The Way the Crow Flies

  The name lay there like a smooth stone collected on holiday. She put it in a drawer of her desk and got back to work, back to her life. She turned on her computer. She put paper in the printer. She sat down and started writing.

  What business are you in?

  The funny business.

  She phoned Shelly every ten minutes, reading her funny stuff. Then stuff that was not so funny, to which Shelly said, “No, keep it for now. It’ll get there, you just don’t know how yet.” They got together every couple of days so Madeleine could try stuff out. Stuff that didn’t require “stuff.”

  What are you selling?

  Stories.

  From time to time she came across the smooth stone. Upon opening her desk drawer in search of a pencil, a paperclip. Sometimes it cropped up in the cutlery drawer among the knives, in the medicine cabinet, under the couch—she had bought a couch. And a bed. Her friends had held a breakup shower for her. Even Christine had given her a gift, a Braun hand mixer. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

  A week after she got home, Madeleine sat cross-legged on her old Persian carpet, eschewing her new club chair, and called longdistance information.

  “For what city?”

  “Winnipeg.”

  “For what name?”

  “Marjorie Nolan.”

  “Thank you, here’s your number—”

  She grabbed a pen and wrote the number on her hand.

  She waited until six-thirty central time.

  A woman answered, “Hello?”—querulous voice, not Marjorie’s.

  “May I speak with Marjorie please?”

  A rustling as the woman lowered the receiver, her voice a muffled complaint, “It’s for you-ou …,” followed by a clunk of receiver against table or floor.

  After a moment, another female voice. “Hello.” Crisp. Note of exasperation. Marjorie.

  “Hello, Marjorie?” said Madeleine.

  “Who’s speaking please?”

  Madeleine could see her—eyes tightening, ready to defend herself. “This is Madeleine McCarthy. We went to school together in Centralia.”

  Half a beat, then the woman said, “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.” And hung up.

  She called every Novotny in Canada. She found Grace’s father. He said he didn’t know where the hell any of them were any more, but if he ever found out….

  She called the Ontario Provincial Police and asked for Missing Persons. “Name of the person?”

  “Grace Novotny.” She could hear keys being tapped in the background.

  Then the female officer at the other end said, “What’s the nature of your information?”

  I was right. “I don’t actually have information, I just … want to know if there’s anything new.”

  “We can’t release that to the public. What’s your relation to Grace Novotny?”

  Madeleine’s answer came so naturally it didn’t feel like a lie. “She’s my sister.”

  “Oh. Well I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing new since ’66.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Nineteen sixty-six—Grace would have been fourteen. Missing. Did she run away from home and get lost? Like Mike? Where have all the young girls gone?

  Madeleine left her house, heading for River Street and the Humane Society to visit the desperate dogs. There was no song to soften or explain where some young girls went. Grace had gone to snuff.

  Love can work like athletic training, or practice with a musical instrument. Train vigorously for a spell. Then rest—take off the runners, put down the violin. When you return to your sport, your scales, you will have inexplicably improved, due to the intervention of nothing but time.

  Madeleine found the scroll and the candle on her carpet in her empty apartment when she returned from her father’s funeral. She read the scroll. “Ma bien aimée, Enjoy this candle at your leisure. When it has burned down, ask me to be with you and I will give you everything I have. But please don’t take too long. I want to have kids. Or you might choose not to light it at all. It will help you to decide because I can’t. À bientôt, O.”

  It’s broad daylight. Madeleine turns on her computer and lights the candle. When she turns her computer off again, she blows the candle out. And so it goes as, over the course of a month, Stark Raving Madeleine begins to take shape.

  Madeleine is not unhappy. She has put something aside, she may never take it up again. Is that what it means finally to grow up? To know there are things we have wrestled with and failed to defeat? To make peace with them by allowing them to rest—like a creature in a coma? Is that maturity? Or is it just life? It could hurt many people if she tells what she knows. It could hurt her mother terribly. Whom could it help? Ricky is free and has been for years. No one ever really believed he did it anyway. Why dredge up the past?

  One morning in early August, Madeleine rides her bike to the pharmacy and heads for the post office at the back with a special delivery letter for Olivia. O is coming home in two and a half weeks. She reaches into the pocket of her army surplus shorts for money and finds a crumpled “First Notice” from Canada Post. Dated ten days ago. How come she never got a “Final Notice”? She hands it to the elderly Korean lady behind the counter. “Do you still have this?”

  The lady pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose, smiles and nods. She disappears into the back room and after a few moments returns with a package the size and shape of a cereal box. She hands it to Madeleine. “Muffins from Mummy.”

  Madeleine smiles. “Yeah, would you like one? Let’s see if they’re still good,” and opens it on the spot, fighting her way through enough masking tape to hold together the first atomic bomb. She was right, a cereal box. All-Bran. The joys of aging. She opens the lid, reaches in and pulls out her father’s air force hat.

  “Ohhh,” says the lady.

  Faded blue, almost grey. Worn red velvet crown of the cap badge. Tarnished gold braid and vigilant albatross, wings outstretched in flight.

  “Very lovely,” says the lady behind the counter.

  “Thank you.”

  Madeleine rides back home, goes inside and lights what remains of the red candle. She waits until it has burned all the way down. Then she goes back out to her car.

  She tosses the hat into the back seat of the bug, gets in and drives.

  Two drifters, off to see the world

  there’s such a lot of world to see

  We’re after the same rainbow’s end

  waitin’ ’round the bend

  my Huckleberry friend

  Moon River, and me

  She drives on because the road pulls her. That’s one of the secrets of North America: the roads have a pull of their own, reactive to rubber, to the undersides of car chassis. She feels the tug of the wheel, she doesn’t have to steer, the tires follow the bend of the highway, the car knows her destination and so does the road. Let’s just drive. We’ll find out where we’re going when we get there.

  Welcome to Kitchener, formerly Berlin. All these places named after the real places elsewhere—give them time and they become real in their own right. London Keep Left. Stratford Next Exit. She exits. Welcome to New Hamburg, to Dublin, to Paris…. Outside the car windows, the corn catches the sun; leafy stalks gleam in three greens, arching oaks and maples line the curving highway, the land rolls and burgeons in a way that makes you believe, yes, the earth is a woman, and her favourite food is corn.

  From four directions come the X-Men, steel soldiers marching in columns, the distance between them tightening as they close in on their home base just south of here. Cables strung like steel streamers from their outflung arms, thrumming with the drone that sets their martial pace. They are on their way to their underground fortress at Niagara Falls, where house-high turbines fuel the economic heart of the world’s biggest democracies and closest relatives, power pronging north and south across the world’s longest undefended border. “What nature has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

&nbs
p; Welcome to Lucan…. Don’t look for that monument now, it’s gone, too many tourists left with fragments of the stone. Just sit back and enjoy the beautiful scenery. Think nice thoughts. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and Be Saved … Kodak … The Wages of Sin Is Death….

  Deciduous trees like stately homes, painted maples streaked up the side with moss, mile-long driveways, weathered gingerbread framing farmhouse windows. The congenial whiff of cowpies, the rude aroma of pigs and the fierce smell of chickens. Smelled but rarely seen or heard nowadays. Red barns, neat and scrubbed, encroached upon by mysterious long low barracks. That’s where the animals have gone, eating and shitting in the windowless dark. Many, but not all. You can still see pale pigs at their troughs, cows in the fields, they blink and flick at flies and live their slow lives. McDonald’s Next Interchange….

  Up ahead, a faded pink ice cream cone tilts toward the roadside, the white shed with its countertop peeling and disused. The cone is still in its party hat, Where did everyone go?

  The afternoon intensifies. August is the true light of summer. Trust Texaco. Dusty gas pumps flash by, glimpse of a screen door emblazoned with a bottle of 7Up, beaded with moisture, poised for pouring. She drives. The sun has sat back to relax on the other side of noon, mellow and magnanimous, with no sense yet that the day is in decline. The best of both worlds.

  Smell the sweetness of the grass, look how the hay is almost mauve in the fields; feel how she swells beneath your wheels, the earth in these parts, gentle as the roll of the sea on a blue day. Clouds sweep so gracefully; the high billow of trees that have lived here so long; the narrative pull of the woods; all the crackling lives lived high and low, paths that promise so many stories, and the road itself, always curving just out of sight, the allure of a storyteller and the assurance, “Follow me into the story, it’s all right. If it were not, would I be here to tell the tale?”

  We’re almost there.

  Madeleine stands under the beating sun and looks out. The concrete is cracked in places. Uneven with many winters, its grey expanse etched with crooked lines of scraggly green growth. The reclamation of this airfield is underway by the quilted countryside that provided so much safe space for emergency landings. The triangular arms of the runways fan out before her, trembling with heat.

  Behind her the hangars loom silent, still white but no longer shipshape, bordered by grime and weeds that have choked out the hedges. People don’t know, unless they trouble to find out, what this place was. Ghost of the Second World War. Relic of the Cold War. Even Kodak pictures fade eventually, and that is what has happened here.

  She drove slowly through the PMQs and the base before winding up at the airfield. The pool, empty. The arena, movie theatre, barracks, office buildings—cement steps sprouting grass, black metal railings listing, seeping rust, coming loose like teeth. The sign for the sergeants’ mess still hangs next to the dusty green door, the air force crest sun-bleached almost to vanishing—why has no one taken it down? There is no longer any such thing as the Royal Canadian Air Force. And just as the services have been unified, so the two Germanys will be, one day soon. The country Madeleine was born in will no longer exist.

  RCAF Centralia is Huron Industrial Park now. A government property, leased cheap to any industry willing to relocate and bring jobs to the area. Windows are manufactured here these days, but Madeleine has seen no one and heard not a sound.

  The churches are gone. Bulldozed. The officers’ mess likewise. In its place a starkly new brown brick building with a sloping roof and smoked windows, Darth Vaderesque. “International School,” says the federal government sign planted in the one patch of tended grass. Nothing to do with manufacturing windows. Suitably vague, suitably far away from anyone who might wonder what lies behind the tinted glass, the numbing government designation.

  No cars parked anywhere. The tennis court has gone the way of the airfield, its metal link fence flounced and ragged. The street names are still the same: the ten Canadian provinces, the two founding cultures and the famous men who made untold sacrifices to keep us free. The signs themselves remain, rusted now, askew, pointing at sky and ground. Canada Avenue. Alberta Street. Ontario, Saskatchewan, Québec…. The Spitfire is gone.

  In the old PMQs, the houses are still painted every colour of the rainbow, but not so recently. People must be away for summer holidays, or perhaps not all the houses are occupied. A few people stared at Madeleine’s car as she tooled slowly past, but they didn’t wave. No swings or teeter-totters in the park any more, but the narrow asphalt paths still wend their way communally among the houses. The open grassy circles are here too, although they are not the vast fields of memory. And that hill she used to run down so recklessly—it’s barely an incline.

  The confetti bush is gone from in front of her old white house—smaller than she remembered, likewise the purple house across from it. She rolled down St. Lawrence in first gear, past the little green bungalow on her left, to the school. Hardly more than a stone’s throw from her old house, yet it was such a big walk then. She stopped in the parking lot near the backstop. Nothing stirred, not even the rope on the flagpole.

  How can this place still exist? Barely two hours from Toronto—she could have driven here any time. Centralia.

  She stopped and got out of the car. Peeked in her old classroom window. New desks. Different art on the walls. A computer. Map of the world, redrawn so many times since her day. She tried the knob of the side door but it was locked. What was in there anyhow? Nothing that hasn’t been as close as her own heart for twenty-four years. She went round the front, up the steps, and cupped her hands around her eyes to peer through the glass double doors: framed fighter jets still flanked the portraits of the young Queen and Prince Philip.

  This place, Huron Industrial Park, leased to temporary people: for them it’s home, perhaps, a community, people raising children, borrowing cups of sugar, keeping in touch after they move on…. But for Madeleine it’s a ghost town.

  She stands on the abandoned airfield. She is not much younger than her parents were when they moved here. She shields her eyes and looks across the baking concrete to the crest of longer grass that marks the ditch where his aircraft went in. For her it was a story, Dad, tell me the story of the crash. It belonged to her, the myth of how, inevitably, her parents were brought together in order to bring forth her and her brother. And the unspoken corollary of the myth: if it hadn’t been for the crash, Dad might have been killed in the war … two out of three aircrew never came back. He was not quite eighteen. Mike was nineteen.

  She squints up at the control tower, miniature to her adult eyes. She can see the roofs of the PMQs from here. Such a small world. What would she have done in her parents’ place? Would she have mustered the conviction “We are a family,” no matter where we move? “Here is who you are,” no matter whom you happen to live among, “this is your father, the best man and the nicest papa in the world”? Such a big world. “You can grow up to be anything you want to be.” Could she have marshalled the optimism, taken the pictures, unpacked the boxes, placed a little family at the centre of that big world? Made herself the anchor of it? Made it make sense?

  Dad, are they going to blow up the earth?

  Naw.

  A journey of forty years. The Story of Mimi and Jack. So many nice remember-whens.

  The sun is relentless. The old airfield waits, impassive, a war monument. And perhaps that’s why she is moved. These strips of concrete evoke so much about this century. Mass mobilization. Mass memory. Heavy loss.

  She recalls seeing a phone booth at the edge of the parade square, near what used to be the PX. She wonders if it still works. She turns and leaves the airfield.

  She has forgiven her parents.

  A rotary phone in a glass booth. It still takes dimes. The slim phone book is dog-eared, pages torn out, but it may serve. She flips through familiar place names—Lucan, Clinton, Crediton….

  She finds him in Exeter. Searches the many pocke
ts of her shorts—crumbs, keys, frizzing tampon, a dime.

  She dials, then leans with her palm against the glass while it rings.

  “Hello.” A woman’s voice, tight but pleasant. Career wife.

  “Hello, may I speak with Inspector Bradley please.”

  “Oh my goodness—”

  Madeleine assumes she has called another dead man, but the woman continues, “—well, hang on a moment and I’ll—may I ask who’s calling?”

  “Madeleine McCarthy.”

  “Just a moment, Madeleine,” and, calling away from the phone, “Tom,” her voice retreating, “Tom? … on the phone … spector Bradley.”

  She will tell him everything. About Mr. March. About her father. And Ricky’s name will be cleared. The right thing.

  “Hello”—manly and businesslike.

  “Hello, Inspector Bradley?”

  “No such person here, there’s just me, Tom Bradley, retired, what can I do you for?”

  “This is Madeleine McCarthy speaking.” She sees the planes of his face, unsmiling line of his mouth, and feels as though she is lying again.

  He pauses, then says, “I know you….” She knows he is probably not thinking of After-Three TV.

  “I was a witness at Ricky Froelich’s trial.”

  “Bingo.” Silence. The ball is in her court.

  “I have new information,” she says.

  “Well I’m retired, young lady, but I can give you a number—”

  “I was a pupil of Mr. March’s, he was Claire’s—he was our grade four teacher.” She hears a sigh. “I think he was responsible.”

  “What do you mean, ‘responsible’?”

  “He did it. He murdered her.”

  “I wish you gals would co-ordinate your efforts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and—another girl, what was her name, Deanne, Diane something—”

  “Diane Vogel.”

  “Right you are, she called me last year, wanting to press charges.”

  “Against Mr. March?”

  “That’s right. Is that your story too?”

  “It’s not a story, it happened.”