Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

The fog has obliterated time and place. Jack could be anywhere — ten thousand feet above the earth, trust your instruments… .

Simon says, “There’s an old Chinese proverb: once you’ve saved a man’s life, you’re responsible for him.”

“You don’t owe me anything, Simon.”

“My colleagues know there is a senior Canadian officer involved, they know he is stationed at Centralia, and although I haven’t mentioned your name, they could track you quite easily, I should think. But here’s the crux of it, Jack. So far, they’ve no inkling you intend to break silence.”

If Simon thinks Jack is worried about his career right now, he’s sorely mistaken.

“Are you threatening me, Simon?”

“No.” He sounds genuinely surprised. When he speaks again, his tone is intimate, almost aggrieved. “I’m giving you my word that they’ll not hear it from me.”

Jack swallows and says, “Simon. I won’t let that boy hang. He’s innocent.”

“Then he has nothing to worry about.”

I don’t know what to do . Jack has not said it aloud. But Simon has heard him. Simon is just across the table, a Scotch away. He leans toward Jack now and says, “Do the right thing.”

The phrase stirs something in Jack’s memory, just behind his left eye…. What Simon said when Jack awoke in the MRI to learn his war was over: You did the right thing, mate .

“Goodbye, Jack.”

Jack takes his hand from the opaque glass and his print remains, black and transparent. He looks up and through it. Outside, the night is clear. The moon glistens through his palm. The fog was inside the booth all along, made of nothing but his own breath. He opens the door and feels the chill through the wool of his uniform. It has started snowing. Flakes graze his eyelashes, melt against his lower lip. He puts on his hat. His legs carry him over the silent white. Halfway across the parade square, he becomes aware of a set of muffled footsteps behind him. He quickens his pace but so does the follower — he can hear the catch of the stranger’s breath, almost feel the clap on his shoulder: You got rid of the car, Jack. Even if you did come forward, the police wouldn’t believe you any more than they believed Henry Froelich. There never was an Oskar Fried . He stops. Who would believe him? His wife. The Soviets. And the CIA.

Jack has never been afraid to do the right thing. But it’s difficult sometimes to recognize it. Show me the right thing and I will do it . Where is up? Where is down? He longs to talk to Mimi, but he must not involve his wife. She didn’t join the armed forces, he did.

He turns, though he knows there is no one behind him. Across the parade square, the empty phone booth glows, transparent once more. The snowflakes gather on his shoulders, thickening like feathers. He stands there as his hat grows a ledge of white, and his shoulders collect frosted epaulettes. He doesn’t know what to do. He only knows what he has done.

“… And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—

‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’”

Sir Henry Newbolt, 1862–1938

MIMI IS AWAKE before Jack. She gets up quietly and reaches for his uniform, crumpled on the floor — she will give it a quick press. As she picks up the jacket she catches a whiff of something. She holds it to her face and sniffs — urine. It takes only a moment to realize that he must have been holding one of the Froelich babies. She looks at him, pale and sleeping, his mouth open, and has a sense of the old man he will one day become. She needs to be gentle with him.

Last night she waited up for him, but when he finally came in he wasn’t hungry and he didn’t want to talk. She gave him two Aspirins; he downed them with a Scotch, and went straight up to bed. She looked in on Madeleine, and when she joined her husband he was already asleep. She waited for him to turn to her, to warm her feet, which were always like ice, but he was dead to the world. He had missed his son’s game. Now was not the time to ask him what had happened over at the Froelichs’. Whatever it was, it had made him ill. Jack was thirty-six and it was important to remember that men bottled a lot up inside, that this could take its toll. Mimi knew how to relax him but he was too sound asleep for that. Her period was late. Maybe this time…. She heard his teeth grind together briefly. She wasn’t sleepy. She stared at the white stucco ceiling, where the shadows of snowflakes fell across a stark moonlit rectangle. She could have got up for an extra blanket but she was too cold.

A baseball game was not the end of the world, but their son would only be young for a very short while. She worried that too soon he would cease to place such importance on his father’s being there to cheer him on. Already Michel was pretending that it didn’t matter — strolling in, announcing his win as though it were an afterthought and telling her he wasn’t hungry; Arnold Pinder’s father had taken them for hamburgers. That this should have caused tears to spring to her eyes, she could only put down to the emotional strain of the past week.

Mimi folds the uniform jacket onto the chair — it will have to be dry-cleaned — and heads for the bathroom. She recalls that the Froelichs’ station wagon was absent from the driveway for most of yesterday evening, and it occurs to her to wonder which of them Jack was keeping company — Henry or Karen?

In the bathroom she pees, then sees on the toilet paper a streak of watery red. She is momentarily bewildered. There have been no cramps, no bloating. She tells herself lots of women have irregular cycles, but she knows better: she has never been one of them. That’s why she and Jack have never had any “surprises.” If her period is changing, it’s because she is too, no matter how young she looks and feels. She splashes water on her face — she has no right to cry. She has two beautiful healthy children, and her neighbour has just lost her only one. It’s wrong to grieve for a child who has not even been conceived. Besides, who knows, there’s nothing to say it might not still happen. She lets the water run, and sits on the side of the tub with her face in her hands. Madeleine bangs on the door: “Maman! I have to go!”

At breakfast she persuades Michel to tell his father about the baseball game. The rain has washed away the freak snowfall and the grass is a new livid green. She dresses more carefully than usual, and kisses Jack goodbye with an extra love-bite on his ear to make him smile.

Madeleine didn’t get a chance to ask her father the questions, because Mike monopolized breakfast with a play-by-play account of his game. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, because the police don’t return to the school. When Colleen corners her at recess, Madeleine tells her what she told the police, then runs to rejoin her school friends — her light cool friends — before Colleen can thank her or rub anything off on her. The scab in the palm of her hand has begun to flake, and Madeleine picks at it as much as she dares.

For the next three days Jack sits tight, in hope that the case will be dismissed, but on Friday a date is set for a hearing. The Crown is willing to move swiftly in consideration of the fact that some witnesses may be posted before the summer is out. Perhaps they also have in mind Ricky’s extreme youth, and the fact that he has been denied bail, for the hearing is a mere three weeks away. The Froelichs’ lawyer has welcomed the speed of events, in view of the scantiness of the prosecution’s case. The Crown will seek to have Ricky tried as an adult, but editorials have already appeared in the major Toronto papers decrying this as inhumane and “an abuse of the letter, and a breach of the spirit, of the law.”