Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“Shut up Grace”—fed up and bored, the teacher marks the failed spelling test.

“Ohhhh…,” Grace is turning round slowly, pulling tall grass, bending over, hugging herself, “oh noooo….”

Marjorie relents, as a long-suffering mother might, when her child’s misbehaviour has run its course and been replaced by contrition or exhaustion. “It’s all right, Grace,” she says. “I won’t tell.”

Grace must make things nice. Pull Claire’s dress down. Fold her arms. Bluebells to cover her, Queen Anne’s lace, which some people call stinkweed but which is pretty like a doily. Marjorie helps with two long cattails for a cross over her chest, because we may as well do this properly.

“She’s sleeping,” says Grace, and bends to kiss Claire good night but can’t because of the eyes. Claire’s face is already changing. Grace finds Claire’s underpants in the grass, tiny yellow butterflies on clean white cotton, and places them over her face.

It is time to get out of here.

They walk Claire’s bike from Rock Bass back to the dirt road and take turns riding it, but when they reach the intersection with the old Huron County road, Marjorie points out that they don’t want anyone to think they have stolen it. They hide it under the willow tree, leaning it against the trunk, where it will be safe from robbers.

Grace pulls one of the pink streamers from the handlebars. “I’ll give it back.”

That night, Grace called on Marjorie and Marjorie said, “I can’t come out, it’s too late, I have to do my homework then go to bed.”

It was dark. Grace had been out long after Brownies, loitering at the end of Marjorie’s driveway with the dented trash cans. Marjorie had seen her from an upstairs window. She rapped on the glass with her knuckles, then opened it and hissed down, “Go home, Grace!” Grace was shivering as though she was cold. Well, the nights were still cool. She wandered slowly away, not in the direction of her own house, not in any particular direction.

Five minutes later she knocked on Marjorie’s door again. Marjorie’s mother was not pleased. She was sick a lot and it really was a bother. “Marjorie,” she called over her shoulder, while Grace waited on the front step. “It’s that kid again.”

Marjorie came to the door in her housecoat, kiss-curls taped to her cheeks. “What do you want?” she said through the screen door.

And Grace said, “We’re best friends, right?” Best fwiends .

Marjorie did not invite her in. Grace’s lips looked sore and she was gnawing the cuff of her Brownie uniform. Marjorie had just had a bath. She wondered now why she had ever been friends with dirty Grace Novotny.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“We are so, Marjorie!”

“Keep your voice down.”

“We are so,” Grace whispered.

“So?”

“So just come out for a minute.”

“I can’t, I’m ready for bed.”

They stood there for a moment, Marjorie behind the screen, Grace on the step below, her eyes starting to wander. Marjorie’s mum said from inside the house, “Marjorie, close the door, there’s a draft.”

“I have to go.”

“Claire never came home,” said Grace.

Marjorie glanced over her shoulder and tightened the cord of her housecoat. “Are you retarded, Grace?”

Grace looked bewildered. She reached for Marjorie’s sleeve but touched the screen. “Marjorie …?” Her voice trembled, tears filled her eyes and she asked, “What happened to her?”

“You killed her, Grace, that’s what happened. Now go home.” And Marjorie closed the door.

THE SUN IS HALFWAY DOWN the sky when Madeleine puts her car into first and rocks up the stony track toward a log house just coming into view.

The day feels as endless as summer itself, suspended in heat. Trees bask in a cinematic light so rich that every pine needle glints, sharp as resin, against the hot blue. In the upper boughs of a Douglas fir, a spiderweb glitters, prismatic, and a crow sits, as crows like to do, atop the central spire. Birch leaves, responsive to the slightest breeze, blink back the sun with their silver undersides. Birdcalls sound intimate and precise; Madeleine is aware of having entered their home. And appearing with the rise in the road, in the distance between slim scaly trunks, the blue sparkle of Lake Huron. A dog barks. Several dogs.

The house stands on a swell of pink and grey granite — a piece of the Canadian Shield softened by sunset. Is it possible that this ravishing evening light can erode stone, painting it day after day with pastel rays? Veins of mica glitter like strewn diamonds, clefts in the rock cast shadows on patches of moss, grey, green, gold and black, the house itself is burnished ochre at this hour. A wooden ramp zigzags up to the front door.

A dog rounds the house and trots, barking, toward her car: ears erect, sturdy, with a white and grey coat. He escorts her up to a level patch where a shiny Dodge pickup is parked. Nearby is an open shed — firewood neatly stacked floor to ceiling, snowmobile, battered snowplough blade, tools and tire chains, along with several large dog crates and leather harnesses. On the other side of the shed, a vintage Ford Thunderbird rests on blocks, hood propped open like a grand piano, mess of greasy engine guts on the ground. She pulls up and parks.

The dog is part husky, judging by the curl of his tail and the song he is singing now, head thrown back, eyes still on her, one blue, one brown. The rest of the canine chorus is coming from somewhere beyond the shed. She gets out of her car and the dog wags his tail but resumes barking, glancing back toward the house as though waiting for permission to drop the guard-dog schtick.

She can smell a barbecue going. She has arrived unannounced at suppertime. After twenty-three years.

Someone comes out from behind the house. A tall figure. Denim cutoffs. Sneakers and a T-shirt. Lean and brown.

Madeleine shades her eyes with her hand and says, “Hi Colleen.”

The dog has stopped barking but he is still at her side, awaiting instructions.

“It’s Madeleine.”

“I know.” Colleen’s voice, still smokey and brief but with the added weight of adulthood.

Madeleine says, “Can I come up?”

“What for?”

She hesitates. She is reminded of the day long ago when she met Elizabeth, and Colleen challenged her, Well say her name, can’t you? Elizabeth. That would explain the ramp up to the veranda. She says, “I’ve brought you something.”

“What?”

Something that belongs to you .

Neither has moved. As though each is waiting for the other to jump from the teeter-totter.

A story .

Madeleine goes to her car and reaches into the back seat.

What remains?

Story. Yours, or one like it, in which, as in a pool, you might recognize yourself.

Memory. Mixed and multifarious, folding itself down, down, for the journey. Story is memory rendered portable. Your memory, or many like yours. Unfold it like a tent. It can shelter a world.

Madeleine holds up her father’s air force hat.

Memory breeds memory. The very air is made of memory. Memory falls in the rain. You drink memory. In winter you make snow angels out of memory.

So much remains.

One witness.

Tell .

After a moment, Colleen disappears behind her house. Madeleine follows, accompanied by the dog. As she comes level with the house on her left, she sees, off to the right beyond the shed, a compound set half amid the trees. A long low wooden building with several small doors at intervals, like a miniature motel, painted hunter green. Covered runs lead from the doors and open onto a fenced-in acreage of mown grass and trees, canine Shangri-La. Eight or ten adults bound along behind the fence, Labs, yellows, browns and blacks, noses crammed through the mesh, tails wagging.