your hands know, Madeleine?”
Madeleine holds her breath at the top of every intake, exhaling in short gusts. She says, “I—can’t say it.”
“What can’t you say?”
She looks down at her hands. White dogs, dumb animals. She strokes one with the other, warming them. She inhales carefully, then walks out onto a narrow branch. “He used to make us strangle him.”
This is the trick of telling. Objects fly together magically, pieces of a broken cup; or simply shift by one degree, kaleidoscopic, changing the picture entirely. Mr. March never strangled Madeleine, so Madeleine never thought of him as a man who strangled. She was nine. She didn’t know how to turn the picture around. To draw its mirror image. The pressure of his thumb in the soft flesh of her arm, his grip tattooed in blue bruises, his hold intensifying as she placed her own small hands around his wide soupy neck. Squeeze. She is thirty-two now and all it took was to say it out loud.
She is aware that the colours in the room have brightened a notch. She looks at Nina and says, “He killed her.”
She grips the armrests so hard she feels the wood givin
g way, melting, turning to chocolate.
Part Five
HUMAN FACTORS
THE GLIDER
IT WAS AFTER they had found out Mike was missing. It was before hope had begun to fade. It was years before Jack and Mimi moved into the condo. Madeleine was graduating high school in three weeks; in three weeks her life would begin. She surged with the dark and shining joy of imminent escape into the world, far from this suburb.
She was at the kitchen sink, resentfully peeling apples for her mother. From the backyard came the roar of the old lawnmower. Through the window, they saw her father crossing back and forth. “Look at your father out there mowing the lawn.”
Madeleine said, sullen, “You want me to do it instead? He won’t let me.” Her mother always talked about her father as though he were some kind of invalid—your poor feeble father, out there pushing the mower on his crutches. Why can’t anyone just be normal around here? Houses have lawns, men cut them. It’s not rocket science and it’s not a tragedy. There is nothing poignant about a middle-aged white man mowing his lawn. Especially when there’s a big fat swimming pool in the middle of it.
Mimi turned and smiled and Madeleine got a stab of guilt in the heart. There were tears in her mother’s eyes. If Mike were here he would be mowing the lawn. She felt horrible for her mother, horrible about what a horrible daughter she was, and she felt furious that her father never let her mow the lawn—as if the safe operation of a small engine with blade affixed required the presence of a Y chromosome. He told her she could be anything she wanted to be—politician, lawyer, brain surgeon, astronaut. He would send her to the moon but he didn’t trust her with a maudit Canadian Tire Lawn-Boy: These things are tricky, you can lose a toe before you know it.
She slouched toward the front door. She heard her mother’s voice from behind her, “Why don’t you ask your father if he wants to go for a walk?” She hated it when her mother tried to “encourage” her relationship with her father. We have one, okay? And you are not the boss of it. So—annoyed at her mother for making her annoyed at the prospect of going for a walk with her father, which was something she otherwise enjoyed doing—she headed for the back door. “You have the nicest papa in the world,” she heard her mother say, and let the screen door slam.
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