Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“When did your friend die?”

“We were — she was nine.”

Nina says, “So you were funny before that happened.”

Madeleine bites her lip, nods.

“Comedy is your gift,” says Nina. “The other things … the pain. Your father’s illness, your brother. And Claire and … all the things I don’t know about — those are all, at best, grist. At worst, they make you want to go off the road. And that’s not really funny.”

Madeleine longs to thank Nina for this, but she can’t speak. Like a dog, she will take this treat away to eat later, in private. “See you next week.”

In a second-hand clothing store in the market, while shopping for a new old Hawaiian shirt, Madeleine sees Claire. In the next instant she corrects herself; that child couldn’t possibly be Claire, Claire is my age, she wouldn’t look anything like that now. In the next instant she corrects herself — Claire is dead. Let’s not think about what she looks like now.

She is out doing normal Saturday afternoon stuff, unaware that a layer has advanced from the back of her mind to the front, like a slide in a kid’s View-Master. The newly promoted layer is taking a turn filtering everything she sees, and distributing the information to the various lobes and neural nets that deal with face recognition, emotion, smell, memory. The layer is dated, however. It doesn’t get out much. It hasn’t been used since 1963. Like software, it needs to be upgraded.

She glimpses a dog out the corner of her eye— Rex . She looks again, it’s a beagle. Besides, Rex must be long dead by now. Good boy. Such a good Rex . It happens all day, breaking in this rookie layer of mind. Thus Madeleine sees a kid squinting through the smoke of a cigarette, leaning delinquent against the convenience store at College and Augusta, and says, Colleen .

“I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” asks Nina.

“I’m sorry I–I feel so sorry for my parents.” She puts her face in her hands.

“Why?”

Plucking several tissues: “Well. That was their little girl. They didn’t know what was happening to her. They loved her.” She blows her nose.

“What about you, Madeleine?”

“I can see him, you know? I’m standing there, and he’s got his hand up, you know? Up my dress. It’s like their little girl came home to them all smudged and broken and they never knew it. They still treated her … as though she was precious.” Sobbing, throat aching, she is beyond sarcasm. “My mother picked out those pretty dresses, and he touched them.”

“You sound as though you feel … it was your parents who were violated.”

Madeleine nods. This makes sense after all.

“What about you, Madeleine?”

She looks up. “What do you mean?”

Nina looks so kind, Madeleine feels a little worried.

“If you could go back to that classroom now,” asks Nina, “what would you do?”

“I can’t change what happened.”

“That’s true.”

“I would”—sorrow comes like sighs, gusts of rain, no longer falling but blowing across fields, dirt roads—“I would say, ‘It’s okay, I’m here,’ and … I would watch.”

“Watch?”

Madeleine nods, tears rolling down. Mum, Dad. Watch me . “’Cause I can’t change it. But at least, if I watched it, she wouldn’t have to be alone.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Madeleine. Me.”

Nina passes her a glass of water.

“Did you ever tell anyone what happened?”

Madeleine sips, shakes her head. “I kinda danced around it, you know? I didn’t know….”

“What didn’t you know?”

“I didn’t know it hurt….” Madeleine cries into her hands. “I didn’t know it hurt so much.” She is raining, raining. She feels the box of tissues arrive in her lap.

After a minute, Nina says, “You’ve been alone with this.”

Madeleine nods.

We think of “witness” as a passive role, but it’s not, it can be terribly difficult. That’s why we say “to bear witness.” Because it can be so painful. Watch me .

“What would happen if you told your parents now?”

Madeleine stops weeping. “Oh I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“My dad’s not well, I might — it could … kill him.” She blows her nose.

“What about your mother?”

“I don’t know…. What if she—?” Madeleine groans because here comes the sorrow again. “I don’t want her to comfort me.”

“Why not?”

“Because she hates what I am.”

Nina waits.

“That’s not fair, she loves me. I just don’t know what she’d do with the information.”

Nina waits.

“She’d — she’ll say, ‘So that’s why you’re the way you are.’” Something so precious and individual, put down to a crime, an obscenity…. No.

Nina says, “If surviving sexual abuse were a recipe for homosexuality, the world would be a much gayer place.”

Madeleine smiles. “I’m all better now,” she says.

“Glad to hear it.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Not for a second.”

She dreams again of too much light. Too green grass. Legs so heavy she can barely walk, thighs like wet cement, pressed down to earth by yellow light.

MADELEINE BUYS TWO AVOCADOS for Olivia and, on her way past the butcher shop in Kensington Market, catches a glimpse of the clock between stripped rabbits hanging in the window; a handprinted sign beneath them announces, “Fresh Hairs.” She has a date with Christine for “some closure” in forty minutes — enough time to do a little writing.

While she’s sitting outside at a guano-festooned table, making notes on a napkin, the ass of a big grey suit passes inches from her face. “Pardon,” says the puddingy voice, like the cartoon hippo making his way down the row in the movie theatre. Restaurants and theatres: the only public contexts in which it is perfectly acceptable to have the ass of a stranger grazing your nose. Madeleine leans back to give the man room. It’s Mr. March. Her stomach plummets. He has kids, a son and daughter. Foiled again, doc — Mr. March would be sixty-something by now, he would be … her hands go cold on the wrought-iron table, she gets the point. He would be sixty — maybe seventy-something. He has continued through time, just like Colleen and Madeleine and the clock in the butcher shop and the rabbits on their way to the pot. He is not a ghost in a classroom, playing out the same eternal scene. He has been teaching for the past twenty-three years. He may still be teaching. He is still out there.

She gets up and leaves. Goes to Olivia’s apartment, finds the key under the brick, enters and calls the police.

She is referred to various departments within the OPP, and finally reaches someone who takes down her story of sexual abuse—“It wasn’t just me, he had a group of us—” and promises to get back to her.

What else is right in front of her that she can’t see?

Various roommates begin to arrive. Someone starts playing the banjo. Of course they don’t mind if she hangs out. She curls up at the end of the heavenly collapsing couch, under a blanket that smells like years of laundry, and waits for Olivia.

Rape.

It’s embarrassing to find out that you are like other people. Even if half of them are celebrities. Especially if half of them are celebrities. It can happen to anyone. I am not special .

“I feel like I’m making it up.”