The roads were getting steeper. The Pyrenees, Olaf said. Brit told them to be sure they were drinking plenty of water. As they hiked up hillsides covered with olive groves, Magdalena listened to Rachel talk about her days doing junk, sleeping in doorways and robbing her mum, and it occurred to Magdalena that the things she’d gotten used to reading as her mother reached for a pan or changed her skirt or stretched out her toes to let the polish dry had something in common. They were stories Magdalena had heard as a little girl, or they were hints of stories her mother might someday decide to tell her, and a number included phrases in the imperative tense—don’t pick the thin-stemmed mushrooms, check that the butcher’s scale is zero to begin with—as if her mother had made notes across her skin of the things that Magdalena ought to know.
But Magdalena’s mother’s body did not say Magdalena anywhere, and as they walked and she listened to Rachel cycle through the stories of her life, Magdalena let herself wonder why. Maybe, like Lina, her mother had things written under her hair. Maybe Magdalena’s name had gotten lost in her ear or covered over by the birthmark behind her mother’s knee. There had been no Magdalena on Lina either, or on Ivan or Andrius, Magdalena’s boyfriend in high school, or on Marija or Ruta or even Rachel, but it couldn’t be that Magdalena was meant to come and go without leaving so much as her name; she had seen herself on Neil: Magdalena Bikauskaitė unmistakable in the hollow of his eye. In the station in Paris, when she’d lifted the bit of hair that stuck out over Neil’s ear, she hadn’t seen any words of explanation. Her name was a fact on his face, like his blood type and the dates his children would be born and the place he went to high school, and she thought about this too as the languages on the other pilgrims became more varied, leaving her understanding only the names—Marias, Paolos, Gottfrieds, Kristofers, Josés, and Adriennes—on strangers’ cheeks and hands and dusty legs. When she told the fortune of somebody covered in a language she couldn’t understand she learned to choose a name and say it carefully, and often she was able to tell from the look on the customer’s face whether Paolo or Kristofer was that person’s father or their son, a lost love, ex-husband, or favorite saint. She wondered what Neil would say if a stranger on the road looked into a crystal or fussed with a deck of cards and then said “Magdalena Bikauskaitė” to him. Would he look confused? Or would he recognize a logic to that name that no one else would understand?
They crossed the border into Spain. The roads were busy with pilgrims hurrying to finish in time for the saint’s feast day and every time they stopped to rest, Rachel found someone who wanted a fortune told. They could buy sandwiches now, and they had their own bunks at the pilgrims’ hostels. Calluses formed around the threads in Magdalena’s feet. Rachel said it was disgusting, but she had to admit that Magdalena had been right, it stopped the blisters.
By then Magdalena had enough money for a decent pair of boots. Brit offered to take her shopping for the kind that breathed, but when they came to a town that had all the big outlet stores, Magdalena told Brit that she’d decided to use the money for something else. Of all the things written on her mother’s skin, there was one story that Magdalena knew the beginning to, but not the end—and besides, she’d spent her childhood reading pay your debts off the inside of her mother’s elbow whenever she rolled up her sleeves. When they stopped for the night, Magdalena asked at the desk for paper and an envelope and she got out the napkin where Neil had written his address. His last name struck her as a familiar fact. She’d seen those letters all her life on the soft skin below her mother’s collarbone, where the name Neil had said was his father’s had been given Lithuanian grammatical endings—Richardui Beartui—the dative form looking clumsy on those foreign words. It meant to Richard Beart or for him, turning Neil’s father into a noun whose meaning was incomplete standing alone like that, as if her mother had hugged the letters of the alphabet to her chest and come away with an unfinished sentence about a man in America claiming her heart.
Magdalena looked at the piece of blank paper the clerk had given her. Hello my dear Neil she wrote at the top, and stopped to think. She didn’t know quite how to make him understand, or where to begin. Rachel had met a group of German Wiccans and gone off to have a beer, so Magdalena had to ask one of the French nuns who taught school to help her with the English.
When she was finished she wrapped the letter around Neil’s sixty euros. She sealed the envelope and took it to the post office on their way out of town the next morning—though she knew from the warning across the back of her mother’s left knee that one should never send cash through the mail.
{NEIL}
Vilnius, June
Just like Magdalena had said, the bus ride to Vilnius took thirty-three hours. Sometime during the night they stopped beside a field, men went in front of the bus, women behind, and Neil woke the next morning as they crossed the German-Polish border wondering if he’d dreamed the sight of all those bare white bottoms twinkling in the moonlight. They stopped again in Warsaw, where everyone stood at a counter to eat potatoes and cold beet soup, then back on the bus. Fields and forests and little wooden farmhouses with thatched roofs went by, and Neil went in and out of dreams, waking to re-plan in his head for the hundredth time just how everything would happen. The bus rolled through pine forests and finally through hundreds of Soviet apartment buildings on the outskirts of Vilnius—some of them without glass in the windows, some with laundry hanging from cement balconies that seemed ready to chip off. Cracks ran like ivy along the seams of the buildings and Neil imagined again the scene in the pizza restaurant, preparing a little speech for himself, wishing Magdalena had left something so he could return it to her the way they did in movies. Madam, I believe this handkerchief is yours. He thought about lying. Magdalena? Is that you? I’m here to do some research and, I mean, what are the odds? But he settled on honesty. I just thought it would be nice to, like, see you again.
His first miscalculation was the pizza. He realized it before he even got off the bus. What an idiot he was to think that Magdalena’s mother would be opening Vilnius’ first pizza restaurant, as if Lithuanians were still standing in bread lines behind the iron curtain. He saw twelve pizza places before the bus got to the station. While he was looking for the city bus that would take him to Professor Uzdavinys’ house, he saw three more. In fact, he had never seen so many pizza restaurants in his life. They were everywhere, with big color photos outside advertising the spicy chicken pizza, the egg and pickle pizza, the chunky chili pizza.
Professor Uzdavinys’ house was actually near enough to the station that he walked rather than trying to find the bus. Professor Uzdavinys’ wife, Renate, was there, just getting ready to go out. She was a professor too, and in perfect English she told Neil to make himself at home and go right ahead and take a nap, he was sure to need it after that long bus ride.
But Neil had no intention of sleeping, when there were so many pizza restaurants to search, looking for a particular person with her light eyes and her one gray tooth. He started by going from pizza place to pizza place, peering inside.
But that couldn’t go on forever. After an hour or so he was getting really hungry, so he went into one of them. Just for kicks he ordered the American pizza—it came covered in barbecue sauce—and purposely looked the other way until the waitress was right there at his table, still holding out hope that it might be her. It wasn’t.
After the pizza his head was clearer, and he realized how ridiculous it all was. He also thought of something he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of before. He still had Magdalena’s number in his phone, on his missed-calls list from when she’d left the message about meeting him in Paris. He could call her, just to ask if she’d arrived okay, and then he could say, sort of casually, “Actually I’m here in Vilnius, maybe we should meet up.” It wasn’t quite the scene he’d pictured, but it would have to do.
But when he called the number it went straight to voicemail, as if her phone had been turned off. “Hello and
please to leave a message,” it said. “Hey, Magdalena, it’s Neil. I just wanted to—sorry, this is Neil from the train station, in case you know, like, several. I just wanted to make sure you got home okay and everything and actually, well, ah, just call me back when you get this, yeah, so I know you’re okay. I mean if you want to. Call me. So yeah. Okay, um, bye.” In a lifetime of sounding like a loser on the phone it was the worst message he had ever left.
He called her again a little later, and then, not wanting her to have a list of missed calls from the same number, he bought a phone card at the post office and called from a pay phone. He wondered if maybe her phone didn’t work in Lithuania. If he knew her last name, he could try to look her up in the phone book. He called his mom, thinking that maybe she could google grand opening pizza Vilnius for him, which might at least narrow things down. But he’d forgotten that she was away on a yoga retreat in Utah. Finally he called his father, which was what he should have done in the first place. His dad would know Magdalena’s mother’s last name, and he might even know the name of her restaurant. Next to the possibility of a completely wasted trip to Lithuania, all the reasons he’d had for not calling seemed less important. But his dad didn’t pick up.
Maybe it was because he couldn’t reach him, but the thought of his father’s phone ringing in the big empty house made Neil sad. Even though he’d gone months without thinking too much about it, he started to miss his dad, wishing he could at least say hi and give him ten tries to guess where he was calling from.
His father had never changed the answering machine, and it still had Nan’s voice pronouncing each word slowly and clearly as if she were talking to someone on the moon. “You have reached Walter and Catherine Hurley. We probably couldn’t make it to the phone in time, or else we’re out in the yard.” And then, because she hadn’t known how to stop the tape, Neil heard Pop’s voice, saying, “That oughta do,” and Nan saying “Well, if they’ve got something to tell us, they can go ahead and say it,” and the sound of water running in the sink.
Hearing their voices just about did Neil in. He hung up without leaving a message and stood for a while in the telephone booth, which someone had peed in pretty recently, thinking about Pop, who could do the fly-away-birdie trick with a bit of newspaper so that it fooled Neil and his cousins every time, and Nan, who once showed him a fish brain that looked like a piece of chewed bubblegum. He was sad for his dad, all alone in that big house, and for himself, all alone in a telephone booth in Lithuania. Naturally he wound up wondering what had made him think he ought to come all this way to stand in pee and broken glass and hear the telephones of the people that he loved just ring and ring. He used up the last of the money on the phone card calling the cell phone his father kept in the car for emergencies, but his dad had probably forgotten to charge it, and it rang straight to a message saying the voicemail had never been set up.
Then, because it was starting to rain and he’d never been so lonely in his life, he called Veejay. He had to use his mobile, but he didn’t even bother leaving the phone booth. He was getting used to the smell, that’s how depressed he was.
“Yo yo, wassup,” Veejay said.
“Hey,” Neil said.
“Hey.”
“So guess where I am.”
“In jail.”
“No,” Neil said.
“In bed with Amanda.”
“What? No,” Neil said. “What are you talking about?”
“Dude, you love her,” Veejay said.
“No I don’t,” Neil said.
“Hang on a sec,” Veejay said, then, “ ‘Her fingers chase the shadows, leave her shoulders bare. Her hands brush imagined breezes from her hair—’ ”
“Jesus, is that my notebook?” It had been missing since before Neil left for Paris. “Where did you find that? I was looking everywhere.”
“Wait, it gets really good. ‘Her fingertips against her pasted lips—’ ”
“Parted lips. Come on Veejay, what the fuck?”
“It really looks like pasted here. Man, you have terrible handwriting.”
“You are such an asshole.”
“Well she loved it. She thought it was really sweet.”
“What?” Neil said. “You showed her?”
“She thinks you have a gift.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Neil said.
“Okay, dude, I’m joking,” Veejay said. “She went home for the summer, remember? Chill.”
“I can’t believe you stole my notebook,” Neil said.
“I didn’t steal it. I found it in the couch.”
“Whatever,” Neil said. Then he had an idea. “Hey wait a second, Veejay,” he said. “Will you look a few pages back? I think I wrote this girl’s name down there.”
“What girl?”
“That girl from Swindon.”
“The one in the pornos?”
“They weren’t pornos. She said he wasn’t even recording.”
“Uh-huh,” Veejay said. “Okay, is it Magdalena, like, Bike-o-skatie or something?”
“Yeah, exactly. How’s it spelled?”
“M-A—”
“The last name,” Neil said. “Just spell the last name.”
“B-I-K-A-U-S-K-A-I-T-E,” Veejay said. “And there’s a dot over the E. Or it might be soup. I’m kind of eating right now. No, it’s definitely a dot.”
Neil wrote it down, Bikauskaitė. He didn’t know how to pronounce it and Veejay said it sounded like a rash you’d get on, like, the fifteenth day of the Tour de France, but Neil found a spot of white marble in his brain and carved it in. Magdalena Bikauskaitė.
Then he didn’t feel like telling Veejay about the phone booth or how it was raining and he had no idea where he was, or about the egg and pickle pizzas. When Veejay asked him how he was liking Paris, he said it was pretty great. And when Veejay asked him how many hot French girls he could see at just that moment, Neil took a second to look at the empty street where two old women in babushkas were waiting out the rain under the awning of what was, of course, a pizza restaurant, and said four or five, but one had armpit hair.
“Man,” Veejay said. “You really are in France.”
There weren’t any Bikauskaitės listed in the phone book. There were a few people named Bikauskas, and then it went to Bikauskienė. Neil wondered if he’d written the name down wrong when his father first called to ask him to deliver the Christmas presents. He tried to remember his father’s friend’s first name. Had it started with a D? He wasn’t even sure he’d ever heard it. There was a Dijana Bikauskienė, but that didn’t sound right. And there was a Nellija Bikauskienė, but that wasn’t it either.
He called Dijana first. No answer. Then he called Nellija. Nothing. Then, not knowing what else to do, he flipped through the phone book, waiting for the rain to stop.
The Vilnius phone book was attached to the pay phone by a little wire. Someone had torn out everything after R, but even in the space from A to Q Neil noticed a number of new letters: the E with a dot over it, a C with an upside-down circonflexe. It reminded him of a joke he and his dad had had when he was a little kid.
It was basically a nonsense world that they’d invented—either his mother never knew about it or she was never invited in. It started when Neil was learning the alphabet, so he must have been kindergarten age or even younger. At school they were taught to sing Ay, Bee, Cee, Dee, Ee, Ef, Gee, Aych, Eye, Jay, Kay, Ellameno, Pee . . . And like all parents probably did with their kids, especially parents who were also English teachers, Neil and his father would play the alphabet game. Starts with Cee, his father would say as they stood in the checkout line at the grocery store. Candy, Neil would say. Cash register, his father would say. Candy bar, Neil would say. Coupons, his father would say. Kellogg’s, Neil would say. Not exactly, his father would say. Corn on the cob, Neil would say. Cole slaw. Cans. Corned beef hash. Crocodiles. And on and on. Starts with Ess. Soup. String beans. Spider-Man. Soda pop.
Starts with Ellamen
o, Neil said once when it was his turn to choose a letter, and his dad thought that was so funny that they started making up a whole world populated with made-up fantastical things: the ellamenopede who liked to eat ellamenoghetti twirled around forks held in each of its ellamillion hands. There was the ellamenopotomus who lived under Neil’s bed and had to be lulled to sleep, as he remembered, by bedtime songs rewritten. There was an ellamen-old lady who swallowed a fly had been one of them. I don’t ellamen-know why she swallowed that fly. Neil’s father had liked Ellamenoland so much that every year as part of the vocab unit he gave his language arts students extra credit if they could make up and define a word that started with ellameno—something Neil had to live down, painfully, when he got to middle school.
That got him thinking about the other things he and his father had done together before his parents split up. When Neil begged for a mail-order town for his train set and his mother said absolutely not, it was too expensive, he and his father set out to build one out of matchsticks. Together they made cabins, then manor houses, railroad stations, castles, pagodas out of matchsticks, even a supertanker that came apart in the bathtub when the glue dissolved. His father sliced the heads off the matches with a razor blade so that the stick was all that was left and Neil dipped them long-ways into a pool of wood glue and laid them one on top of the other for rafters and walls. Neil’s mother would go around sweeping up the little rolling match heads they forgot to throw away. She said they were a fire hazard. Neil’s fingers were clumsy and he spread the glue too thick or made the walls all crooked, but his father’s matchstick houses were perfect, tiny chinks cut for windows, a red Twist-Em for a flag waving from the ramparts of a matchstick fortress.
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