Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

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 remained 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.

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.