Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“You’ve got baseball practice,” says Jack.

“I quit.”

“That’s what you think,” Jack says, and salts his schnitzel.

Madeleine looks up at her father to see how angry he is, and he smiles at her.

“Madeleine wants me to come,” Mike says gruffly. “Don’t you?”

Madeleine looks from her father to her brother and mumbles, “Yeah.”

“See?” says Mike.

Jack ignores the boy.

Madeleine says, “How come I have to testify when I already told the police?”

“That’s part of our justice system,” says Jack. “The accused and the public have the right to hear all the evidence in open court.” It will all be over soon. “And you’ll be under oath.”

“Do I have to swear on the Bible?”

“Yup,” says Jack. “Just tell the truth, like you did last Halloween,” he tells her.

Madeleine’s stomach closes.

Mimi says, “What about last Halloween?”

Jack says, “That’s classified,” and winks at Madeleine. She forms a smile with one side of her mouth. He reaches over and pats her on the head, saying, “We’re right proud of you, sweetie.”

“I’ve got a stomach ache.”

“You’ve got butterflies in your stomach,” he says. “That’s natural.” Madeleine sees butterflies — a storm of them — yellow…. “Just tell the truth.”

Mike says, “You better or they’ll hang him.”

Jack slaps the table, and Mimi jumps along with the cutlery. “That’s not true,” he says. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Everyone’s saying it.”

“Who’s everyone? Arnold Pinder’s father? Answer me.”

“Jack,” says Mimi.

Jack takes a breath and says to his wife, “What’s for dessert?”

Jack tucks her into bed next to Bugs Bunny and obliges her by kissing the rabbit’s plastic cheek. “Why don’t we read something,” he says, putting down his Scotch, reaching for the book on her bedside table, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland .

“Dad?”

“Yeah?” He flips through the book.

“Sometimes is it—? Can a lie ever be good?”

He glances up. “What that’s, sweetie? What do you mean?”

“Like. Say … in a war.”

“You mean when a soldier is being interrogated by the enemy,”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the best policy is to say nothing at all — apart from your name, rank and serial number. If you lie, you might get caught in it.”

“What if there isn’t a war on?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, it’s almost never all right to lie. Lies are self-perpetuating, do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means that one lie leads to another, until you have what’s known as a domino effect.”

Dominoes is a game. Everyone gets it for Christmas. No one knows how to play it. Now is not the time to ask about dominoes. “But Dad?” Now is also not the time to mention someone’s life depending on a lie in a courtroom, because Dad will know she is talking about Ricky Froelich and she will have no choice tomorrow but to tell what she really saw — didn’t see. Even Madeleine’s questions are lies designed to hide what she is really asking. “What if you have to tell a lie to make people believe the truth?” she asks. He lowers his glass and looks at her. From the mouths of babes. She can’t possibly know anything. He sets the book aside. “Why do you ask that?”

Madeleine swallows.

“Have you been reading something, old buddy? Did you see something on TV that made you wonder?”

She nods, yes — she is not really lying. She has been reading something. She has seen things on TV. They often make her wonder.

He takes a big breath and smiles. “You’re going to be a lawyer when you grow up.”

“I don’t want to be a lawyer, Dad.”

“You can be whatever you want to be, you can be an astronaut, or an engineer—”

“I want to be a comedian.”

“That’s right.” He laughs and rubs her head. “You’ve posed a very complex question. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”

Madeleine feels sorry for her father. He thinks she has a good head on her shoulders. His Deutsches Mädchen . His spitfire. He doesn’t know she is a liar. His sore eye looks sad. “Thanks,” she says.

She sees him as though through the crack in the door of a dark closet. She is in among the coats and battered board games, and he is out there sitting innocently on the edge of her bed, tucking her in. When she comes out of the closet, the shadows follow her but he doesn’t see them. Because he is good.

He says, “That is what’s known as an ethical question.” Ethical . It sounds like gasoline. He says, “Sometimes, the truth lies somewhere in between.”

The truth lies .

“Sometimes, you have to assess the whole situation. Do what’s known as a cost-benefit analysis, to see how the truth will best be served. That’s also called diplomacy.”

Sometimes, with Dad, you ask for one definition and you get the whole dictionary.

“Nine times out of ten, however, the truth is pretty cut and dried.”

“Like at Halloween?” she asks

“What about Halloween?”

“When I hit the tree and wrote stuff in soap?”

“You wrote stuff in soap?”

Madeleine reddens. “Yeah.”

“I don’t remember that…. You soaped someone’s windows?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Whose?”

“… A teacher’s.”

“I see.” He nods. “I don’t think you mentioned that.”

Madeleine shakes her head. “But I told on myself.”

“Good. You told your teacher? And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’”

“Well, he was as good as his word. What did you write?”

Madeleine looks at her bedspread. Chenille highways, mountain paths leading in all directions. “A word.”

“What word?”

“A bird.”

“You wrote the name of a bird? What kind of bird?”

“Um”—she swallows—“peahen.”

“Peahen?” He smiles. “What’d you write that for?”

Madeleine shrugs.

“Was that something you learned in Mr. Marks’s class?”

“March.”

“Was that part of your science lesson?”

“Health,” says Madeleine.

“Health? What’s that got to do with health?”

“Exercises.”

“What exercises?”

“For muscles.”

“What’s a peahen got to do with that?”

“It’s a girl peacock.”

“I know what it is, I just don’t see what it’s got to do with health class.”

Madeleine doesn’t say anything. Jack looks at her. “No wonder you soaped his window.”

Madeleine waits.

“It was wrong, but you owned up to it.”

She nods.

“It takes guts to tell the truth sometimes. That’s what you’ve got. Let me tell you something, old buddy. If you ever find yourself wondering what’s the right thing to do — because, as you get older, you’ll find the truth is not always what it seems — when you find yourself in a tough situation, just ask yourself, ‘What is the hardest thing I could do right now? What is the toughest choice I could make?’ And that’s how you’ll know the difference between the truth and a whole bunch of … excuses. The truth will always be the hardest thing.”

His knuckles are white around his glass, with its slick of ice and amber at the bottom.

“’Night-night, sweetie.”

MADELEINE IS STANDING on a box in the witness box. It’s like a penalty box for one.