Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Through the earth-toned portal of Nina’s office, Madeleine has returned to the classroom, she has watched the child, she has lifted the bandage and smelled how rank the wound, exposed it to air so that it too can re-enter time and begin to change, to seal itself. She has listened faithfully, but has yet to translate the child’s story into adult language. So she has not truly heard it. She is just one more grown-up who nods and loves but can do nothing to help.

She cups her hands over her face and inhales.

“You feeling faint?” asks Nina.

Madeleine shakes her head. “I still have to do it sometimes. Smell my hands. Weird, eh?” She grins. “My brother used to razz me about it.”

Something so simple will be gained in the translation. Something that adults take for granted as they freely walk the earth, unbounded by bedtimes and the reproach of vegetables uneaten on the plate: Teachers can leave the classroom. They can leave the parking lot in their car. They can drive along a dirt road to a place where the fence has been left cordially unmended by the farmer. They can descend to the ravine at Rock Bass with a fragile blue egg sheltered in the palm of one big hand, then up the other side and, in their brown brogues that the children have only ever seen on asphalt or school linoleum, they can walk across the newly turned cornfield to the meadow beyond, where an elm tree stands….

“Why do you do it?”

“To clean them. To inhale a bad smell off them. Obsessive compulsive, right? You should be paying me.”

“What does it smell like?”

“Well there isn’t really a smell.”

“What do you imagine it smells like?”

“You’re good. Okay, it’s uh, clammy. It’s a yellow smell.”

“Yellow? You mean like urine?”

“No, just … yellow.”

She has yet to translate the bold text and pictures of her child’s story into the fine print of adulthood. When she does, she will be able to tell it back to the child. Tell it gently. The terrible story that the child does not know she knows.

She flexes her fingers, closing and opening her fists, this is the way to feel that your hands will not be chopped off.

“Does that help the smell to go away?” asks Nina.

Madeleine notices her hands swivelling on her wrists. “No.” She relaxes them on the armrests and they go ice-cold. She takes a deep breath and sits on them.

“I think maybe I did it.”

“Did what?”

“Killed her.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I can see her lying there.”

“You saw yourself, we know that.”

“But I have such a clear picture of her.”

“Can you describe the picture?”

“I can, I can — I see the grass tamped down like someone had a picnic there, you know?”

“Madeleine. Can you see her face?”

“We saw a deer.”

“Who did?”

“Me and Colleen and Rex.”

“Can you see Claire’s face?”

“Mm-hm.”

“What does it look like?”

“She’s sleeping?”

“Can you describe her hair? You said she was wearing a hair-band.”

“Barrettes, yeah, and she had on her charm bracelet.”

“What about her eyes?”

“They’re closed.”

“What about the rest of her face, Madeleine? Her mouth, her cheeks?”

“She looks peaceful but she’s pale because, well, she’s dead.”

“Madeleine?”

Madeleine looks up.

Nina says gently, “When people die of strangulation, their eyes stay open. They change colour, they don’t … it doesn’t look anything like your picture.”

Madeleine feels tired suddenly. As though tired were her natural condition and she has been waiting only for something to fall — all the balls, stilled in air, to drop. Am I dying? A voice has asked the question from deep within the tiredness. From the heart of the woods where the eyes of animals shine, from a den where a bone-white girl crouches.

“I’m afraid,” says Madeleine.

“Can you describe it?”

“I’m afraid I know something.”

Pictures, even scary ones, can be reassuring because they are narratively complete, unlike memory, which lies around, some assembly required. Madeleine’s picture of Claire lying peacefully dead turns out to have been a piece of painted scenery all along. “Like Bonanza,” she murmurs.

“Bonanza?”

Yellow Shell sign, intact and filling the screen until Ben Cartwright and his boys burst through on horseback.

“I see,” says Nina.

After a moment, Madeleine says, “I don’t want to.”

“Want to what?”

“See what’s behind the picture.” She blinks spasmodically but keeps her eyes on Nina, paying attention. Concentrate, little girl . “What if it was my dad?” she says, in a voice as small as a toadstool.

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“It would be the worst thing.”

“Madeleine? Why is it up to you to find out what happened to her?”

Madeleine looks up, bewildered— you’ve lost me, doc . “I thought you thought … I knew. Like I’m looking at a clue but I don’t recognize it, because … I don’t know that I know.”

“Madeleine. You may never find out what happened to Claire. But there are things you can find out.”

“Like what?” She feels her forehead wrinkle like a dog’s, earnest and pleading, eyes growing puddly and round as saucers.

“Who you are in all this.”

Madeleine stares at Nina, aware of a corrosive feeling in her stomach. “And anyhow, her underpants were covering her face,” she says.

“I know,” says Nina. Everyone knows that. One of the “haunting details.” “You’ve been carrying a heavy load, Madeleine. Can you imagine putting it down for a moment? And resting?”

Something shifts, yields to gravity. Madeleine sinks without moving and, as though in answer to the new proximity of the earth, tears flow.

“I think I’m dying.” Her words reach her as if someone else has spoken them. Someone she has known all her life but forgotten. A traveller returning. Shawl around her head and shoulders. Mourner.

She doesn’t recognize this self. She has discovered a talent for grief — like walking downstairs one morning and playing Chopin, never previously having touched a piano. Is sorrow a gift? Tears are flowing from every place on her body, sprouting like leaves, she can hear them lightly singing back the rain, she is weeping like a willow.

“Give me your hands,” says Nina.

She does.

“Nina, I know I didn’t kill Claire. But my hands think I did.”

“Why?”

“Because they know how.”

Time stops for grief.

Deep and muddy green, ping of sonar, what is down there? Dark and drowned, keep diving, this is a dream, you can breathe under water. Dive, dive until you know how terribly sad it is that a child was killed.

“What do your hands know, Madeleine?”

Madeleine holds her breath at the top of every intake, exhaling in short gusts. She says, “I — can’t say it.”

“What can’t you say?”

She looks down at her hands. White dogs, dumb animals. She strokes one with the other, warming them. She inhales carefully, then walks out onto a narrow branch. “He used to make us strangle him.”

This is the trick of telling. Objects fly together magically, pieces of a broken cup; or simply shift by one degree, kaleidoscopic, changing the picture entirely. Mr. March never strangled Madeleine, so Madeleine never thought of him as a man who strangled. She was nine. She didn’t know how to turn the picture around. To draw its mirror image. The pressure of his thumb in the soft flesh of her arm, his grip tattooed in blue bruises, his hold intensifying as she placed her own small hands around his wide soupy neck. Squeeze . She is thirty-two now and all it took was to say it out loud.