It was possible that the letters were a reference to another Magdalena Bikauskaitė, although even back home it wasn’t such a common name. Maybe there was more to it and the name came at the end of a sentence that began under his hair. Magdalena squinted toward the bus stop and waved her arms.
In a moment a shape detached itself from the bus and hurried toward her, colors resorting themselves as he got nearer until Neil’s jeans became distinct from his sweatshirt and a smudge of orange became his hair. The edges of him sharpened and then, when he got near enough, panting a little, the words on his face came into focus. There it was: Magdalena Bikauskaitė, just above his cheekbone. She handed him the package.
“Gosh, thanks,” Neil said, and he was running back to the bus before Magdalena had a chance to ask him to lift up the hair by his ear so she could see if the name followed other words across his temple.
Magdalena waited until she heard the bus leave, and then she looked around, wondering which side of the bus station she was on. But the streets were nothing more than wedges cut into a wash of tan and gray. Out of habit she took her glasses out and started to put them on, just to get her bearings, but she stopped. A crowd of little shapes was coming toward her in twos.
In another moment they were all around her, bobbing at the edges of her sight in smears of green uniforms. “Sixty degrees north-northwest!” an adult voice called out. The little shapes pivoted in their pairs, bumping into Magdalena.
“North northwest!” the leader said. “Kimberly! Emily! What do we say?”
“Sorry, Miss.”
“Sorry, Miss,” and they circled what she now saw was a compass held like a fiddler crab on the palm of one of their hands. Magdalena took out her phone and pretended to check the time to avoid seeing their faces.
“Ours’s stuck.”
“Ours’s too.”
“Follow Becky,” the leader said. “Right. Forty paces north-northwest. Careful as you cross the street. Careful! Kimberly!” and the little shapes ducked back into the haze.
Then the street was empty, but Magdalena put her glasses back in her bag just to be safe. It was bad enough when she accidentally got too close to an old person and it said inflammatory heart disease or lung infection or regret across their face. Nobody wanted to see something like that on a child. There would be other things written there too: Lives at No. 12 Hollbury Mews. Air stewardess. Marries Ronald. Finds a sea anemone. But sometimes a face that said loved across the lips when it smiled would have a never hidden in the dimple, and Magdalena had learned a long time ago that it was better not to look at all. Old people could have whole sentences disappear in their wrinkles, but Magdalena did not like looking at children, with their skin so smooth across their faces that it was hard to ignore what it said.
For as long as Magdalena could remember the words had always been there, although she didn’t used to think of them as words. At first she didn’t think of them as anything, they were just extensions of a person’s skin, like eyebrows or the chicken pox or the long brown birthmark on the back of her mother’s knee—which her mother told her was a footprint left there many years ago by fairies, who sometimes walked over children as they slept. So for a while when she was very young Magdalena thought that the other kind of marks had also been left by fairies, who were known for making trouble and who must have walked up and down each person’s body with ink on their shoes.
But the marks turned into letters when Magdalena started school. “Who can show us the letter A?” the teacher said. The class pointed to the chalkboard, and Magdalena pointed to the chin of Tomas Kukauskas sitting next to her.
Pretty soon the letters came together into words and each person’s body became a puzzle. Once when her teacher bent over to correct her exercises, Magdalena looked at the marks that curled out of her teacher’s nose and disappeared into her ear and found that she could read them.
“Magdalena, if you have a question say it out loud so we all can hear,” her teacher said as Magdalena tried to fit her mouth around the letters. The first word was long, but when she made each sound and then made them all together she realized it was somebody’s name: MY-KO-LAS.
“MYKOLAS,” she said. She followed the letters along her teacher’s cheek, stringing the sounds together like they had been taught to do. The second word was even longer: “ISN’T-COMING-BACK,” Magdalena said. It was all one word in Lithuanian. Her teacher stood up so sharply that her pen made a mark across Magdalena’s paper, as if she’d gotten all the answers wrong.
“What did you say?” her teacher asked. Magdalena said it again. She stacked the sounds of the letters on top of one another, and when they came out of her mouth they were words.
“Who told you that?” her teacher said. The class was quiet.
“I read it,” Magdalena said.
“Where did you read it?” her teacher asked.
“There.” Magdalena pointed to the place beside her teacher’s nose. Her teacher brought her hands up to her face and Magdalena thought she was going to wipe away the writing. But she only rested her fingers against her lips for a moment.
“Finish your work,” she said.
When the teacher passed her again, Magdalena took another look. It was hard to keep all the sounds in her head and remember where she’d started, but if she said them aloud and listened to her own voice, then the shapes became sounds and the sounds became words. “MYKOLAS-ISN’T-COMING-BACK.”
Magdalena’s teacher put her hands to her face again, then reached for the chalkboard rag and looked for a clean part. Magdalena craned her neck to read the words one more time before her teacher wiped them away. “MYKOLAS-ISN’T-COMING-BACK.”
“Stop saying that!” her teacher said. The class looked up. The teacher pressed her face into the chalkboard rag and the chalk dust powdered her cheeks. Magdalena wanted to say the words just one more time, but she stayed quiet. And as it turned out, these words weren’t like the ones on the chalkboard. Even though tears ran down her teacher’s face, they did not get washed away.
Sometimes Magdalena wondered what would have happened to her if the world hadn’t started going blurry when she was six or seven years old, when she was still sounding out people’s foreheads like other kids sounded out street signs, when she had cried because she was the only one in her class who had to wear glasses, not knowing that nearsightedness had been given to her like a blessing. Perfect vision and she might have ended up like her father in the bathtub, wrists open like books.
By the time she was ten or eleven Magdalena had stopped wearing her glasses, and she passed her adolescence in a fog. When she and Lina first moved to London she put them on again, and even let Lina talk her into getting contact lenses because they looked better. In London only Lina’s skin had words she understood without even trying—and those she already knew by heart—so Magdalena made an appointment with an optometrist and then walked around the city marveling at the mortar that suddenly appeared between bricks. But now that she’d learned English well enough to find herself accidentally understanding most of what was written there at the hairline or over an eyebrow, she preferred to leave her glasses off and let the world melt around her.
The haze was not ideal. Magdalena had permanent bruises on her shins from bumping into things, and at times like this it would be nice to know where buildings stopped and streets began. She was at the bus station, she knew that much, but she seemed to have gotten turned around. Colors and shapes smeared together and nothing looked familiar.
Magdalena tried to think back to her first day in Swindon, when she’d gotten off the bus from London with Barry’s address written on a scrap of paper. Which way had she gone? Probably in the other direction. She had been trying to balance Lina’s old suitcase on its one good wheel while she held the shoebox with the ashes in the other hand. She’d dropped the box and a fine dust puffed out; she remembered kneeling to pick up the shoebox and watching the dust settle between cobblestones, which meant she must have been
on the other side of the bus station because this street was paved.
Nearly a year had gone by since that first day in Swindon and the shoebox was still under her bed, waiting to go home. But that wasn’t what Magdalena wanted to think about. She kept her glasses in her bag, chose a direction, and started walking.
If Lina were there they would walk together, arm in arm like old women. They would make it halfway across town and then suddenly, dramatically, Lina would be too exhausted to go on. Or she would decide that the other direction was better after all and she’d wave down some man in a nice car and get him to give them a ride. Magdalena would read three children or something she didn’t understand, like pneumonectomy across his forehead—things that were easy to ignore. And when he let them off they’d have to find another ride back into town. Lina was like that, always getting them into places they shouldn’t be. She never thought things through—it said so across the arches of her feet.
A car honked at her, and Magdalena realized she’d ended up in the middle of the street. Without her glasses, the curb a few feet away melted into the fuzzy gray of the gutter and she had to feel with her toes to find the sidewalk. She did this expertly, with no sudden falterings, because it was better to whack her shins sometimes than to look like a blind person and have somebody come up close to give her their arm.
Off to her right there was a shape taller than the rest. That would be the church she and Neil had passed on their way to the bus stop. She pressed her fingertips against the sides of her eyes. Sometimes that made her vision sharper, though she had to be careful to avoid looking at a woman who was passing. The woman was already close enough that Magdalena could see dark patches of text across her cheeks.
Magdalena always told Barry that she had to be at work at quarter to three, a lie that gave her three hours to meet Ivan, or, lately, to call Ivan and walk around waiting for him to call her back. It often didn’t happen, and Magdalena would get all the way to the Sainsbury’s on the edge of town before she had to turn back if she wanted to make it to her shift on time, with her feet already hurting.
Having Ivan for a boyfriend had seemed like a good idea at the time, when Magdalena first came to Swindon and needed a reason to get out of Barry’s house. It was Zosia, the Polish girl’s, advice to her. “Get a boyfriend,” Zosia said when Magdalena first moved into the bedroom next to Barry’s study. “He’ll call you a whore but he’ll leave you alone.” Barry hated boyfriends, but he was a little scared of them too. So when Ivan asked her to get a drink with him one night after the bar closed, Magdalena didn’t say no.
Ivan was different from the men Lina used to try to get Magdalena to go out with when they were in London. After a while Lina gave up on her, but there was a time when she was always arranging double dates for them, choosing for Magdalena some older guy who’d made money on the stock market and invested it collecting photographs of circus freaks or old-time jazz records, things Magdalena learned she had better not pretend the slightest interest in; if she did, the men would call her for a second date and she’d have to grab her phone quick to keep Lina from answering it for her and saying yes.
But Ivan had no investments besides an old Vespa he’d fixed up himself, with red flame decals pasted on the sides. Magdalena was pretty sure Ivan was seeing other girls, but she liked to ride with him on the Vespa on weekends, when he’d pick her up in front of Barry’s house and they’d go out past the brown edges of town until they got to fields of yellow rapeseed, the little engine, which wasn’t made to be taken on the motorway, sputtering under the weight of the two of them.
But the thing she liked best about Ivan was his skin. Magdalena knew some Russian but she couldn’t read it, and Ivan’s body remained a mystery because even though he claimed to be one hundred percent British now that he’d been in Swindon for most of his life, there wasn’t a single word in English on him anywhere, Magdalena had made sure of that. So even though he was the kind of boyfriend Lina would have said they’d outgrown before they were even in high school, Magdalena didn’t like the thought of leaving him and his incomprehensible skin and finding somebody new, steeling herself to look closely at a body that would most likely tell her all sorts of things she would rather not know. It was easier to keep filling her afternoons walking around Swindon, waiting for her phone to ring.
Lina used to say men had a kind of radar. They never called if you were waiting for them. The trick was to do something that sent a signal out into the universe showing that you didn’t care. Lina used to throw away jewelry or other things that she’d been given and sure enough, as soon as she’d flushed a pair of earrings down the toilet, the phone would ring. Magdalena didn’t believe in those kinds of things, but even so, not for the first time, she erased Ivan’s number from her phone. But still he didn’t call.
Magdalena first heard Lina’s theory of men and their radar on the day many years earlier when Lina climbed down onto the balcony of Magdalena’s mother’s apartment in Vilnius to the sound of glass breaking upstairs. Magdalena’s mother was setting the table for breakfast and she gave a little shriek, surprised to see a seven-year-old in her garlic plants. Her mother brought Lina inside and asked her what in God’s name was going on up there and didn’t she know she could be killed climbing between floors like that? Her mother was sending a message, Lina had said. Something like that. And it was hard to imagine that the radar of even the dullest of men wouldn’t pick up on the fact that Lina’s mother was just then shattering every bit of glass in the apartment upstairs.
Until then, all that Magdalena and her mother had known about the Valentukas family who lived above them was that their illegal washing machine leaked, leaving an orange stain on their kitchen ceiling. When Magdalena and her mother first moved in the stain was just a tiny spot, shaped like a rabbit. A sign of springtime, no bigger than Magdalena’s hand. “A rabbit means a new life,” Magdalena’s mother had said, standing in the kitchen looking up at the stain, and they would make one. It was not long after Magdalena’s father had died.
The stain grew steadily, week after week, changing shape each time Mrs. Valentukienė did the laundry. It reflected Magdalena’s mother’s moods. When times were good she saw good omens there—a loaf of bread, brown at the edges, that meant a happy home, or a curl like a woman’s hair, foretelling money—and when times were bad just the sight of it could make her cry. When Magdalena’s mother was a little bit drunk she would tell their fortunes in it. “You see? A mushroom wearing a hat. Ah, and see? He is shooting an arrow. That means that somewhere a nice man is waiting to fall in love with me, only he is like a mushroom, we will have to look very hard to find him.”
“In the forest?” Magdalena would ask.
“Maybe,” her mother would say, and they would both look up at the stain, which really did look like a mushroom shooting an arrow, and would change again on Saturday when Mrs. Valentukienė did the wash. After another drink or two Magdalena’s mother would start to get sentimental and tell Magdalena to go up and ask Mrs. Valentukienė to please never do the laundry again so that Magdalena and her mother wouldn’t lose their friend the mushroom who promised so much. Then Magdalena knew it was time to help her mother into bed, to turn out the lights and lock the door and draw the blinds against the moonlight that was surely right that minute streaming over little mushroom men shooting all variety of arrows in all variety of forests, waiting to be found.
Magdalena’s phone rang. Unidentified caller, it said. She was glad she hadn’t been the first to call. She let it ring four times, then said hello.
“Hey,” Ivan said.
“Hey,” she said.
“Look, I’m sorry I’ve been a bit out of it lately.” Ivan spoke English without an accent, at least according to him. Magdalena was no expert at accents. Maybe it was only his way of trailing off at the end of his sentences, as if he was always deciding that what he was saying wasn’t worth the effort before he’d even finished saying it, that reminded Magdalena of the Russian g
uys she knew back home.
“Uh-huh,” Magdalena said. “Is okay.” He had been ignoring her at work, going off to do the inventory when her shift started. Lina wouldn’t have picked up the phone. But Lina always got called back.
“Look, when can I see you?” Ivan asked. He made the schedule, so he knew what time she worked.
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said. “I’m busy.”
“Meet me in ten minutes, yeah?” Ivan said. “By the fountain.”
The stain from the Valentukas family’s washing machine had gone through a particularly violent transformation in the week or so before plates began smashing into the walls of the apartment upstairs and Lina climbed down onto their balcony. This was due, it turned out, to Ruta Valentukienė, Lina’s mother, washing every piece of fabric in their house, including the red drapes, which made the orange stain on Magdalena’s kitchen ceiling blush pink around the edges. Ruta Valentukienė washed the mattress covers and the lace from the windows. She washed the tablecloths and couch pillows. When she ran out of laundry soap she used shampoo, which made the washing machine explode into a mess of freesia-smelling bubbles. It was the only way Ruta Valentukienė knew of getting rid of the smell of burned hair. Lina’s father and his new girlfriend—her hair turned to black goo on the ends, the result of Ruta having dragged her out of their bed and straight to the stove where the girl’s pretty blonde hair flared up like dry hay—had left in a hurry. But the stench of that hair remained—the bitch. Cheap dye, no doubt about it, Magdalena’s mother told Ruta, sniffing the air when she took Lina back upstairs with Magdalena following behind with a broom to sweep up the glass. Good-quality hair doesn’t smell like that, Magdalena’s mother said, and took over from Ruta, who was crying into the coffee she was heating for them in an old saucepan—there was nothing else left to make it in. Ruta had opened all the windows, the illegal washing machine was groaning quietly in the corner, and even through the scent of shampoo Magdalena could smell something scorched and bitter.
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