Madeleine feels tired suddenly. As though tired were her natural condition and she has been waiting only for something to fall — all the balls, stilled in air, to drop. Am I dying? A voice has asked the question from deep within the tiredness. From the heart of the woods where the eyes of animals shine, from a den where a bone-white girl crouches.
“I’m afraid,” says Madeleine.
“Can you describe it?”
“I’m afraid I know something.”
Pictures, even scary ones, can be reassuring because they are narratively complete, unlike memory, which lies around, some assembly required. Madeleine’s picture of Claire lying peacefully dead turns out to have been a piece of painted scenery all along. “Like Bonanza,” she murmurs.
“Bonanza?”
Yellow Shell sign, intact and filling the screen until Ben Cartwright and his boys burst through on horseback.
“I see,” says Nina.
After a moment, Madeleine says, “I don’t want to.”
“Want to what?”
“See what’s behind the picture.” She blinks spasmodically but keeps her eyes on Nina, paying attention. Concentrate, little girl. “What if it was my dad?” she says, in a voice as small as a toadstool.
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“It would be the worst thing.”
“Madeleine? Why is it up to you to find out what happened to her?”
Madeleine looks up, bewildered—you’ve lost me, doc. “I thought you thought … I knew. Like I’m looking at a clue but I don’t recognize it, because … I don’t know that I know.”
“Madeleine. You may never find out what happened to Claire. But there are things you can find out.”
“Like what?” She feels her forehead wrinkle like a dog’s, earnest and pleading, eyes growing puddly and round as saucers.
“Who you are in all this.”
Madeleine stares at Nina, aware of a corrosive feeling in her stomach. “And anyhow, her underpants were covering her face,” she says.
“I know,” says Nina. Everyone knows that. One of the “haunting details.” “You’ve been carrying a heavy load, Madeleine. Can you imagine putting it down for a moment? And resting?”
Something shifts, yields to gravity. Madeleine sinks without moving and, as though in answer to the new proximity of the earth, tears flow.
“I think I’m dying.” Her words reach her as if someone else has spoken them. Someone she has known all her life but forgotten. A traveller returning. Shawl around her head and shoulders. Mourner.
She doesn’t recognize this self. She has discovered a talent for grief — like walking downstairs one morning and playing Chopin, never previously having touched a piano. Is sorrow a gift? Tears are flowing from every place on her body, sprouting like leaves, she can hear them lightly singing back the rain, she is weeping like a willow.
“Give me your hands,” says Nina.
She does.
“Nina, I know I didn’t kill Claire. But my hands think I did.”
“Why?”
“Because they know how.”
Time stops for grief.
Deep and muddy green, ping of sonar, what is down there? Dark and drowned, keep diving, this is a dream, you can breathe under water. Dive, dive until you know how terribly sad it is that a child was killed.
“What do your hands know, Madeleine?”
Madeleine holds her breath at the top of every intake, exhaling in short gusts. She says, “I — can’t say it.”
“What can’t you say?”
She looks down at her hands. White dogs, dumb animals. She strokes one with the other, warming them. She inhales carefully, then walks out onto a narrow branch. “He used to make us strangle him.”
This is the trick of telling. Objects fly together magically, pieces of a broken cup; or simply shift by one degree, kaleidoscopic, changing the picture entirely. Mr. March never strangled Madeleine, so Madeleine never thought of him as a man who strangled. She was nine. She didn’t know how to turn the picture around. To draw its mirror image. The pressure of his thumb in the soft flesh of her arm, his grip tattooed in blue bruises, his hold intensifying as she placed her own small hands around his wide soupy neck. Squeeze. She is thirty-two now and all it took was to say it out loud.
She is aware that the colours in the room have brightened a notch. She looks at Nina and says, “He killed her.”
She grips the armrests so hard she feels the wood giving way, melting, turning to chocolate.
Part Five. HUMAN FACTORS
THE GLIDER
IT WAS AFTER they had found out Mike was missing. It was before hope had begun to fade. It was years before Jack and Mimi moved into the condo. Madeleine was graduating high school in three weeks; in three weeks her life would begin. She surged with the dark and shining joy of imminent escape into the world, far from this suburb.
She was at the kitchen sink, resentfully peeling apples for her mother. From the backyard came the roar of the old lawnmower. Through the window, they saw her father crossing back and forth. “Look at your father out there mowing the lawn.”
Madeleine said, sullen, “You want me to do it instead? He won’t let me.” Her mother always talked about her father as though he were some kind of invalid—your poor feeble father, out there pushing the mower on his crutches. Why can’t anyone just be normal around here? Houses have lawns, men cut them. It’s not rocket science and it’s not a tragedy. There is nothing poignant about a middle-aged white man mowing his lawn. Especially when there’s a big fat swimming pool in the middle of it.
Mimi turned and smiled and Madeleine got a stab of guilt in the heart. There were tears in her mother’s eyes. If Mike were here he would be mowing the lawn. She felt horrible for her mother, horrible about what a horrible daughter she was, and she felt furious that her father never let her mow the lawn — as if the safe operation of a small engine with blade affixed required the presence of a Y chromosome. He told her she could be anything she wanted to be — politician, lawyer, brain surgeon, astronaut. He would send her to the moon but he didn’t trust her with a maudit Canadian Tire Lawn-Boy: These things are tricky, you can lose a toe before you know it.
She slouched toward the front door. She heard her mother’s voice from behind her, “Why don’t you ask your father if he wants to go for a walk?” She hated it when her mother tried to “encourage” her relationship with her father. We have one, okay? And you are not the boss of it. So — annoyed at her mother for making her annoyed at the prospect of going for a walk with her father, which was something she otherwise enjoyed doing — she headed for the back door. “You have the nicest papa in the world,” she heard her mother say, and let the screen door slam.
She stepped out into the backyard and said, “Hey Dad, wanna go for a walk?”
He looked up from where he was crouching with the mower tilted, wiping its green-stained blade. Tightening the nut. The smell of cut grass and gasoline reached her, deeply reminiscent, reassuring … and sad. Everything is fucking sad. It’s sad to be conceived. We start to die the moment we are born.
“Sure, sweetie.”
She followed him into the garage as he wheeled the mower across the concrete to its appointed place. The smell of cool concrete — another deep suburban smell, along with the chlorine whiff, mingle of roses and other people’s suppers.