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.”
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?