Way the Crow Flies (104 page)

“He told me he waved,” she says matter-of-factly, and observes the air go flat around her. “You knew, eh?”

Her mother’s features tighten. “Of course I knew,” says Mimi. “I’m his wife.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“He’s my husband. He’s your father.”

“He’s a criminal.”

Madeleine hears the smack, feels her face burn with the slap she can see poised in the palm of her mother’s hand. But no one gets slapped.

“It’s okay,” she says, “I’m leaving.”

“Don’t be silly, Madeleine,” says Mimi, draping the wedding gown over the banister, turning toward the open kitchen. “Come,” she says, lighting a cigarette, “I’m making a
poutine râpée
for you, you’re too thin, then we’ll play Scrabble.”

Madeleine stares after her mother.
No wonder I’m so fucked up
. The smoke reaches her and she inhales the refreshing menthol difference, resisting its power to comfort her. “Mother, did you know oxygen is highly flammable? It is also highly inflammable.”

“Madeleine, your trouble is you’re too much like me.”

“I am nothing like you.”

Mimi turns on the tap, pulls on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and starts scrubbing potatoes. Her husband is dying.

Madeleine inquires reasonably, “Have you thought of cutting down to, say, three packs a day?”

“You call yourself a feminist, but you’re not very nice to your mother.”

Madeleine sighs. She notices the kitchen table, already set for breakfast for three. A cock-a-doodle tea cozy forms a quilted freestanding complement to matching napkins and placemats. Next to her father’s plate sits a long, narrow plastic container with fourteen compartments stamped with the days of the week and “a.m.” or “p.m.” In the centre of the table, the salt, pepper, sugar, toothpicks
and napkin-holder cluster on a lazy Susan.
It’s ten P.M. Do you know where your life is?

“Qu’est-ce que t’as dit, Madeleine?”

“Nothing.”

Madeleine stands immobilized in the spacious foyer, like something delivered by mistake from Sears. Around her rise the clean lines of the condo. On the wall that leads down to the rec room are framed family photos, starting with her parents’ wedding, then descending, posting by baby by holiday, black-and-white to colour, The Story of Mimi and Jack. The pictures stop in 1967—the four of them at Expo in front of the American pavilion—a geodesic dome. Mike had long hair.

In the kitchen, water rushes and smoke coils up from the ashtray next to the sink. Madeleine watches her mother’s busy back as she flays potatoes with her yellow-gloved hands,
so flexible I can pick up a dime
. In the living room, her father has not moved in his chair. On the TV, cartoon enzymes are eating dirt particles.
How many more miles, Dad?

“I wish Mike were here,” she says.

Mimi brushes her ear with the back of her hand, as though at a fly, and resumes scrubbing.

“Why can’t we just say he’s dead?” inquires Madeleine of the wall, uncertain whether or not she can be heard above the roar of the tap. “Why can’t we have a funeral for him?” she says to the foyer, and her words float small and weightless up to the cathedral ceiling.

On the wall next to her mother, between the coffee maker and the microwave, is mounted a small plaque. It holds a pair of scissors on a magnet, and bears a painted verse:
These are my scissors, they belong on this rack / If you use them please put them back
. At the edge of the sink perches the old ceramic frog holding the pot scrubber in his big grin.

“I love you, Maman.”

The tap thunks off, Mimi turns and, hands upraised and dripping like a gloved surgeon, comes quickly to her daughter, and hugs her.

Her mother’s embrace. Small, hot and strong. Something dark beneath the perfume and Cameo menthol. Salt and subterranean. Unkillable.

Madeleine feels the old guilt. It comes of always knowing that Maman was hugging a different child, one with the same name. She has always tried to hug her mother back as that child—the clean one.

“Oh Madeleine,” says her mother into her shoulder, with a squeeze like steel bands, “Papa and I love you very much.”

She knows her mother’s eyes are clamped shut. Like a medium bracing herself for the sheer force of love passing through her—this love that Madeleine has always believed to be general, directed toward “my child,” never toward Madeleine herself.

She waits for her mother’s grip to relax, then says as kindly as possible, “Maman, I have to go back to Toronto, but I’ll come home next week, okay?”

“Mais pourquoi?”

She can’t bear to see the bewilderment enter Mimi’s eyes—why am I always hurting my mother? “I have so much work to do and … I have to move out of our—out of my apartment.”

Her mother’s face tightens again—prepared to repel the word “Christine”. Or any word that may be a synonym for
Christine
. Mimi lifts a hand in defeat, or dismissal—“Do what you want, Madeleine, you always do”—and returns to the kitchen.

“You know, the irony is, Maman, Christine and I might’ve broken up ages ago if you hadn’t been so against us.”

She watches her mother’s back. Chopping now.

“It’s not like a diagram of a cow in a butcher shop, you know,” she says. “You can’t cut out the part of me you hate and take the rest.”

If Mimi were to turn, Madeleine would see that she is annoyed. She is annoyed because she is crying. She is crying because—perhaps you can understand, even if you are not a mother, what it is to have your child say,
You hate me
.

Madeleine waits, numb. Like a dead tree. If the earth were beneath her feet now, instead of the gleaming floor, she could lie down and commence that long return. This is the terrible kindness of the earth: she will always welcome us back, hers is a love that never dies, never says, “I will take this part of you, but not the rest.”

The phone rings and Mimi answers it. Clears up a scheduling mistake regarding the Catholic Women’s League, consults a list and confirms a bridge date.

Madeleine says, “You remember my teacher in Centralia?”

Mimi glances at her, then back to her list. “Mr. March.”

“He abused us. Me and some other girls.”

Mimi turns to face her daughter and hangs up the phone—then looks back at her hand as though surprised at its initiative.

“It’s okay, Maman, I’m fine, I’m only telling you because—”

A sound like a chirping, it’s her mother, hand cupped in front of her mouth; she looks as though she’s about to cough something up, a feather.

“Maman?”

Madeleine is too much like her mother, she realizes, as she watches Mimi’s mouth turn to an upside-down smile, red blotches appear on her cheeks, neck, nose—stricken, painted with the unreserved sorrow of a clown.

“Maman, it’s okay—”

Madeleine would like to put this whole visit back in a bag under the basement steps, stuff it among the Christmas decorations and the card-table chairs.

All Mimi wants to do is remove it from her daughter, wipe it from her face like summer dirt, a little blood from a cut, all she wants is to offer her own flesh in place of whatever happened to her child, but she can’t. It’s too late. Her arm is powerful, but it can’t reach her little girl leaving for school, any more than it can reach her son walking out the door seventeen years ago. She is left clutching air. Nothing she did was enough.
Ce n’est pas assez
.

Madeleine has never seen her mother cry like this. Not even when Mike went away. Fresh sorrows reactivate old ones. We go to the same well to grieve, and it’s fuller every time.

She is amazed by what her mother says next:

“I’m sorry,
ma p’tite, c’est ma faute, c’est la faute de maman.”

Madeleine holds her mother, and the embrace is still hot but not so hard now—flesh instead of wood—which one of them has changed?

“It’s not your fault, Maman.”

Everything is going to be okay. What is this dark feeling? Mortal happiness. Here is the wound. It doesn’t smell after all. It hurts terribly, but it’s clean. Here is a fresh dressing, let Maman do it.

“Je t’aime, maman.”

Mimi wipes Madeleine’s face with her hands—thoroughly, like a mother cat—then digs a tissue from her sleeve and holds it to her daughter’s nose. Madeleine blows and laughs.

Mimi smiles. “You’re so pretty,
ma p’tite.”

“I take after you.”

Mimi glances toward the living room. The top of his head hasn’t moved, he is still asleep in his chair. She lowers her voice. “Did you tell your father?”

“No.”

“Good.”

And Madeleine is certain now that it was good, is grateful not to have burdened him. Her mother can take it.
Women are stronger
.

Mimi kisses her daughter, and the pain is not mitigated by what she realizes next—in fact it’s worsened because, like polio, what happened to her child could have been prevented. “Oh Madeleine, Madeleine….”

Madeleine follows her mother’s voice. In it she hears the cadence of comfort. What remains may not be a lot, but it’s good. I have my mother. She steps into the meadow unafraid, there are no hunters here. Basks in her mother’s gaze, unashamed, so grateful finally to be seen.

“Oh Madeleine,” says Mimi, and cups her daughter’s face tenderly in her hands, “is that why you are the way you are?”

A sensation behind Madeleine’s eyes as though a reel of film has skipped. She knows she has reached the end of something, and passed through it to something else, because her voice sounds robotic in her ears, as though she’s speaking a new language. “I’m pretty sure that Mr. March killed Claire.”

Her mother is still speaking the old language as Madeleine leaves the house. She can hear her voice but can no longer make out the words.

Outside, she reaches for the door of her car and hears something clink to the asphalt. It gleams silver in the porch light. The medal. She picks it up and gets into her car. Rubs her palm where the four
compass points have gouged their temporary impressions, and sees the old paper-thin scar that shadows her lifeline.

M
ADELEINE HAS PULLED OVER
to the side of the 401 expressway across the top of Toronto. This time she couldn’t make it to an exit ramp. Forehead resting against the steering wheel, she is praying. She doesn’t believe in God, nor is she a non-believer. Belief has nothing to do with it. She’s praying because there’s so much pain. The living and the dead. The known and the unknown.

She can hear it—it has always been there. Like the chatter of a pebble beach. It grows louder, closer, until she hears a chorus of souls, mouths pulled down in sorrow. All those imprisoned in their minds; all those who are doing their best for their families; all who are struck with the vertigo of standing on two feet, all who live so bravely on four legs, so tirelessly on two wings, on bellies and between fins; the heartbreaking courage of animals; the lonely death of a dear brother, of a child long ago in Centralia, were they very frightened? Oh if only we could visit them at the hour of their death—not to intervene, because that is impossible, but simply to witness. To love them as they leave, not seek to make their suffering invisible. All they ask is that we picture it.
Watch me
.

“Pray for them,” she whispers to the instrument panel of her old VW beetle. Sixteen lanes zip by.
Pray for them
. It is then—on the noisy paved shoulder, wondering if she will ever be able to leave her car—that she receives the gift: it fills her like a breath. It is not a knowledge of the mind, it simply arrives: the only thing in the world that matters is love.

After fifteen minutes she is able to start her car and gather speed along the shoulder. The little bug, dirty white eggshell, travels down the exit ramp. Designed for Hitler. Built by slaves. As recognizable as a Coke bottle. The sins of the father. Good little car.

She feels fine when she gets home, and knows she will never be the same. Nothing can ever frighten her out of her life again. As though she had survived a disaster. A plane crash. Something.

A strange transformation is effected by the authority of the printed word in an official document.
The prisoner
. Ricky.
The victim
. Claire. The welter of information regarding where precisely the crossroads were, the words “willow tree” drained of colour, the numbing exactitude regarding where the body was found and in what position.

Thank goodness it’s Wednesday. Shelly thinks Madeleine is still out of town, and in a way she is. She got an hour’s sleep on her carpet this morning—Christine had returned for the bed.

Madeleine is wearing a baseball cap to shelter her eyes from the fluorescent lights in the windowless reading room of the Provincial Archives of Ontario. Steps from the YMCA; she could have come here any time.

The patient? She reads on. The pathologist, the police, Dr. Ridelle—Lisa’s dad. This transcript is a 1,858-page list of what the grown-ups knew. Legal size.

She is sitting at one of several long wooden tables. Around her, a pallid few others pore over genealogical records and municipal sewage blueprints. Insomniacs unite.