Mimi smiles. “You’re so pretty, ma p’tite.”
“I take after you.”
Mimi glances toward the living room. The top of his head hasn’t moved, he is still asleep in his chair. She lowers her voice. “Did you tell your father?”
“No.”
“Good.”
And Madeleine is certain now that it was good, is grateful not to have burdened him. Her mother can take it. Women are stronger.
Mimi kisses her daughter, and the pain is not mitigated by what she realizes next — in fact it’s worsened because, like polio, what happened to her child could have been prevented. “Oh Madeleine, Madeleine….”
Madeleine follows her mother’s voice. In it she hears the cadence of comfort. What remains may not be a lot, but it’s good. I have my mother. She steps into the meadow unafraid, there are no hunters here. Basks in her mother’s gaze, unashamed, so grateful finally to be seen.
“Oh Madeleine,” says Mimi, and cups her daughter’s face tenderly in her hands, “is that why you are the way you are?”
A sensation behind Madeleine’s eyes as though a reel of film has skipped. She knows she has reached the end of something, and passed through it to something else, because her voice sounds robotic in her ears, as though she’s speaking a new language. “I’m pretty sure that Mr. March killed Claire.”
Her mother is still speaking the old language as Madeleine leaves the house. She can hear her voice but can no longer make out the words.
Outside, she reaches for the door of her car and hears something clink to the asphalt. It gleams silver in the porch light. The medal. She picks it up and gets into her car. Rubs her palm where the four compass points have gouged their temporary impressions, and sees the old paper-thin scar that shadows her lifeline.
RICKY FROELICH Missing
HENRY FROELICH Missing
MICHAEL MCCARTHY Missing
GRATIA
MADELEINE HAS PULLED OVER to the side of the 401 expressway across the top of Toronto. This time she couldn’t make it to an exit ramp. Forehead resting against the steering wheel, she is praying. She doesn’t believe in God, nor is she a non-believer. Belief has nothing to do with it. She’s praying because there’s so much pain. The living and the dead. The known and the unknown.
She can hear it — it has always been there. Like the chatter of a pebble beach. It grows louder, closer, until she hears a chorus of souls, mouths pulled down in sorrow. All those imprisoned in their minds; all those who are doing their best for their families; all who are struck with the vertigo of standing on two feet, all who live so bravely on four legs, so tirelessly on two wings, on bellies and between fins; the heartbreaking courage of animals; the lonely death of a dear brother, of a child long ago in Centralia, were they very frightened? Oh if only we could visit them at the hour of their death — not to intervene, because that is impossible, but simply to witness. To love them as they leave, not seek to make their suffering invisible. All they ask is that we picture it. Watch me.
“Pray for them,” she whispers to the instrument panel of her old VW beetle. Sixteen lanes zip by. Pray for them. It is then — on the noisy paved shoulder, wondering if she will ever be able to leave her car — that she receives the gift: it fills her like a breath. It is not a knowledge of the mind, it simply arrives: the only thing in the world that matters is love.
After fifteen minutes she is able to start her car and gather speed along the shoulder. The little bug, dirty white eggshell, travels down the exit ramp. Designed for Hitler. Built by slaves. As recognizable as a Coke bottle. The sins of the father. Good little car.
She feels fine when she gets home, and knows she will never be the same. Nothing can ever frighten her out of her life again. As though she had survived a disaster. A plane crash. Something.
“That self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.”
BUTTERFLY EFFECTS
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF ONTARIO
REGINA
vs
RICHARD PLYMOUTH FROELICH
(murder)
Trial Evidence
A strange transformation is effected by the authority of the printed word in an official document. The prisoner. Ricky. The victim. Claire. The welter of information regarding where precisely the crossroads were, the words “willow tree” drained of colour, the numbing exactitude regarding where the body was found and in what position.
The body was clad in a blue dress.
Thank goodness it’s Wednesday. Shelly thinks Madeleine is still out of town, and in a way she is. She got an hour’s sleep on her carpet this morning — Christine had returned for the bed.
…The body was lying flat on its back with the lower limbs, the two legs, parted. Under a tree, an elm.
Madeleine is wearing a baseball cap to shelter her eyes from the fluorescent lights in the windowless reading room of the Provincial Archives of Ontario. Steps from the YMCA; she could have come here any time.
…the patient had marks upon the neck.
The patient? She reads on. The pathologist, the police, Dr. Ridelle — Lisa’s dad. This transcript is a 1,858-page list of what the grown-ups knew. Legal size.
A female child at that age would have a hymen which is something through which you cannot normally insert a little finger, and that was completely missing, it had been completely carried away….
She is sitting at one of several long wooden tables. Around her, a pallid few others pore over genealogical records and municipal sewage blueprints. Insomniacs unite.
…masses of maggots about in this region….
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.
intense cyanotic lividity of face and neck, intense cyanosis of the nails and extremities of fingers, the tongue protruded…
The picture is altering now. It’s changing. Finally growing older.
…colour and pupils obscured by post-mortem glazing…
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.
…large amount of uric acid on the legs but not on the underpants, which would indicate…
She is here to bear witness.
…a type of injury you would expect to see with some large object dilating this area…
She is here because she can’t go forward. She has to go back.
…the whole of the entranceway was widely dilated.
His Lordship: Pardon?
A: Widely dilated.
And when she gets there, she needs to listen to the children.
…the body was covered by reeds, I should say bulrushes…
Moses among the bulrushes. We always called them cattails. Why have I thought of Moses? Moses was among the rushes, not bulrushes.
Q: Was the face visible?
A: The face was covered.
Q: With what?
A: A pair of underpants.
Q: Cotton underpants?
A: Yes sir.