Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Nina says, “When we invest so much in denying the truth, it can feel unreal when we finally speak it.”

“Wape,” says Bugs.

Nina waits.

Madeleine can cope. People who can cope take responsibility for things. Which means they need to have had them coming. The alternative is too terrifying: that bad things can just happen to them. It will be you the icicle falls on from twenty storeys up. You waiting for the bus when a motorist has a stroke and mounts the curb. To have been available to disaster once means to be permanently without a roof. Unless it was somehow your fault.

“It’s not like I never had a choice, even at nine,” says Madeleine. “You always have a choice.”

“And you’re willing to drive off the road to prove it.”

Sexual violation is a form of robbery. You arrive home to find your house ransacked. All items, the precious and the mundane, the priceless and the merely expensive, have been treated the same way. All items have been turned into the same item. Overturned, flung aside, the picture of your grandparents and the contents of the cutlery drawer. You can still hear the foot-stomps through your house. You can buy a new TV but only time will restore the cushioned peace of your home, heal the rent in the air on the stairs, the aftershock in the living room, all those places where emptiness has been allowed to leer obscenely into your home. Why us? Nothing personal.

“I feel sick.”

“Would you like some water?”

Rape treats the victim like nobody, like everybody, like anybody, bitch! Up the ramp, through the door to the slaughterhouse. The uncountable qualities that make one individual different from another, shocked away; the soul, shocked from the body, looks on in sorrow and pity at what is happening to its sister, its brother— bitch! It will be very difficult for the body to allow anything to inhabit it after that. Very difficult for it to allow the soul to re-enter. The soul may have to be content to follow close, make common cause with that other lonely follower, the shadow. Very difficult for the body to know whether that light request at the nape of the neck, please let me in , is the soul or the shadow. It is the soul. The shadow’s request is more humble, it asks only to be seen. Please don’t turn away, every time you turn away, I die .

“I feel carsick.”

“Put your head between your knees.”

Sexual violation turns all children into the same child. Come here. Yes, you . Children heal quickly, so that, like a tree growing up around an axe, the child grows up healthy until, with time, the embedded thing begins to rust and seep and the idea of extracting it is worse than the thought of dying from it slowly. I’m not hurting you . Once pleasure and poison have entwined, how to separate them? What alchemist, what therapist, what priest or pal or lover?

“I’m not into that ‘repressed memory’ bullshit,” says Madeleine and picks up the pink stone, weighing it in her hand, cool marble, satisfyingly oval. “But you know that story ‘The Purloined Letter’?”

“Yes.”

“I feel like there’s stuff just lying around but I can’t see it.”

“Hiding in plain sight.”

“Yeah. Or camouflaged.”

“Like a frog changing colour to match its surroundings?”

“Yeah, or like um, you know, like speckled eggs that hide in the uh … in the….”

“Grass?”

“Yeah.” She is weeping.

“What is it, Madeleine?”

“I don’t know, my eyes are crying.”

“Why?”

“Search me , doc.” She puts the stone back on the table, spins it.

“What were you saying when your eyes started to cry?”

“I don’t remember.” She rubs a tickle from the palm of her hand.

“You were talking about a speckled egg—”

“Not speckled, blue.”

“A robin’s egg?”

Madeleine takes a deep breath and looks down.

The grass is thick with neglected objects no longer confined to the room at the top of her head; she is finding pieces everywhere, strewn underfoot, collecting in the cracks of sidewalks, reflected in the blur of subway trains. The mystery is how they have managed to stay intact long enough to be found, these breakable things, fragile as butterfly wings, perishable as childhood, spilling like fluff from dandelions and cattails — catch one, make a wish, release it back onto the breeze — glittering like stolen silver in a nest.

It is as though she has hit upon the magic words to make these objects glow so that they can be found. But they are not “magic,” they are just words. Not spells, just spelling. Names. Perhaps that is what magic is. Claire .

“DID GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ever do butterflies?” asks Madeleine, settling into the swivel chair, cross-legged, warming her feet in her hands.

“I’m not sure,” says Nina.

“I dreamt I found a Georgia O’Keeffe print like the one you have here, and it made me so happy to know that you and I both had the same picture. Except in my dream it was this incredible butterfly. Huge and bright yellow like the sun.” Madeleine gazes at the serene skull and horns.

She has grieved in the best therapeutic tradition. She has “come to terms with her abuse,” she has wept and called the police. Surely her work here in terracotta-land is done. Me go home now.

“I’m seeing someone,” she says.

Nina listens.

“I’m um … happy. Isn’t that weird?”

Nina smiles.

“I feel like part of me is awake and that part’s really happy. But it has to drag around this other part. This dead-weight like an unconscious patient. It’s me. My eyes are closed, I’m in this blue hospital gown.” She crinkles her face. “How transparent am I, doc?” She waits. “The girl in the blue dress. It’s like she grew up in a coma.”

“In your dreams your legs feel heavy.”

As though something were weighing me down. A body. Mine .

The OPP have not been able to tell her anything but she has been assured they are on it. She doesn’t intend to wait while the bureaucratic wheels grind, however. She has a meeting with a lawyer tomorrow. She is going to bring charges. It’s the right thing to do.

“What kind of charges?” asks Nina.

“What do you mean? Sexual assault, of course.”

Just as Madeleine had never been able fully to comprehend that people and places went on changing after the McCarthys were posted away, so a child’s world, though crowded with fantasy, coloured by faith in talking animals and time travel, is in fact rigidly ordered and unchanging. Policemen are always smiling and uniformed — you never picture one in a lawn chair with a beer. Butchers wear white coats and stand behind counters, they do not shop themselves, or go to the doctor wearing an ordinary shirt. Teachers are unimaginable outside school — you may see them on their way to their car, but they fall off the edge of the earth when they leave the parking lot, only to rematerialize the next morning at the front of the class, appropriately attired.

It was a breach of reality when Mr. March did what he did after three, but reality healed around it like a mysterious nub in the bark of a tree. Part of being able to accommodate this breach — to dilate normalcy — meant applying to it the same rigid laws of childhood physics: this is what happens after three. It happens in the classroom. Up by his desk. Just as the butcher never shops for broccoli, the policeman never plays croquet and the milkman is never without his truck, the things that happen in the classroom after three could never happen anywhere else.