Way the Crow Flies (105 page)

For years she carried her unrevised child’s picture of Claire lying peacefully on the grass, sadly dead. Babe in the wood, tended by swallows bearing leaves and wildflowers to blanket her.

The picture is altering now. It’s changing. Finally growing older.

She is here because she can’t come tomorrow, tomorrow is the regular After-Three Thursday marathon—she will have all this evening to write, the archives close at four. She is here because she can’t tell anyone what her father did.

She is here to bear witness.

She is here because she can’t go forward. She has to go back.

And when she gets there, she needs to listen to the children.

Moses among the bulrushes
. We always called them cattails. Why have I thought of Moses? Moses was among the rushes, not bulrushes.

Marjorie Nolan. She drew a picture with the title “Moses among the Cattails.” Miss Lang corrected her gently.

I drew Batman and Robin, and Grace Novotny got a gold star for her picture—what did she draw? Madeleine sees the back of Grace’s head—uneven part, messy pigtails constricted by bare elastics. She tries to look over Grace’s shoulder but sees only her hands at work. Bandaged. Imagine doing that to a child. She can hear Grace’s pencil crayon against the construction paper, colouring, colouring, colouring….

There was a record playing—“A Summer Place,” by the Mantovani strings. We didn’t normally have Miss Lang for art. Art was normally on Friday.

Some things are difficult to see straight on. They can only be glimpsed by looking away, caught by the corner of the eye. Like phosphorescence in a cave; look away and you will see. Madeleine tries to look away but there is too much light coming through the big classroom windows. She squints but it’s no good, the sun is up there, bright yellow, smiling and pulsating, obliterating Grace and her drawing. Madeleine squeezes her eyes shut and sees a yellow orb tattooed inside her lids. And yet, as she recalls, it was a rainy day. She returns her attention to her own drawing,
Holy Thursday, Batman
—and winces at the realization that this was the day after Claire went missing.

Some things stay in the containers we placed them in years ago, bearing the labels we wrote in an awkward childish hand: The Day Claire Went Missing. They stay that way and, even into adulthood, we may not question them. Until we have occasion, one day, to open the container, smell what has happened to the contents and revise the label: The Day Claire Was Murdered.

Madeleine’s red boots flew off one by one, Claire swung so high that Madeleine saw her underpants, “I see London, I see France! I see—”
yellow butterflies
. On Claire’s underpants. Madeleine looks up from the page, suddenly parched. Is there a water fountain in this room?
Archives
. The word itself is a desert.

She smells the polish on the oak table. It reminds her of her father, his various desks. She looks down again at the dry page.

I can’t remember what I was wearing that day. It was hot.

She remembers her father sitting halfway toward the back. Giving her the thumbs-up. She sees him in his blue uniform but she knows that’s impossible, it was June. Like now. He’d have been in his khakis. Very important loved ones become, in memory, like cartoon characters—a definitive version is called up, always in the same outfit. One that survives burning, being run over, blown up, drowned and riddled with bullets.

Transcripts are spartan. Factual stage directions, lines of dialogue unembellished by emotional cues in brackets. But personalities come through. And Madeleine sees herself, still vulnerable, on the page. Like a butterfly, pinned. Forever nine years old.

Madeleine reads on and it’s like watching a series of calamitous events unfold in a movie. Don’t go back in the house! Check the back seat!
Ask me the question!
Why did no one ask the right question? A sleeveless dress with a Peter Pan collar, that’s what I was wearing. With a matching hairband.

It is the brooch Mr. March touched.

But it’s not possible to enter the page and alter what happened. It has been happening here, in four boxes housed in downtown Toronto, for twenty-three years, and it will go on playing itself out. A long-running show.

The show-and-tell table. Madeleine flips back to the index of exhibits at the front of the volume to find out what was in the jar—there is no judge to stop her now, she is a grown-up, she is permitted to choose her horrors:

“Want a bite?” said Claire. And Madeleine and Colleen shared
her chocolate cupcake, her apple slices and the little round of cheese in red wax. Madeleine made a pair of lady lips with them afterwards and Claire bubbled with laughter. She was a great audience. Her last meal.
Stomach contents
. One of a long list, like snapshots.

But salient information is often missing; e.g., it was not just any lunchbox, it was a Frankie and Annette lunchbox, priceless, coveted—

—again, the significant feature omitted: two luxuriant pink streamers. Except that when Madeleine saw Claire’s bike in the trunk of the police car, there was only one. That’s why Colleen and I went out to the field that day, to the tamped-down spot—to find her other streamer. But it turned out Grace had it.

Grace in the rain with no raincoat on, the bedraggled pink streamer transplanted into the handlebar grip of her beat-up bike, too big for her. Bouncing up and down on the hard seat, stark like the skull of a steer,
it doesn’t hurt
.

Hey Grace, where’d you get the streamer?

Someone gave it to me
.

Who?

Someone
.

Madeleine’s breath comes like a dog’s breath. Grace got the streamer from Mr. March. A trophy, plucked by its roots from Claire’s pink two-wheeler. A prize for his pet.

She swallows, her throat parchment. She glances at the archivist. At the other researchers. No one has noticed. What is there to notice? A dark-haired young woman sitting perfectly still, obscured from view by four cardboard crates of documents.

But she has something now. She can tell the police about the streamer. They will find Grace Novotny. Grace will tell who gave it to her. No one will need to know it was Jack who waved that day….

She returns to the page:

Not just any charm bracelet; she had the
Maid of the Mist
, a heart, a teacup and many other things, including her name in silver cursive script,
Claire
. Madeleine wonders if the McCarrolls have kept it. She wonders if they ever had another child. Perhaps they would rather not know the truth. Reawaken their grief.

Moses among the Cattails
. Madeleine flips ahead.

Madeleine can hear Marjorie giggle, although the court stenographer didn’t record it.

You lie, Margarine! Why did no one check up on that?

Madeleine wonders what she would make of ten-year-old Marjorie now, through adult eyes. Would she be taken in, the way the grown-ups were? Waxy curls. Blue doll-eyes. Polite and slightly, reassuringly, out of date.

Mr. Fraser, the Crown prosecutor. In the gloomy black robe.

Another lie.

Madeleine hears another giggle, and the good-natured know-it-all tone. Are some children transparent only to other children?

It’s strange to picture these grown men—1963 men—grappling with the taxonomy of the Toadstool—Tweenies, Sprites, Elves and Pixies.

Dream on, Margarine.

Claire said that. No, not exactly, she said, “We can look for a nest.” Madeleine and Colleen were in the schoolyard, Claire had a buttercup. Music was coming from the school, the band was practising … the tattered melody struggling out the windows of the gym at J. A. D. McCurdy School—
It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears
…—the
school band playing as Mr. March thumped time at the piano. Marjorie was nearby with Grace, trying to butt in, she heard where Claire was going and why. And with whom. Ricky, so Claire imagined.

Poor Marjorie. Terribly left out by everyone—except Grace and Mr. March. Is that how he found out where Claire was going that day? Mr. March’s little fiend, running to him, reporting.

Show-and-tell. “I collect them, sometahms,” said Claire, the weightless robin’s egg cupped in her hands. Madeleine rubs her palm and looks at it. There is the pale scar, but something else is there too—a piece of shell. Pale blue. No, not in her hand, not yet, she is reaching for it in the long last-year’s grass but Colleen grabs her wrist, slaps the knife into her hand,
Cut me
.