The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  In the kitchen, water rushes and smoke coils up from the ashtray next to the sink. Madeleine watches her mother’s busy back as she flays potatoes with her yellow-gloved hands, so flexible I can pick up a dime. In the living room, her father has not moved in his chair. On the TV, cartoon enzymes are eating dirt particles. How many more miles, Dad?

  “I wish Mike were here,” she says.

  Mimi brushes her ear with the back of her hand, as though at a fly, and resumes scrubbing.

  “Why can’t we just say he’s dead?” inquires Madeleine of the wall, uncertain whether or not she can be heard above the roar of the tap. “Why can’t we have a funeral for him?” she says to the foyer, and her words float small and weightless up to the cathedral ceiling.

  On the wall next to her mother, between the coffee maker and the microwave, is mounted a small plaque. It holds a pair of scissors on a magnet, and bears a painted verse: These are my scissors, they belong on this rack / If you use them please put them back. At the edge of the sink perches the old ceramic frog holding the pot scrubber in his big grin.

  “I love you, Maman.”

  The tap thunks off, Mimi turns and, hands upraised and dripping like a gloved surgeon, comes quickly to her daughter, and hugs her.

  Her mother’s embrace. Small, hot and strong. Something dark beneath the perfume and Cameo menthol. Salt and subterranean. Unkillable.

  Madeleine feels the old guilt. It comes of always knowing that Maman was hugging a different child, one with the same name. She has always tried to hug her mother back as that child—the clean one.

  “Oh Madeleine,” says her mother into her shoulder, with a squeeze like steel bands, “Papa and I love you very much.”

  She knows her mother’s eyes are clamped shut. Like a medium bracing herself for the sheer force of love passing through her—this love that Madeleine has always believed to be general, directed toward “my child,” never toward Madeleine herself.

  She waits for her mother’s grip to relax, then says as kindly as possible, “Maman, I have to go back to Toronto, but I’ll come home next week, okay?”

  “Mais pourquoi?”

  She can’t bear to see the bewilderment enter Mimi’s eyes—why am I always hurting my mother? “I have so much work to do and … I have to move out of our—out of my apartment.”

  Her mother’s face tightens again—prepared to repel the word “Christine”. Or any word that may be a synonym for Christine. Mimi lifts a hand in defeat, or dismissal—“Do what you want, Madeleine, you always do”—and returns to the kitchen.

  “You know, the irony is, Maman, Christine and I might’ve broken up ages ago if you hadn’t been so against us.”

  She watches her mother’s back. Chopping now.

  “It’s not like a diagram of a cow in a butcher shop, you know,” she says. “You can’t cut out the part of me you hate and take the rest.”

  If Mimi were to turn, Madeleine would see that she is annoyed. She is annoyed because she is crying. She is crying because—perhaps you can understand, even if you are not a mother, what it is to have your child say, You hate me.

  Madeleine waits, numb. Like a dead tree. If the earth were beneath her feet now, instead of the gleaming floor, she could lie down and commence that long return. This is the terrible kindness of the earth: she will always welcome us back, hers is a love that never dies, never says, “I will take this part of you, but not the rest.”

  The phone rings and Mimi answers it. Clears up a scheduling mistake regarding the Catholic Women’s League, consults a list and confirms a bridge date.

  Madeleine says, “You remember my teacher in Centralia?”

  Mimi glances at her, then back to her list. “Mr. March.”

  “He abused us. Me and some other girls.”

  Mimi turns to face her daughter and hangs up the phone—then looks back at her hand as though surprised at its initiative.

  “It’s okay, Maman, I’m fine, I’m only telling you because—”

  A sound like a chirping, it’s her mother, hand cupped in front of her mouth; she looks as though she’s about to cough something up, a feather.

  “Maman?”

  Madeleine is too much like her mother, she realizes, as she watches Mimi’s mouth turn to an upside-down smile, red blotches appear on her cheeks, neck, nose—stricken, painted with the unreserved sorrow of a clown.

  “Maman, it’s okay—”

  Madeleine would like to put this whole visit back in a bag under the basement steps, stuff it among the Christmas decorations and the card-table chairs.

  All Mimi wants to do is remove it from her daughter, wipe it from her face like summer dirt, a little blood from a cut, all she wants is to offer her own flesh in place of whatever happened to her child, but she can’t. It’s too late. Her arm is powerful, but it can’t reach her little girl leaving for school, any more than it can reach her son walking out the door seventeen years ago. She is left clutching air. Nothing she did was enough. Ce n’est pas assez.

  Madeleine has never seen her mother cry like this. Not even when Mike went away. Fresh sorrows reactivate old ones. We go to the same well to grieve, and it’s fuller every time.

  She is amazed by what her mother says next:

  “I’m sorry, ma p’tite, c’est ma faute, c’est la faute de maman.”

  Madeleine holds her mother, and the embrace is still hot but not so hard now—flesh instead of wood—which one of them has changed?

  “It’s not your fault, Maman.”

  Everything is going to be okay. What is this dark feeling? Mortal happiness. Here is the wound. It doesn’t smell after all. It hurts terribly, but it’s clean. Here is a fresh dressing, let Maman do it.

  “Je t’aime, maman.”

  Mimi wipes Madeleine’s face with her hands—thoroughly, like a mother cat—then digs a tissue from her sleeve and holds it to her daughter’s nose. Madeleine blows and laughs.

  Mimi smiles. “You’re so pretty, ma p’tite.”

  “I take after you.”

  Mimi glances toward the living room. The top of his head hasn’t moved, he is still asleep in his chair. She lowers her voice. “Did you tell your father?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  And Madeleine is certain now that it was good, is grateful not to have burdened him. Her mother can take it. Women are stronger.

  Mimi kisses her daughter, and the pain is not mitigated by what she realizes next—in fact it’s worsened because, like polio, what happened to her child could have been prevented. “Oh Madeleine, Madeleine….”

  Madeleine follows her mother’s voice. In it she hears the cadence of comfort. What remains may not be a lot, but it’s good. I have my mother. She steps into the meadow unafraid, there are no hunters here. Basks in her mother’s gaze, unashamed, so grateful finally to be seen.

  “Oh Madeleine,” says Mimi, and cups her daughter’s face tenderly in her hands, “is that why you are the way you are?”

  A sensation behind Madeleine’s eyes as though a reel of film has skipped. She knows she has reached the end of something, and passed through it to something else, because her voice sounds robotic in her ears, as though she’s speaking a new language. “I’m pretty sure that Mr. March killed Claire.”

  Her mother is still speaking the old language as Madeleine leaves the house. She can hear her voice but can no longer make out the words.

  Outside, she reaches for the door of her car and hears something clink to the asphalt. It gleams silver in the porch light. The medal. She picks it up and gets into her car. Rubs her palm where the four compass points have gouged their temporary impressions, and sees the old paper-thin scar that shadows her lifeline.

  RICKY FROELICH Missing

  HENRY FROELICH Missing

  MICHAEL MCCARTHY Missing

  GRATIA

  MADELEINE HAS PULLED OVER to the side of the 401 expressway across the top of Toronto. This time she couldn’t make it to an exit ramp. Forehe
ad resting against the steering wheel, she is praying. She doesn’t believe in God, nor is she a non-believer. Belief has nothing to do with it. She’s praying because there’s so much pain. The living and the dead. The known and the unknown.

  She can hear it—it has always been there. Like the chatter of a pebble beach. It grows louder, closer, until she hears a chorus of souls, mouths pulled down in sorrow. All those imprisoned in their minds; all those who are doing their best for their families; all who are struck with the vertigo of standing on two feet, all who live so bravely on four legs, so tirelessly on two wings, on bellies and between fins; the heartbreaking courage of animals; the lonely death of a dear brother, of a child long ago in Centralia, were they very frightened? Oh if only we could visit them at the hour of their death—not to intervene, because that is impossible, but simply to witness. To love them as they leave, not seek to make their suffering invisible. All they ask is that we picture it. Watch me.

  “Pray for them,” she whispers to the instrument panel of her old VW beetle. Sixteen lanes zip by. Pray for them. It is then—on the noisy paved shoulder, wondering if she will ever be able to leave her car—that she receives the gift: it fills her like a breath. It is not a knowledge of the mind, it simply arrives: the only thing in the world that matters is love.

  After fifteen minutes she is able to start her car and gather speed along the shoulder. The little bug, dirty white eggshell, travels down the exit ramp. Designed for Hitler. Built by slaves. As recognizable as a Coke bottle. The sins of the father. Good little car.

  She feels fine when she gets home, and knows she will never be the same. Nothing can ever frighten her out of her life again. As though she had survived a disaster. A plane crash. Something.

  “That self-same moment I could pray;

  And from my neck so free

  The Albatross fell off, and sank

  Like lead into the sea.”

  BUTTERFLY EFFECTS

  IN THE SUPREME COURT OF ONTARIO

  REGINA

  vs

  RICHARD PLYMOUTH FROELICH

  (murder)

  Trial Evidence

  A strange transformation is effected by the authority of the printed word in an official document. The prisoner. Ricky. The victim. Claire. The welter of information regarding where precisely the crossroads were, the words “willow tree” drained of colour, the numbing exactitude regarding where the body was found and in what position.

  The body was clad in a blue dress.

  Thank goodness it’s Wednesday. Shelly thinks Madeleine is still out of town, and in a way she is. She got an hour’s sleep on her carpet this morning—Christine had returned for the bed.

  …The body was lying flat on its back with the lower limbs, the two legs, parted. Under a tree, an elm.

  Madeleine is wearing a baseball cap to shelter her eyes from the fluorescent lights in the windowless reading room of the Provincial Archives of Ontario. Steps from the YMCA; she could have come here any time.

  …the patient had marks upon the neck.

  The patient? She reads on. The pathologist, the police, Dr. Ridelle—Lisa’s dad. This transcript is a 1,858-page list of what the grown-ups knew. Legal size.

  A female child at that age would have a hymen which is something through which you cannot normally insert a little finger, and that was completely missing, it had been completely carried away….

  She is sitting at one of several long wooden tables. Around her, a pallid few others pore over genealogical records and municipal sewage blueprints. Insomniacs unite.

  …masses of maggots about in this region….

  For years she carried her unrevised child’s picture of Claire lying peacefully on the grass, sadly dead. Babe in the wood, tended by swallows bearing leaves and wildflowers to blanket her.

  intense cyanotic lividity of face and neck, intense cyanosis of the nails and extremities of fingers, the tongue protruded…

  The picture is altering now. It’s changing. Finally growing older.

  …colour and pupils obscured by post-mortem glazing…

  She is here because she can’t come tomorrow, tomorrow is the regular After-Three Thursday marathon—she will have all this evening to write, the archives close at four. She is here because she can’t tell anyone what her father did.

  …large amount of uric acid on the legs but not on the underpants, which would indicate…

  She is here to bear witness.

  …a type of injury you would expect to see with some large object dilating this area…

  She is here because she can’t go forward. She has to go back.

  …the whole of the entranceway was widely dilated.

  His Lordship: Pardon?

  A: Widely dilated.

  And when she gets there, she needs to listen to the children.

  …the body was covered by reeds, I should say bulrushes…

  Moses among the bulrushes. We always called them cattails. Why have I thought of Moses? Moses was among the rushes, not bulrushes.

  Q: Was the face visible?

  A: The face was covered.

  Q: With what?

  A: A pair of underpants.

  Q: Cotton underpants?

  A: Yes sir.

  Q: Are these the underpants?

  Marjorie Nolan. She drew a picture with the title “Moses among the Cattails.” Miss Lang corrected her gently.

  A: Yes

  I drew Batman and Robin, and Grace Novotny got a gold star for her picture—what did she draw? Madeleine sees the back of Grace’s head—uneven part, messy pigtails constricted by bare elastics. She tries to look over Grace’s shoulder but sees only her hands at work. Bandaged. Imagine doing that to a child. She can hear Grace’s pencil crayon against the construction paper, colouring, colouring, colouring….

  There was a record playing—“A Summer Place,” by the Mantovani strings. We didn’t normally have Miss Lang for art. Art was normally on Friday.

  Some things are difficult to see straight on. They can only be glimpsed by looking away, caught by the corner of the eye. Like phosphorescence in a cave; look away and you will see. Madeleine tries to look away but there is too much light coming through the big classroom windows. She squints but it’s no good, the sun is up there, bright yellow, smiling and pulsating, obliterating Grace and her drawing. Madeleine squeezes her eyes shut and sees a yellow orb tattooed inside her lids. And yet, as she recalls, it was a rainy day. She returns her attention to her own drawing, Holy Thursday, Batman—and winces at the realization that this was the day after Claire went missing.

  Some things stay in the containers we placed them in years ago, bearing the labels we wrote in an awkward childish hand: The Day Claire Went Missing. They stay that way and, even into adulthood, we may not question them. Until we have occasion, one day, to open the container, smell what has happened to the contents and revise the label: The Day Claire Was Murdered.

  EXHIBIT No. 49: Underpants referred to

  Madeleine’s red boots flew off one by one, Claire swung so high that Madeleine saw her underpants, “I see London, I see France! I see—” yellow butterflies. On Claire’s underpants. Madeleine looks up from the page, suddenly parched. Is there a water fountain in this room? Archives. The word itself is a desert.

  She smells the polish on the oak table. It reminds her of her father, his various desks. She looks down again at the dry page.

  HIS LORDSHIP: …what is your name, little girl?

  A: Madeleine McCarthy.

  I can’t remember what I was wearing that day. It was hot.

  Q: You don’t need to speak quite so loudly, Madeleine.

  A: Sorry.

  Q: That’s all right.

  She remembers her father sitting halfway toward the back. Giving her the thumbs-up. She sees him in his blue uniform but she knows that’s impossible, it was June. Like now. He’d have been in his khakis. Very important loved ones become, in memory, like cartoon characters—a definitive version i
s called up, always in the same outfit. One that survives burning, being run over, blown up, drowned and riddled with bullets.

  Q: What does it mean to take an oath, Madeleine?

  A: It means you swear to tell the truth.

  Transcripts are spartan. Factual stage directions, lines of dialogue unembellished by emotional cues in brackets. But personalities come through. And Madeleine sees herself, still vulnerable, on the page. Like a butterfly, pinned. Forever nine years old.

  Q: …who is your teacher?

  A: My teacher last year was Mr March.

  Q: Did you like him?

  A: No.

  Madeleine reads on and it’s like watching a series of calamitous events unfold in a movie. Don’t go back in the house! Check the back seat! Ask me the question! Why did no one ask the right question? A sleeveless dress with a Peter Pan collar, that’s what I was wearing. With a matching hairband.

  Q: What is that brooch you are wearing?

  A: It’s a lighthouse.

  It is the brooch Mr. March touched.

  Q: Where is it from?

  A: It’s from Acadia, my mother is Acadian. We speak French.

  Bailiff: Place your right hand on the Bible.

  But it’s not possible to enter the page and alter what happened. It has been happening here, in four boxes housed in downtown Toronto, for twenty-three years, and it will go on playing itself out. A long-running show.

  A: What’s in the jar?

  Q: Cover that table back up, and keep it covered.

  The show-and-tell table. Madeleine flips back to the index of exhibits at the front of the volume to find out what was in the jar—there is no judge to stop her now, she is a grown-up, she is permitted to choose her horrors:

  EXHIBIT No. 21: Jar of stomach contents

  “Want a bite?” said Claire. And Madeleine and Colleen shared her chocolate cupcake, her apple slices and the little round of cheese in red wax. Madeleine made a pair of lady lips with them afterwards and Claire bubbled with laughter. She was a great audience. Her last meal. Stomach contents. One of a long list, like snapshots.