The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

“’Cause I won’t tell you a goddamn thing if you don’t, that’s why.”

  Madeleine feels the carved weight of the knife handle and looks at Colleen’s open palm. “Don’t make it deep,” says Colleen, “just enough for blood.”

  Colleen watches her. Madeleine hesitates. Colleen looks gritty as highway dirt, but her palm looks so soft. Madeleine lets the sharp edge rest across the fleshy part of Colleen’s palm. Then she presses, and pulls the blade toward herself. The skin parts and a row of red seeds sprouts, then seeps into the hollow of Colleen’s hand.

  Colleen holds out her other hand for the knife. Madeleine gives it to her. Colleen waits, her cupped palm collecting blood. Madeleine extends her own left hand, palm up, clutching it around the wrist with her right as though to keep it from running away.

  Colleen lifts the knife. Madeleine shuts her eyes and gasps. Then opens them. Colleen is looking at her, her mouth in a sarcastic tilt.

  “You ready, Mighty Mouse?” Madeleine nods. She forces herself to watch, but before she can put on a brave face it’s over, and she has barely seen the knife move, neither did she feel it, but the red stripe has appeared like magic across her palm, widening, gracefully overflowing its banks. Colleen slaps her palm into Madeleine’s, holding tight, smooshing them together. Madeleine pushes back; it still doesn’t hurt.

  Colleen lets go. “There,” she says. “On ai seurs de san.”

  Their two hands are smeared as though with fingerpaint. They let Rex lick their wounds, because everyone knows that dogs have antiseptic spit.

  Colleen resumes walking and Madeleine follows. Colleen seems to have forgotten about her. They walk in silence.

  “Hey Colleen, what were you going to tell me?”

  “Not here,” she says.

  At Rock Bass, Colleen sits next to the flat stone by the stream and reaches down her white school blouse for the leather string she wears around her neck; tawny brown, softened with age. It’s almost the colour of her skin. She lifts it out, its end enclosed in her palm—the unscathed one.

  “I’m going to show you something,” she says. She opens her hand to reveal a tiny deerhide pouch closed with a delicate leather drawstring. She opens it, picking the fragile knot. She reaches in with thumb and forefinger and takes out the secret. A crumple of paper.

  “What is it?” asks Madeleine.

  Colleen smooths it out. “It’s from a catalogue.”

  The once glossy fragment is flannelly with age. Madeleine can make out part of a red bicycle—a boy’s bike—and underneath, a caption, “Pony Express.”

  “I’m adopted,” says Colleen.

  The earth tilts soundlessly, the maple tree lists, suddenly rootless. Adopted. Madeleine concentrates on the charred flat stone between them. Behind Colleen is a blank. No—behind her are dead parents. That’s why kids get adopted. “Are you an orphan?”

  “No stupid, I got parents.”

  “I know, I mean … before.”

  “My blood parents are dead.”

  Madeleine feels dizzy. Colleen has had the thing happen that everyone is so afraid of, that your parents might be killed in the car without you—for that is how parents die.

  There is a shawl of death everywhere, it seems to Madeleine. And trapped in its folds, a smell. It is the smell of the McCarrolls, of Colleen, of the exercise group, of Madeleine and Mr. March. Most people don’t have the smell and don’t even notice it on others. They are the lucky ones. Like Dad. He thinks I am sunny and light. Her mother has sniffed the air once or twice as though at the scent of smoke, then dismissed it, the way you do when you figure it’s someone else’s house on fire.

  “That’s how come your mum volunteers at the orphanage, eh,” says Madeleine, seeing her own words like neat black writing on a clean page. Words are clean. The paper-thin scar at the corner of Colleen’s mouth has paled, her lips turning mauve. “Yeah, that’s one reason.”

  “You were just a baby when you were adopted, though, eh,” says Madeleine.

  “No, I was a little kid.”

  “But you don’t remember.”

  “I fuckin’ well do so remember, I remember everything.”

  This is not the time to ask what “fuck” means—not the time for questions that splash and ripple, but for words that go softly plop.

  “I don’t care if you’re adopted.”

  Colleen just stares off.

  “Your parents don’t care.”

  “I know.”

  “No one in your family cares if you’re adopted.”

  “We’re all adopted, tithead.” Colleen plucks a blade of grass and sticks it between her teeth.

  Madeleine sees all the Froelich kids again, as though for the first time. It’s true they don’t look alike, but neither do she and Mike. Although Mike looks like Dad and Madeleine looks like Maman. “Even Elizabeth?”

  “Yeah,” says Colleen, turning to look at Madeleine. “You think that’s funny?”

  “No”—biting the inside of her cheek to kill a grin, not because it’s funny but because it isn’t.

  Colleen hugs her knees and begins to rock slightly. “Except for Rick. He’s my blood brother.”

  “You mean like—” and Madeleine indicates the fresh wound in her palm.

  “No,” says Colleen, “for real.”

  That makes sense. When you think about it, they do look alike, but the resemblance is beneath the surface. They are different colours—Rick’s black hair and eyes and white skin in winter, the opposite of Colleen with her husky-dog eyes and dusky skin. Not to mention Rick is a gentleman. But their eyes and their cheekbones are the same shape, their lean builds.

  “Our name was Pellegrim,” says Colleen.

  Pellegrim. Sounds like pilgrim, thinks Madeleine.

  She and Ricky were on the floor in the back of the car when it crashed. They were looking at an old Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalogue.

  “That’s my rifle,” said Ricky. A toy rifle with a white silhouette on the stock, of a horse and cowboy at full gallop.

  “That’s my two-wheeler,” said Colleen. A red “All American Pony Express” with a shiny bell and crossbar.

  “That’s a boy’s bike,” Ricky told her.

  “That’s what I want.”

  “Sure, why not, you’re pretty tough for a girl.” He was nine, she was six. They survived because they were on the floor. Colleen’s face was cut by the catalogue page, a bad paper cut. Ricky got a concussion and had his neck in a brace afterwards but he was all right. Their parents went through the windshield. The front end of the Plymouth was stove in but the engine stayed in place.

  Colleen got herself out of the car and went to her mother.

  There was no other car. There was a half-dead deer. There was a rifle in the trunk of the car. Someone should get it and kill the deer, thought Colleen. She couldn’t look at the deer because it was still alive and suffering. And she couldn’t look at her mother because her mother was dead. She couldn’t see her father. He had been thrown into the woods. She walked in a little way, found him, but she didn’t go near. She returned and rocked on her heels next to her mother for a long while. In one hand she still clutched a crumple of catalogue pages.

  Ricky woke up and got out of the car, and saw that the deer was still kicking. It was so sad, its terrible brown eyes, Colleen wondered what would happen to the baby deer off in the forest somewhere. Ricky got the rifle out of the trunk and shot the deer. He covered his mother with a blanket she had sewn. He found his father and covered his face with leaves. Then he took his little sister by the hand and they started walking down the highway, dragging the rifle along behind them.

  The car engine kept running until it ran out of gas.

  “What do you wanna do now?” says Colleen, getting up.

  “I dunno,” says Madeleine, “what do you wanna do?”

  They rinse their feet in the stream. The water is so cold that their feet dry almost immediately. They put their shoes and socks back on, Madeleine her Ma
ry Janes, Colleen her scuffed loafers with the empty penny slots.

  “Come on,” says Colleen. “I could use a smoke.”

  Life began again in an orphanage. But soon, Colleen’s brother disappeared. Memory survived as imagination, and after a while she forgot she had a brother—a real one. They gave her a new name, Bridget. Perhaps she’d had an Indian name and they’d changed it when she arrived; that was what happened to many of the children there. They were Indians. So was she, as far as the staff were concerned, but she was a half-breed in the eyes of the other kids. She didn’t come from a reserve, she didn’t belong to a band—her mother’s people had had a beautiful cabin on a road allotment, but it was gone and they had scattered. She came from a car.

  First they called her “mute,” then “mentally retarded.” None of the children were permitted to speak their own languages, because they were heathen. When she broke her silence to speak in Michif, that was considered even worse. Michif was not a language, and the Métis were not a people.

  Finally, she was “uncontrollable.” Social Services intervened when she was admitted to hospital, and sent her to a training school outside Red Deer, Alberta. It was a place for retarded, delinquent and discarded children. Many were Indians or somewhere in between. If you were good, you got to work on the farm. She was tied to the bed, for her own safety and that of the other residents. But she wasn’t sterilized, she didn’t stay there long enough. One day someone called out from the boys’ side of the fence, “Colleen!” and she turned, knowing her name when she heard it. He was her brother.

  Karen Froelich had realized that she could no longer volunteer at this place. It didn’t need help, it needed closing. When she and Henry adopted the two “hard cases,” they signed a paper requiring them to live within the province and report regularly to an officer of the juvenile court. Karen had been an aid worker with the U.N. Henry had been a refugee. They knew something about bureaucracy. They packed the children into the Chevrolet and drove east two thousand miles. Henry found work on an air force station in Ontario where everyone was rootless and no one stayed long enough to look too deeply into anyone else’s past.

  THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT

  RICK IS PICKED UP on his way home from school that Tuesday afternoon. Jogging south from Exeter on Highway 4, his books in an army surplus knapsack, school shoes looped through the straps and bouncing. The OPP cruiser slows alongside him. He recognizes the two officers and salutes them casually. The one on the passenger side leans forward and says, “Hop in, son.”

  Rick keeps jogging, “No thanks, I’m in training.”

  “Get in the car,” says the one behind the wheel.

  Rick stops. “Why? What’s happened?” His parents, the kids. Is Elizabeth okay?

  The cop in the driver’s seat says, “Get in the goddamn car.”

  Rick hesitates. The passenger door opens and his friend emerges like a bull from a pen. Rick turns and runs. Into the field, obeying an ancient reflex. It’s crazy, he hasn’t done anything, but he’s running like hell across newly sprouted rows of beets, over ridges of earth hardening in the sun, books slamming his back, shoes whacking his side, throat burning. The cop is way behind, Rick can see that with a glance over his shoulder. He keeps pelting, there’s a woodlot up ahead, if he can make it to the trees—another shoulder check reveals the big cop hunched over, hands on his knees, winded—an old glee pulls at the corners of Rick’s mouth, unreasonable surge of triumph, “Try and catch me, maudi batars!” He starts to laugh, chin up, chest out, not tired, never tired, could run forever—another glance, the cruiser is rocking toward him over the furrows, tearing up a dirt cloud in its wake. It picks up speed, coming straight at him. He stops.

  Jack pays the cab driver and gets out in front of the cenotaph in Exeter at 7:20. There is still light in the sky when he makes his way on foot to the staff car waiting for him behind the old train station.

  He has never felt so comfortable behind the wheel of any car, relieved to be off the pins and needles that seemed to upholster the Ford Galaxy. He got a couple of Aspirin from the cabbie who drove him here from the Hertz drop-off in London, and now, as he cruises south, he feels his headache draining away and settles back to enjoy the cushioned suspension and the clean sense of having accomplished something—despite the grease under his nails. His hands look like Henry Froelich’s.

  The blue Ford was the only thing the police had to tie Oskar Fried to the area. Soon it will be no more than a metal envelope. Jack has done his bit for Queen and country, and now he analyzes in his mind the benefit versus the cost. The benefit: Oskar Fried is safe and free to contribute his expertise to the West’s fight for military and scientific supremacy. The costs: the police have been allowed to waste precious time in the hunt for a child-killer, and Jack has lied to his wife. The latter need never be repeated. The former doesn’t sit well with him, but he reminds himself that maybe Simon can pull strings from his end and get the authorities back on track.

  He turns in at the gates, eager to ditch the staff car, wash up, then dash home. He phoned Mimi from Windsor, telling her he was stuck at a meeting in London. The last lie.

  “I have to call my parents sir,” Rick says again.

  The inspector says, “I’ll get someone to phone them for you. What’s the number?”

  Rick’s stomach growls. He is in the same green concrete room, seated at a wooden table. The inspector sits across from him. Rick is cold. They took his knapsack with his windbreaker in it and have yet to give it back.

  The inspector asks, “Why did you do it, son?”

  “Do what?”

  Rick is not all that aware of the attention he pays kids. They hang around him, like birds. He doesn’t always notice, but when he does he may acknowledge them. A push on the swing if he happens to be in the schoolyard and a little kid says, “Push me, Ricky.” A couple of shots on goal, sure, you can try on my jacket if you want to. He is like the person who happens to have a bag of popcorn when the pigeons land. So he doesn’t know what Inspector Bradley means when he says, “You like ’em young, eh Rick?”

  Jack heads down Canada Avenue, the white buildings of the station shining under the street lights. The air is as fresh as if it had just gone through the wash and Jack feels lighter than he has in days. He skipped lunch and he’s looking forward to whatever Mimi will give him, eager to see his kids.

  High pale clouds reflect the moon; it’s possible we’ll get one more snowfall this year, but it will be old man winter’s last gasp. Soon it will be time to trade in his dress blues for the light khaki uniform of summer. He finds himself looking forward to New Brunswick this August—time Mimi saw her mother again, and Jack could use a good game of Deux-Cents, a real wingding with his brothers-in-law.

  He passes the message centre on his left—had he not popped in there yesterday for Sharon McCarroll’s boarding pass, had he not delivered it personally, he would never have found out about Froelich spotting Fried. So much of this game is about chance and making the most of it. Human intelligence. Humint. Simon is right, it’s vastly underrated.

  When a U-2 spy plane is shot down, when an Igor Gouzenko surfaces, the public gets a glimpse behind the veil. But hundreds of men like Simon are working around the clock, fighting invisible battles, scoring silent victories, so that each morning the world can look the same as it did the day before. And we can continue to take it all for granted, and to have faith: the sun will rise, the sky will not be full of airplanes, will not be obliterated by an air-raid siren.

  He passes the intrepid Spitfire, its nose tilted toward the stars, and crosses the Huron County road. He is among a quiet handful of people who know how precious and fragile it all is. Behind the tranquility of everyday life, something unstable is multiplying; something that wants to assert the primacy of chaos. Jack has, very briefly and quite unremarkably, worked behind the scenes so that his family and millions of others never have to find out. He enters the PMQs with an expansive feeling in his chest.r />
  “Then why didn’t your air force man come forward, if he saw you?”

  “Maybe he got posted.”

  Rick is past hunger, feeling sick now, what time is it? They think I strangled Claire McCarroll. “Maybe he’s not from the station, maybe he was just here on course and he left the next day.”

  “What servicemen do you know who have recently left the station?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But he knew you—he waved, according to you—how do you explain that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know much,” says Rick’s friend from the passenger side—the one who punched him in the gut when he stopped running. He is sitting on a chair tilted against the wall, taking notes.

  “I want to call my dad.”

  “Trouble is, buddy,” says the big cop, “there were no departures from the station that week. No courses finishing, no postings, no one away on leave. We checked, eh?”

  Rick stares at the scarred tabletop.

  “How do you explain that, young man?” asks Bradley.

  “I can’t.”

  “I can.” Rick waits. Bradley says, “It never happened.”

  A bad dream. “I want my mother,” says Rick and bites his lip, feeling himself redden with the approach of tears, ambushed by the potency of the universal phrase. He looks up. The big cop is grinning at him.

  Jack runs up the steps and into his house. “What’s for supper, I’m starved”—but the kitchen is empty. No dinner smells, the table not set. “Mimi? … Kids?” What’s happened? I went away and something happened. The cuckoo clock startles him; he reaches for the phone, for Mimi’s pop-up tin address book—although he hasn’t a clue how to decode her filing system—and catches sight of the note on the fridge, “We’re across the street at the Froelichs’.” He breathes again. He wants a beer. Maybe Henry’s got a good Löwenbräu on ice.

  He is about to knock on the Froelichs’ door when the bejesus police dog lunges at him through the screen—“Rex!” Colleen seizes his collar. “He thought you were another cop.” She turns and disappears down the hall, and Jack enters. A record is blaring on the hi-fi. Bambi.