Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Madeleine feels dizzy. Colleen has had the thing happen that everyone is so afraid of, that your parents might be killed in the car without you — for that is how parents die.

There is a shawl of death everywhere, it seems to Madeleine. And trapped in its folds, a smell. It is the smell of the McCarrolls, of Colleen, of the exercise group, of Madeleine and Mr. March. Most people don’t have the smell and don’t even notice it on others. They are the lucky ones. Like Dad. He thinks I am sunny and light . Her mother has sniffed the air once or twice as though at the scent of smoke, then dismissed it, the way you do when you figure it’s someone else’s house on fire.

“That’s how come your mum volunteers at the orphanage, eh,” says Madeleine, seeing her own words like neat black writing on a clean page. Words are clean. The paper-thin scar at the corner of Colleen’s mouth has paled, her lips turning mauve. “Yeah, that’s one reason.”

“You were just a baby when you were adopted, though, eh,” says Madeleine.

“No, I was a little kid.”

“But you don’t remember.”

“I fuckin’ well do so remember, I remember everything.”

This is not the time to ask what “fuck” means — not the time for questions that splash and ripple, but for words that go softly plop .

“I don’t care if you’re adopted.”

Colleen just stares off.

“Your parents don’t care.”

“I know.”

“No one in your family cares if you’re adopted.”

“We’re all adopted, tithead.” Colleen plucks a blade of grass and sticks it between her teeth.

Madeleine sees all the Froelich kids again, as though for the first time. It’s true they don’t look alike, but neither do she and Mike. Although Mike looks like Dad and Madeleine looks like Maman. “Even Elizabeth?”

“Yeah,” says Colleen, turning to look at Madeleine. “You think that’s funny?”

“No”—biting the inside of her cheek to kill a grin, not because it’s funny but because it isn’t.

Colleen hugs her knees and begins to rock slightly. “Except for Rick. He’s my blood brother.”

“You mean like—” and Madeleine indicates the fresh wound in her palm.

“No,” says Colleen, “for real.”

That makes sense. When you think about it, they do look alike, but the resemblance is beneath the surface. They are different colours — Rick’s black hair and eyes and white skin in winter, the opposite of Colleen with her husky-dog eyes and dusky skin. Not to mention Rick is a gentleman. But their eyes and their cheekbones are the same shape, their lean builds.

“Our name was Pellegrim,” says Colleen.

Pellegrim . Sounds like pilgrim , thinks Madeleine.

She and Ricky were on the floor in the back of the car when it crashed. They were looking at an old Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalogue.

“That’s my rifle,” said Ricky. A toy rifle with a white silhouette on the stock, of a horse and cowboy at full gallop.

“That’s my two-wheeler,” said Colleen. A red “All American Pony Express” with a shiny bell and crossbar.

“That’s a boy’s bike,” Ricky told her.

“That’s what I want.”

“Sure, why not, you’re pretty tough for a girl.” He was nine, she was six. They survived because they were on the floor. Colleen’s face was cut by the catalogue page, a bad paper cut. Ricky got a concussion and had his neck in a brace afterwards but he was all right. Their parents went through the windshield. The front end of the Plymouth was stove in but the engine stayed in place.

Colleen got herself out of the car and went to her mother.

There was no other car. There was a half-dead deer. There was a rifle in the trunk of the car. Someone should get it and kill the deer, thought Colleen. She couldn’t look at the deer because it was still alive and suffering. And she couldn’t look at her mother because her mother was dead. She couldn’t see her father. He had been thrown into the woods. She walked in a little way, found him, but she didn’t go near. She returned and rocked on her heels next to her mother for a long while. In one hand she still clutched a crumple of catalogue pages.

Ricky woke up and got out of the car, and saw that the deer was still kicking. It was so sad, its terrible brown eyes, Colleen wondered what would happen to the baby deer off in the forest somewhere. Ricky got the rifle out of the trunk and shot the deer. He covered his mother with a blanket she had sewn. He found his father and covered his face with leaves. Then he took his little sister by the hand and they started walking down the highway, dragging the rifle along behind them.

The car engine kept running until it ran out of gas.

“What do you wanna do now?” says Colleen, getting up.

“I dunno,” says Madeleine, “what do you wanna do?”

They rinse their feet in the stream. The water is so cold that their feet dry almost immediately. They put their shoes and socks back on, Madeleine her Mary Janes, Colleen her scuffed loafers with the empty penny slots.

“Come on,” says Colleen. “I could use a smoke.”

Life began again in an orphanage. But soon, Colleen’s brother disappeared. Memory survived as imagination, and after a while she forgot she had a brother — a real one. They gave her a new name, Bridget. Perhaps she’d had an Indian name and they’d changed it when she arrived; that was what happened to many of the children there. They were Indians. So was she, as far as the staff were concerned, but she was a half-breed in the eyes of the other kids. She didn’t come from a reserve, she didn’t belong to a band — her mother’s people had had a beautiful cabin on a road allotment, but it was gone and they had scattered. She came from a car.

First they called her “mute,” then “mentally retarded.” None of the children were permitted to speak their own languages, because they were heathen. When she broke her silence to speak in Michif, that was considered even worse. Michif was not a language, and the Métis were not a people.

Finally, she was “uncontrollable.” Social Services intervened when she was admitted to hospital, and sent her to a training school outside Red Deer, Alberta. It was a place for retarded, delinquent and discarded children. Many were Indians or somewhere in between. If you were good, you got to work on the farm. She was tied to the bed, for her own safety and that of the other residents. But she wasn’t sterilized, she didn’t stay there long enough. One day someone called out from the boys’ side of the fence, “Colleen!” and she turned, knowing her name when she heard it. He was her brother.

Karen Froelich had realized that she could no longer volunteer at this place. It didn’t need help, it needed closing. When she and Henry adopted the two “hard cases,” they signed a paper requiring them to live within the province and report regularly to an officer of the juvenile court. Karen had been an aid worker with the U.N. Henry had been a refugee. They knew something about bureaucracy. They packed the children into the Chevrolet and drove east two thousand miles. Henry found work on an air force station in Ontario where everyone was rootless and no one stayed long enough to look too deeply into anyone else’s past.

RICK IS PICKED UP on his way home from school that Tuesday afternoon. Jogging south from Exeter on Highway 4, his books in an army surplus knapsack, school shoes looped through the straps and bouncing. The OPP cruiser slows alongside him. He recognizes the two officers and salutes them casually. The one on the passenger side leans forward and says, “Hop in, son.”