Ann-Marie MacDonald: Way the Crow Flies

“Can I come?” asks Madeleine, tentative — this could be pushing things too far.

“Sure, why not?” he says, and lets a squirt of clear spit escape his lips.

Times like this with Mike are precious. She does not want to move or say anything to wreck it. At times like this it is almost as if he has forgotten that she is a girl, and is treating her like a brother.

The sun tilts across their shoulders. Their shadows have grown up on the ground before them, long and lanky against the loose weave traced by the backstop.

“You ready to roll, kids?” Dad calls.

They walk back toward the car, comrades, no need to speak — as they say in the Marine Corps, Deeds Not Words . Their parents are smiling, amused at something. Madeleine reflects that sometimes your mother and father look pleased with you and you can’t figure out why.

They pile into the back seat and it’s funny how this is the first time since they arrived in Canada that Madeleine has not felt as though she were climbing into the new car in the new place. It’s just the car. It’s just Centralia, where we live, and that’s our school, J. A. D. McCurdy.

“J. A. D. McCurdy made the first heavier-than-air powered flight in Canada, in 1909,” says Dad.

You ’spect me to remember dat, doc?

A breeze lifts and the pulleys clank against the empty flagpole as the Rambler backs from the parking lot. On the first day of school the flag of our country will be raised. Not our flag, precisely, but the Red Ensign: the Canadian coat of arms, and in the upper left corner, the Union Jack. Canada does not have an official flag, we are not officially a country, we are just a dominion. What is a dominion? We’re not sure. It’s the name of a grocery store chain.

Madeleine is nervous now. Her hands are cold. The Rambler’s creeping pace is taking them back through the PMQs, and closer to their house. Which will it be? Look for one with blank windows and an empty driveway. Algonquin Drive, Columbia Drive….

At the corner of Columbia and St. Lawrence Avenue is a two-tone tan house with an orange VW van in the driveway. A plump girl with curly hair is Hula Hooping on the front lawn. As they turn right down St. Lawrence, Madeleine wonders, will I ever Hula Hoop with that girl? Will I get to drive in her van? Or is she moving away?

A purple house ahead on the left catches her eye because PMQ driveways are not usually full of old cars and washing-machine parts, or big German shepherd dogs that are not tied up. Who lives there? Scary people? That too would be unusual.

“That dog is loose,” says Mike.

Mimi looks. “Tsk-tsk.”

Her mother’s tsk-tsk is the only time Madeleine is ever aware of her French accent. She puckers her lips and tsk-tsks in a way English people think of as sexy. Madeleine twists her mouth to one side, à la Bugs Bunny, at the mere thought of the word. It makes her think of Bugs dressed up as a girl Tasmanian Devil, with a big bosom and red lipstick.

“What’s so funny, squirt?” says Mike.

“Zat’s for me to know and you to find out, chérie,” replies Maurice Chevalier, thanking heaven for “leetle girls.”

The Rambler pulls into a driveway directly across from the purple house and stops. Dad says, “Say hello to the house, kids.”

A two-storey white aluminum-sided semi-detached house on St. Lawrence Avenue. With a red roof.

Dad opens his door. “Let’s inspect the premises, shall we?”

Madeleine is happy their house is white. Make of me what you will, it says, you need not behave in a yellow or green way in order to live in me. An asphalt path leads from the driveway to the front porch, which is located at the side of the house for privacy from your neighbours, who live on the other side. Jack gets out of the car, walks around and opens Mimi’s door. She gets out and takes his arm.

Their parents always lead the way to the door of the new house. Mike follows, hands jammed in his pockets, observing the tradition but looking down. He is getting old enough to feel conspicuous — this walk up to their new house, an intimate act performed in public. Madeleine slides from the back seat and turns on the movie camera in her mind — I must remember this, the first walk up to our door.

They are coming to the end of their homeless sojourn. In these last few moments they are still vulnerable, soft-shelled. Roofless for another few seconds, open to the rain, to kindness, to cruelty. Jack climbs three concrete steps to the small porch, opens the screen door and reaches into his pocket for the key. Mike runs back to the car for something as Jack slides the key into the lock.

Then Jack does what he always does, over Mimi’s squeals and protests. He scoops her up in his arms and carries her across the threshold. Madeleine covers her face and peeks through her fingers, mortified and delighted. Mike returns and tosses her mangy Bugs Bunny to her. “Come on, kiddo,” he says. She hugs Bugs and follows her brother into the house.

To the left of the vestibule, stairs descend to the basement. Directly in front it’s up three steps and a quick right to the kitchen — functional Formica, frost-free Frigidaire and Westinghouse oven, with just room to spare for a small table and four chairs. A window over the sink looks onto the front lawn. In Mimi’s mind it is already curtained. To the left is the living room with fireplace and, immediately off it, the dining room. It never seems possible that the china cabinet and buffet will fit once the dining suite is in, but somehow they always do. A bay window in the living room overlooks the backyard and one of Centralia’s big empty green fields ringed by the backs of houses.

Mimi squints, mentally arranging the furniture — couch under the window, framed oil painting of the Alps over the mantelpiece, reproduction of Dürer’s Praying Hands on the kitchen wall. She leads the way up fourteen steps that turn on a modest landing, to three bedrooms and the bathroom. She makes the sign of the cross when she enters the master bedroom. Once the moving van has arrived, she will call up the Catholic padre and have him bless the house. Mimi is not as devout as her mother, but the master bedroom is where children are conceived.

Madeleine and Mike know better than to squabble over the choice of bedrooms. Maman is the commanding officer at home and she will assign quarters.

They troop back downstairs, footsteps clattering, voices hollow. Mimi turns to Jack, arms folded.

He says, “What do you think, Missus?”

She tilts her head. “Ça va faire.”

He smiles. Passed inspection.

The four of them stand in their new living room. The empty smell. Fresh paint and cleanser. The white echo of the place.

Tonight they will sleep in a motel. Tomorrow the moving van will come and, though they will eat in a restaurant again, they will sleep in their own house. On the third night, Mimi will make a fabulous supper in their own kitchen, and from then on the house will breathe with the smells of home. An invisible welcome will billow like sheets in a breeze when they walk in the door. Hello .

That night in the motel, tucked into a rollaway cot, Madeleine asks her mother to tell The Story of Mimi and Jack.

“Oui, conte-nous ça, maman,” says Mike, snug in the extra bed.

And Mimi tells the story. “‘Once upon a time there was a little Acadian nurse called Mimi, and a handsome young air force officer named Jack….’”

If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.