“What is it?” asks Nina.
“The blue dress,” says Madeleine, and weeps.
Blue dress is one of those details that come alive only when they are released into speech. Like the princess in the glass coffin. Open the lid, remove the apple from her mouth, release the word into air. Watch it reunite with its companions, form clusters of meaning.
Blue dress might have remained preserved under glass, like the exhibits in a museum case — hollow eggs, pinned moths. Mute about meadows and nests and the warm hides of deer who bend to drink from a stream in springtime. Showing, but not telling.
The blue dress was Claire’s, of course — Madeleine knows that, never forgot it — but it’s surprising how information can lie quietly dispersed for a lifetime. She has never forgotten what happened in the classroom after three, but she has remained immune to its meaning. It has lain dormant in its cocoon of silence.
“What about the blue dress, Madeleine?”
“It was hers.”
“Whose?”
This immunity to meaning is not amnesia, it is craftier and harder to “snap out of.” Because you are awake and sane. There was no tornado, no looking glass or rabbit hole. There is just a room at the top of your mind with a lot of stuff that never got put away. Like toys that lie inert, waiting for midnight.
“Claire.” The word is a small cry, a bird escaping her throat.
“What about Claire, Madeleine?”
She hears a moan, it has come from her but reminds her of someone else…. “She was murdered?” In her voice she hears the interrogative inflection of a child, cadence of bewilderment and fear, whose fault is it? Mine?
“I know,” says Nina. “I’m so sorry.”
“She was strangled?” She begins to rock.
“Madeleine?” says Nina gently.
Madeleine looks up and takes the box of tissues from Nina’s outstretched hand. “I’m sorry.”
… Reminds her of Grace, voice veering, eyes unmoored and swerving. Like a trapped dog.
“Why are you sorry?”
“I don’t know,” she sobs.
Grace Novotny. Why does Madeleine remember the names of kids from grade four when she can’t remember the names of people she bonded with six weeks ago on a film set? Marjorie Nolan, Grace Novotny, Joyce Nutt, Diane Vogel. The following little girls….“I testified at the trial.”
She tells about Ricky’s alibi, the air force man who waved but never came forward. She tells about her lie, and how she reversed it on the stand. About how her father revealed to her the secret of how to recognize the right thing. It was simple: the right thing would always be the hardest.
“Poor little thing,” says Nina.
Madeleine stops rocking and allows her eyes to rest on the painting of the bleached skull, relieved to have told the story, and is rewarded with a realization: “I think I still feel a lot of guilt about Ricky.” Once the words are out, she recognizes them as stunningly self-evident. “I guess I’m an open book to you, eh?”
“Perhaps, but I can only read one page at a time.”
“Oh wow, was that, like, profound or something?”
Nina waits. Madeleine fiddles with the rake in the miniature sandbox, feeling very small. “Nina … what if I get better and … I’m not funny any more? What if I can’t work? What if I have to go back to school and become a lawyer or a pharmacist or something?”
Nina holds the pink stone in the palm of her hand, gently weighing it, and says, “When did you first want to be a comedian?”
“Oh, when I was about, like … I was five or something. I stood on a kitchen chair and told jokes.”
“When did your friend die?”
“We were — she was nine.”
Nina says, “So you were funny before that happened.”
Madeleine bites her lip, nods.
“Comedy is your gift,” says Nina. “The other things … the pain. Your father’s illness, your brother. And Claire and … all the things I don’t know about — those are all, at best, grist. At worst, they make you want to go off the road. And that’s not really funny.”
Madeleine longs to thank Nina for this, but she can’t speak. Like a dog, she will take this treat away to eat later, in private. “See you next week.”
In a second-hand clothing store in the market, while shopping for a new old Hawaiian shirt, Madeleine sees Claire. In the next instant she corrects herself; that child couldn’t possibly be Claire, Claire is my age, she wouldn’t look anything like that now. In the next instant she corrects herself — Claire is dead. Let’s not think about what she looks like now.
She is out doing normal Saturday afternoon stuff, unaware that a layer has advanced from the back of her mind to the front, like a slide in a kid’s View-Master. The newly promoted layer is taking a turn filtering everything she sees, and distributing the information to the various lobes and neural nets that deal with face recognition, emotion, smell, memory. The layer is dated, however. It doesn’t get out much. It hasn’t been used since 1963. Like software, it needs to be upgraded.
She glimpses a dog out the corner of her eye—Rex. She looks again, it’s a beagle. Besides, Rex must be long dead by now. Good boy. Such a good Rex. It happens all day, breaking in this rookie layer of mind. Thus Madeleine sees a kid squinting through the smoke of a cigarette, leaning delinquent against the convenience store at College and Augusta, and says, Colleen.
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” asks Nina.
“I’m sorry I–I feel so sorry for my parents.” She puts her face in her hands.
“Why?”
Plucking several tissues: “Well. That was their little girl. They didn’t know what was happening to her. They loved her.” She blows her nose.
“What about you, Madeleine?”
“I can see him, you know? I’m standing there, and he’s got his hand up, you know? Up my dress. It’s like their little girl came home to them all smudged and broken and they never knew it. They still treated her … as though she was precious.” Sobbing, throat aching, she is beyond sarcasm. “My mother picked out those pretty dresses, and he touched them.”
“You sound as though you feel … it was your parents who were violated.”
Madeleine nods. This makes sense after all.
“What about you, Madeleine?”
She looks up. “What do you mean?”
Nina looks so kind, Madeleine feels a little worried.
“If you could go back to that classroom now,” asks Nina, “what would you do?”
“I can’t change what happened.”
“That’s true.”
“I would”—sorrow comes like sighs, gusts of rain, no longer falling but blowing across fields, dirt roads—“I would say, ‘It’s okay, I’m here,’ and … I would watch.”
“Watch?”
Madeleine nods, tears rolling down. Mum, Dad. Watch me. “’Cause I can’t change it. But at least, if I watched it, she wouldn’t have to be alone.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Madeleine. Me.”
Nina passes her a glass of water.
“Did you ever tell anyone what happened?”
Madeleine sips, shakes her head. “I kinda danced around it, you know? I didn’t know….”
“What didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t know it hurt….” Madeleine cries into her hands. “I didn’t know it hurt so much.” She is raining, raining. She feels the box of tissues arrive in her lap.
After a minute, Nina says, “You’ve been alone with this.”