Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Jack reaches for the remote and turns on the news.

Olivia is waiting on Madeleine’s front step. A barrel-chested short-haired orange dog, with a head like a German Second World War helmet is panting on a leash beside her.

“Whose dog?”

“Mine, but I’m leaving tonight.”

“I thought you weren’t leaving till tomorrow, I was going to drive you to the airport, I still will, hang on—”

“It’s okay, I called a cab.”

“Cancel it, I’ll—”

“No, no, sit.”

“Are you talking to the dog or me?”

Olivia laughs and takes her hand, pulls her down to the step beside her. “This is Winnie.” Winnie is fresh from the Humane Society.

“He’s a pit bull,” says Madeleine.

“She. Winifred is an American Staffordshire terrier.”

“Which is a fancy way of saying pit bull.”

“Technically.” Olivia kisses her. “Je t’aime.”

Olivia’s kiss is like an electrical gauge. It lets Madeleine know that, against all odds, she is in excellent working order. “Then stay and have dinner with me, we’ll roast wieners over the gas ring, I’ll pop the Manischewitz and we’ll make the beast with two backs, what do you say?”

“I can’t, I got a grant to go on this trip.”

“Give the money back.”

“I want to go.”

Madeleine strokes the dog’s head and is assaulted by a tongue of bovine heft. She looks down and addresses the porch steps. “Why’d you adopt a dog if you were just going to ditch her right away?”

“I’m not ditching her, I’m giving her to you to look after.”

“You expect me to look after her for three months?”

“No, she’s going to look after you.”

Madeleine looks at the dog and the dog grins back — fleshy mouthful of shark teeth, six hundred pounds of exertable pressure ready and waiting between those jaws.

Olivia says, “She loves kids.”

“I don’t have any kids.”

Olivia smiles, raises her eyebrows briefly in a way that reminds Madeleine of someone.

“What does she eat? Cops? Drug dealers?”

“I had to take her,” says Olivia. “She’d been there for six months.”

“Really? Why?”

“No one wanted her. She’s not a puppy. Plus she’s a pit bull.”

“She’s a pussycat.”

Olivia smiles. “I know.” She puts the leash in Madeleine’s hand, kisses her and gets into a waiting taxi.

In the condo in Ottawa, Mimi says, “Jack, do you want some hot?” and switches the TV off.

Madeleine and Winifred watch as the taxi disappears down the street and around the corner. Madeleine goes to rise and notices a drawstring bag on the step. In it, two dog bowls, a sample bag of kibble and a thick red candle with a scrolled note. She puts the note in her pocket for later and goes inside with the dog, feeling like a child of the universe. In the middle of the empty living room her wineglass, crusted red on the bottom, is where she left it by the phone on the carpet. It magnifies the red light blinking on the answering machine. She ignores the light and fills one of the bowls with water, the other with kibble. The dog laps promiscuously, great plashes of pleasure, then devours the food with a series of contented asthmatic grunts. More porcine than canine.

“Was that good?”

The dog tilts her massive head attentively, ears cocked, forehead wrinkled, panting.

“You’re part alligator, aren’t you, Winnie”—scratching her behind the ears, feeling the steel-belted wall of muscle beneath the neck fur—“Aren’t you an alligator, aren’t you!”

They play tug-of-war with the one remaining towel from the bathroom, Winnie growling in a lubricious and gratifying show of viciousness. Madeleine chases her all through the empty apartment, Winnie wiping out on the hardwood, biting air with her high-pitched play-bark, leaping back in delighted fright when Madeleine springs from a cupboard, from around a corner, snarling, “I’m gonna get you, oh you better run! Run run run run!” Until they are exhausted. Now that’s therapy.

Winnie makes a beeline for the carpet and flops down the way dogs do, abandoning themselves to gravity as though they’ve been shot. She knocks over the wineglass, which breaks against the blinking answering machine. Madeleine shoos her from the broken glass, cleans up and, as an afterthought, rewinds and begins to play the messages. Nine from Shelly, five from Olivia, several from Tony. Rising urgency, common theme: Where are you? Where the hell are you? Are you okay?

Today is Thursday.

Holy shit, Batman!

The enormity of realizing that she has missed an After-Three Thursday is almost exhilarating. Like a shot of B vitamins. She will make it up to everyone. They will have scrambled and written her out of the Friday night taping, but she will scramble and squeeze back in, bursting already with generosity, ready to charge in with a bagful of one-liners to shower on her colleagues.

“This is bad,” she says to the dog, “really bad.” Winnie tilts her head. “Not you, you’re good, me bad, bad Madeleine.” She puts her hand on the phone. Make the hardest call first. Shelly. “Thufferin’ thuckotash,” she says to Winnie, lifting the phone to her ear, about to dial — but the line is dead. Not dead, someone is there—

“Hello? Hello, Olivia?”

“Oui, allô?”

“Oh hi Maman, it didn’t even ring.” She laughs, “We’re psychically linked.” If she didn’t know better, she’d swear she had forgiven her mother for yesterday — why am I so happy all of a sudden? Your guilty secret. You’re a happy person . “Maman?”

On the other end of the line, a pause to rival one of her dad’s. Then Maman says, “Your papa is gone,” and her voice breaks.

Madeleine’s lips part. She leans forward slowly and drops her forehead to her knee. So this is the thing, when it finally comes. She cradles the receiver against her shoulder while her mother weeps.

Your papa. Your papa… .

JACK MCCARTHY Died of wounds

WHEN A PARENT DIES, a planet disappears, and the night sky will never look the same again. It doesn’t matter how grown up we are when we lose one. And when both are gone it’s as though we are permanently without a kind of roof — invisible shield, first line of defence between ourselves and mortality, gone.

Madeleine’s relief at seeing her mother was a shock to herself. She craved to be scolded for her choice of wardrobe, to be informed with asperity that she was too thin, but Mimi was coming undone. Not in the presence of friends, the priest, the relatives who had begun to arrive. Only with Madeleine. For so many reasons — because Madeleine is part of Jack, part of her son, part of her, because “tu es ma fille ,” no matter what, and only a daughter can know. Long raking sobs, makeup-ruining grief. The sight of tears trickling through her mother’s fingers, running down her hands — well preserved but older now, the polish a little starker — was the worst for Madeleine. But something surprising was happening. She had always feared she would go to pieces when her father died, but she was discovering an unsuspected reserve of emotional endurance. It felt involuntary, as though she had been born equipped with it, like the impulse to suckle, to walk, to run — standard mammalian features. The ability to remain supple while her mother held onto her and wept; to remain patient while being told how to boil water; to know when to run her a hot bath; to be able to say, “What about his clothes?” This while a tap within her gushed, profligate sorrow — how is it possible that this strength and this grief can go together? My dad is gone . “Have you chosen the flowers, Maman?” His empty chair, the newspapers in the blue boxes at the foot of the driveway. “You choose, Madeleine.” His TV remote, his shoes, wrinkled across the instep, his slippers, his name on the stack of mail on the hall table. Where is my dad? She chooses daisies.