The others join in. They sing so quietly it’s as though they are in the middle of a forest, silent but for the scurries and hoots of busy night hunters. They sing softly so as to soothe but not wake the bears in their caves, the wolves in their dens, the rabbits in their holes. They sing so as neither to douse nor fan the glowing campfire, or shake more cold from the blue-black winter sky.
“‘I feel so broke up, I want to go home….’”.
Ricky outlasts them all, picking out a tune while the others sleep in a pile of blankets and pillows on the floor. But by the time the wheels of the Rambler crunch slowly up the snowy driveway, only Rex wakes at the sound.
Jack and Mimi tiptoe up the stairs with the Froelichs right behind. They glimpse the clutter of the kitchen, where every pot and pan has been hauled out to help bang in the New Year, and stop in the living-room doorway. Mimi gestures to Karen to “come here.” She slips her arm through Karen Froelich’s and the women look in on their sleeping children. Flushed and tangled, Orange Crush moustaches, popcorn ground into the carpet, sleeping hands still clutching toys. Ricky is flaked out on the easy chair, his guitar across his knees. His eyelashes flutter; he raises his head, glances around and says, “Sorry ’bout the mess.”
A week after New Year’s, Jack drives to London with his daughter. They take a walk in Storybook Gardens. The animals have left for the winter and only the greenhouse is still open to visitors. The castle drawbridge is closed but they slip in through snowy hedges and walk among the silent frolicking effigies. Humpty Dumpty teeters on his wall, wearing a pointed hat of snow; the witch beckons, her palm full of white powder — Madeleine takes care to avoid her eye.
Icicles grow from Little Bo-Peep’s staff, the Cow jumps over the Moon and the Dish runs away with the Spoon, heedless of the change of weather, still in their fairy-tale finery.
On the way home, Jack takes a detour through a winter-postcard neighbourhood, cruising slowly round the cul-de-sac of Morrow Street in the twilight. He hasn’t been summoned here in weeks. In the third-floor corner window, the curtains are open, blue light plays on the glass and ceiling. On the street, one among a line of parked cars, is the bright metallic blue Ford Galaxy — on its rear bumper, a yellow sticker from Storybook Gardens. Jack pulls away. Let sleeping dogs lie.
~ ~ ~
REX FOUND HER. She was in a field beyond the ravine at Rock Bass, halfway between the cornfield and the woods. German shepherds are natural trackers. It’s terrible what happens to a face after death by strangulation. He recognized her scent as being hers and not hers. The sight of her made him bark because, for Rex, it was as though she had put on a Halloween mask.
On her back, beneath a criss-cross of last year’s bulrushes, clumps of bluebells, wildflowers, April showers. Hairband not askew. Eyes closed. Eyes do not naturally close in death by strangulation.
There is nothing peaceful or natural about the faces of people who have died that way. They look terrifying. A child’s peaceful body, soft pixie cut, and a monster face. It’s as though the evil of the person who killed her has leapt onto her face. She does not look like anybody’s child. She does not look like anybody any more.
SWINGING ON A STAR
BY MARCH IT SEEMS as though winter will never end. But the earth knows when spring must come, and already the unseen bluebells and lily of the valley are tipped with green, tenderly curled but stirring beneath the soil. Deer can smell the trickling water, and they paw the banks for new shoots; in their nests, birds await the miracle of the first beaks to breach their shells.
It is two and a half weeks before Easter but you can still feel winter. Yesterday was warmer and it rained, but Jack Frost is back today, that’s what March is like. On the road there are still a few worms but they are frozen. Wormsicles. There is a certain kind of ice on the puddles at the side of the road, the thin glass kind, fracturing like a sugar pane when you delicately press your boot, smashing like a windshield when you jump. Later in the day, when it gets warmer, you will be able to push the puddle’s barely frozen surface and see it wrinkle and fold like a sheet. Where there is bare earth and bumpy old grass, the clumps glitter cold, fine-crunching beneath your boot, grains of glass melting from the faint heat of your foot. These are the things of March.
In the park, Madeleine notices green spears piercing the brown and yellow patches amid the receding snow, tough little crocuses; and there is the whiff of thawing dog-doo, reappearing now in wells of granular old snow. It is still cold, but not so cold that you couldn’t eat an apple outside and taste it. Not so cold that snot will freeze on your nose. Grown-ups say that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. What does that mean?
Today is the last Thursday in March. In two weeks it will be Holy Thursday. Then it will be Easter Sunday, and that means chocolate bunnies and hunting for Easter eggs — the end of Lent. Maman has been very impressed by Madeleine’s abstinence from candy, especially chocolate. But she’d had plenty of practice with the Mr. March candy. In a way Madeleine has cheated, because Lent is supposed to be hard. It occurs to her now that if she had really wanted to give up something important, she could have put her Bugs Bunny away for forty days.
She stops halfway down St. Lawrence Avenue, on her way to school, and takes a deep breath. Bugs would smother, because where would he be? In a closet? In a drawer? In the dark. No. After forty days of suffocating on his own, having no one to tell his jokes to, how could Madeleine expect they could ever be friends again? Now that would be something. To give up Bugs entirely. To give him away to a needy child overseas. To love Jesus more than Bugs. Oh no.
She crushes some icy mud into chocolate milk with her galoshes. She has never thought about it in this way before. If she is not willing to give up Bugs, does that mean she loves him more than Jesus? More than God? Who is God? He is an angry person who loves you. Does He want her to sacrifice Bugs? God sacrificed His only son, that’s why we have Easter. It is blasphemy even to compare Jesus to Bugs Bunny. Bugs on the cross. Now I’ve hoid everything. Turning bread into carrots. Madeleine walks on, trying not to think these thoughts, sorry dear God. Jesus is supposed to be the one at your side, the one you talk to, not Bugs. Just as your guardian angel is always at your side. A huge silvery person who hovers, waiting for you to be run over or fall off a bridge. Madeleine knows that even though they are supposed to protect you, your guardian angel would like nothing better than to take you straight up to heaven while you are still a child with a pure white soul. God loves the souls of children best of all. They are his favourite. Yum. Like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and that is another bad thought because you should not think about God in that way. Fee-fiefo fum. Think of kind Jesus—suffer the little children. Madeleine slows down, out of range of her own house, still too far from the school — maybe someone’s mother will let her use their bathroom. All of a sudden she has to go.
What if God wants her? There is nothing you can do if God wants you. There is nowhere to hide, it’s like an air raid only worse because God is everywhere, especially in an air-raid shelter. When people get a vocation, they hear a voice saying, “Be a nun”—or if they are a boy, “Be a priest”—and there is nothing they can do, they have to be one. Because it’s God’s voice speaking. Forget it if you wanted to be on Ed Sullivan instead of in a convent. Forget it if you are too young to die, there are plenty of child martyrs, they perform miracles all the time, creepy little happy dead kids.