The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  “Get down!” my mother barks. “Both of you!”

  A rock, I understand, meant for our escorts, the ones qualified to put out the blaze. The tires’ slow creep, and I swear I can feel every stone and speck of gravel beneath the rubber, swear I can hear every voice, see every red, puffed face with eyes alight. I’m the princess and the fucking pea, only my senses are open floodgates and the seas that rush over me run evil and deep. A scuffle erupts outside, and a man, half his face hidden by a bandanna, crashes against my door. I cry out, the shock echoed by the pickup’s rear-end collision, the breaking of plastic lights. My mother mute, her focus forward and unflinching. She shifts into neutral and guns the accelerator. The engine roars, and the firemen look back. The man plastered against my door rights himself. His palm print, wide and thick, lingers on the glass. A sweaty impression, a fortune-teller’s map. A shotgun blast, and Fran screams.

  A break at the crowd’s center, an open space where the firemen take longer strides, and to my left, I’m allowed a clear view of the house. Flames and cords of smoke twist from the second-story windows. At the edge of the clearing, a tattooed man waves flag of red and white. The drummers’ sticks a blur. The little boy in the wet bathing suit steps into the open and throws a rock. A shattered window brings cheers from the mob.

  We move faster against the crowd’s tide, and by the next intersection, we’re free. The firemen step aside, the slowest nearly clipped by our bumper, an accelerator stomp and a blur of houses. In me, the crash of momentum and inertia, adrenaline’s woozy ebb. A girl on a bike darts between two parked cars, and when my mother slams the brakes, the belt snaps hard against my chest.

  The car still. The late sun highlights the windshield’s grime. The girl pedals past, her focus on a bike too big, a wrestling of handlebars, the front tire wobbling. My mother buries her face in her hands.

  “Mom?” I rub her heaving shoulder. “Mom?”

  I step outside, and the first gust steals my breath, my eyes squinted against the kicked-up dirt. My hair blows into and from my face. Branches clatter, smothering clouds and static all around. Our town over a hundred fifty miles from the ocean, yet I woke to a seagull in our yard. “Not a good sign,” my father said. We watched the news last night. A storm churning up the coast, a web of tight isobars, coastal evacuations from North Carolina to New York. My goodbye hugs tempered with contingency plans and reminders of a distant cousin who drowned in a flash flood. I make promises to text, and we establish rendezvous points, just in case.

  On my shoulders, a pack waiting for the weight of books. I’m both exhausted and anxious. A night of fitful sleep and restless dreams. A new school year, nine months since my last class. Two hundred seventy-three days; six thousand, five hundred fifty-two hours. Some hours tedious, some maddening, all tinged with the Shut-In’s pale fear. A day like today so often dreamed of, a reunion with what I’d lost, but in my heart, a sputtering. The fear when yearning transcends into reality. A fear rooted in fragility and violence and my inability to shake the images of a house on fire or a ghost walking through the rubble.

  I take the alley. Basketball backboards waver, and around me, the flight of leaves. I lift Fran’s back-gate latch, a moment’s glance for the garage’s side-door windows. Inside, shadows and dust and the old muscle car Fran’s father’s been restoring one junkyard trip at a time. Growing opposite the garage’s door, a dwarf maple, its umbrella branches trembling in the wind. The thin limbs hang down, their tips tracing the grass, and beneath, a shaded patch, the hiding spot Fran and I chose during summer games of kick-the-can. A refuge often kept after calls of Ollie-ollie-oxen-free, our conversations and secrets more compelling than any chase.

  I knock on the back door. Fran’s mother at the stove, and she waves for me to enter. The door shut quickly against the wind’s howl. Fran’s mother is a kindergarten teacher at the elementary school, and a child couldn’t ask for a kinder guide for the first leg of their long, weird journey. She turns and says, “Let’s try again,” and we repeat the back-to-back pose we struck in this very spot last week. I feel the hand she’s rested atop her head brush my hair. She steps back, a smile, her gaze angling up. “Still can’t believe it,” she says. She puts on a mitt, opens the oven door, and removes a tray of cookies. She sets the tray on the stovetop and hugs me. Her hand in a mitt and the oven’s warmth on her dress’s front.

  “You didn’t blow away?”

  “It’s pretty crazy.”

  “You look pretty, honey.” She ducks into the dining room, her voice raised. “Kayla’s here. Let’s hustle, Fran.” Then to me: “First day. Always those jitters.”

  “Fran?”

  “Less Fran and more me.”

  “You? Still?”

  “Still. Especially this year.”

  “I can see that. I wonder what the kids will have to say.”

  “I’ve been around long enough to know I can’t predict it. All I hope is they don’t make me cry.” She smiles. “At least not on the first day.”

  Her spatula scrapes the tray. The cookies pile on the plate. “Tell your mom I’ll bring her blender over tonight.”

  Fran enters. She wears her field hockey sweatshirt but beneath waits the sleeveless, low-cut blouse her mother’s forbidden, a secret trusted to me alone. Fran’s mother kisses her daughter’s cheek and stuffs a rolled-up poncho into her backpack. “You’ll thank me later,” she says. The local weatherman on the portable TV. New warnings, the predicted crests of creeks. In the capital, sandbags along Front Street. Fran’s mother places a napkin and warm cookie into each of our palms.

  “You’ve been doing this for the first day since nursery school.” Fran adjusts her backpack. “I’m not a baby anymore.”

  “So you don’t want it?”

  Fran takes a bite. “Didn’t say that.”

  Her mother kisses us both. “Be good, OK?”

  A hug from Fran. “They’re lucky to have you, mom.”

  Her mother places a hand over her heart. “That’s very kind, baby.”

  “Don’t get used to it.” Fran takes another bite. “It’s probably the hormones talking.”

  Our route almost a mile, and we talk about the strangeness of return to a life interrupted. I turn silent as I eat my cookie, lost in the drift of being claimed by neither the past nor the future. I’m familiar with the high school’s side entrance and the stairwell climb to my old math class, and while I haven’t explored much beyond that, I have spent the last week studying the website’s floor map. My routes and a dozen variants planned, the periods I can stop at my locker noted and the hope none of my wanderings will cross my path with Missy Blough’s. Fran in my Spanish and English classes—and lunch, thank goodness.

  Closer now, the school in sight. The wind stronger, and on it, the first drops, a sting upon my bare arms. Fran holds her hands over her ears and cries as she turns around and around, “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!” The clouds ripple and turn upon themselves, a coiling that lends the illusion of life, the constriction of bowels and serpents. The pressure drop an ache in my sinuses and gut. For a moment, the hint of smoke, a scent quickly lost, and I wonder if Fran’s as haunted by the other day as I am. The guns. The firemen who didn’t put out fires. A little boy throwing stones. The murdered man an agitator fond of confrontations and street-corner diatribes, the distributor of radical pamphlets, a man my father had clashed with after barring him from speaking at his campus rally. “He wasn’t well,” my father said. “A poor soul sick in his heart and mind.” The man a stranger but in the mob, faces I’d seen in the supermarket and church. All of them neighbors.

  We cross the open playing fields. The rain picks up. The wind unblocked and the seagulls huddle on the soccer field’s midline. Dirt swirls off the baseball diamond, and my shielding hand can’t keep the grit from my eyes. We break into a jog. The wind whistles against the courtyard’s brick. The napkin that held my cookie lifts from my grasp, and the paper joins the other tumbling scraps, some catching in tree
s and bushes, the others scurrying out of sight. I wouldn’t look up if not for the snap of fabric and the grommets’ spastic clank. A new flag flies beneath the old, a red circle and white cross. The clouds unleash, our final fifty yards a sprint that can’t save us from getting soaked.

  Inside, a gauntlet of lanyard-wearing teachers, ID badges, photos of younger selves. We shake out our hair, and Fran takes off her sweatshirt. “Hot,” I say. The crammed space echoes with the teachers’ uncoordinated refrain—the herding of all students directly to the auditorium. “Like lambs to the slaughter,” Fran says, her “Baaa!” met by a gym teacher’s hard glare. The secretaries and teachers point the way, a series of hallways, and my studied map melts into the reality of trophy cases and slammed lockers and a hundred overlapping conversations. We pass beneath a hand-painted banner—GO WILDCATS! The air thick with humidity and the press of bodies, a popping in my ears, the noise, the storm’s dropping pressure. More teachers gather outside the gym doors, and I return the wave from my math teacher. Freshmen and sophomores are directed to one side, juniors and seniors to the other. I’m careful on the trembling bleachers, the mortification of starting high school with a public pratfall. I was here at the end of 7th grade—a runner-up in the county science fair, soil studies and a red ribbon. We find a seat, and I look around. Girders beneath the curved ceiling and championship banners on the walls. The lights shine in blinding puddles on the hardwood. Two men in suits gather at center court, each with a clipboard, walkie-talkies secured to their belts. A wide, white screen obscures one of the backboards. The bleachers fill, and around me, voices and shouts. Older boys, and I consider the faces, and although I recognize none of them from the mob, all are suspect. The rain heavier, gusts and bursts, a drumming above our heads.

  Teachers line the walls along either entrance, and I fall into a daydream—their division into categories. The ex-athletes, their fondest memories rooted on the courts and fields of their youth. The jaded ones who count the years to retirement, the dispensers of packets and word searches and multiple-choice tests. Then the ones like my father. The ones who come home with stuffed briefcases, who nurture their craft and have patience for all. The ones who remember the pain of adolescence and the rawness of first loves and broken hearts.

  A cord snakes across the hardwood and rises to a microphone held by one of the suit-wearing men. He raises his hand, a call for silence. His shoes shined, sharp creases in his pants. A woman on the floor near us raises a finger to her lips. The gym teacher who stared down Fran offers a sharp blast of the whistle lassoed around his neck. The principal speaks, a moment of feedback then a greeting. Wishes for all to have a good year.

  He draws a deep breath, and I’m reminded of the little boys at the pool, the gathering of self before their first leap. “We’ve been through a lot these past few months. In the world as a whole and in our little corner of it. Coming back today is a big step for all of us.” The rain falls harder, and the skylights blur with runoff. The principal raises his voice. “We’re going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance.” He motions and the lights dim. A laptop and projector sit atop a cafeteria table, an image brought into focus on the wide screen, blue letters on a white background—I pledge allegiance to the flag. “Over the weekend, Congress approved a new phrase be added to the Pledge.” He fiddles with the laptop, an inadvertent click to the next slide before he scrolls back. “So if you’ll stand and join me, we’ll go through it line by line.”

  Fran and I stand with the others. The scuffle of shoes, tremors in the wood. The moment’s silence undercut by the rain and wind, and from one of the skylights, a slow drip. The assistant principal waves, and a custodian rolls out a garbage can. Inside the plastic, a new rhythm, steady as a heartbeat. The principal clicks through the slides, the gym filled with mumbled responses and dull echoes. “And to the Republic, for which it stands. One nation, under God . . .” The next slide appears, the blue print now red. The principal holds the microphone closer to his lips, “ . . . chosen and elect and true . . .”

  In me, a hitch, a moment of separation, a divorce from the familiar. The new words like pebbles in my mouth, my stumble righted with the next slide. “With liberty and justice for all.”

  My hand slides from my chest. A look from Fran, and the wordless understanding of best friends. The fire. The mob’s cries. A shotgun’s blast. A meaty palm pressed upon my window.

  The drip’s pace quickens. The principal and his assistant and the custodian looking up as the students exit the gym.

  The storm dominates the first week back, two days missed due to flooding, our hockey field a swamp, practices held in the puddled parking lot. Afterward, Fran and I walked through scarred neighborhoods. Downed branches, scattered shingles, couches and rugs pulled from flooded basements and left to dry in the sun. In my backyard, the robin’s nest blown from the oak. Come Friday, the pledge’s new words still stuck in my throat. My father sighed when he heard the news, an evening talk about the subtext of “chosen and elect.” Other dispatches from my first week—my initial log-ins to my online calc 3 course through MIT. Missy Blough’s locker nowhere near mine and the rumor she’s already been suspended for smoking in the girls’ lav.

  Saturday evening finds my mother and I preparing salad in the kitchen. Our first lettuce in months, and I trim the leaves’ brown edges. I call into the TV room. “Who’s on now?”

  “Reporters,” my father says.

  The TV special is carried on all the major networks. A Healing Gala. A concert in Philadelphia, commercial cut-aways of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The First Lady the master of ceremonies, the show a cavalcade of country music stars and athletes and megachurch pastors. The hour filled with sing-along tunes and appeals to the nation for reconciliation and a return to God. Prayers offered for all true Americans.

  I sit between my parents and pull Chestnut onto my lap. My father with a spatula in hand, the burgers on the grill just turned. Chestnut sniffs the smoke on his shirt. I lean against my mother, happy to be here, this warm center, the Shut-In’s claustrophobia fading. On TV, the First Lady commands center stage. She’s willowy and thin, a college track star, a lawyer famous for her struggle to reinstate school prayer. She flips back her blond hair. The lights gleam, and she gleams in return, her hair, her smile, her jewelry. She paces the stage, and in her eyes, another kind of gleam, the shine of a true believer. She praises her husband’s initiative to alter the Pledge of Allegiance and prays for the Golden Age that awaits a united America. Eyes closed, she raises a hand to the heavens, her voice honeyed with bliss and rapture. “Praise be.”

  I stroke Chestnut’s head, his ears folded back. “She’s full of shit,” I say. “Seriously, really?”

  “One never knows.” The TV light plays on my father’s glasses. “She may surprise us.”

  “Or she could be full of shit,” my mother says. “Like all-the-way-to-the-top full.”

  My father grins. “More probably that. Still, let’s hope for a surprise.”

  Chestnut rolls onto his side and offers me his belly. The First Lady speaks of a new dawn. Her image looms behind her, a close-up thirty feet tall. She calls out the nation’s enemies—the anarchists and communists, the atheists and one-worlders—and the crowd boos each more than the last. She cites the wave of house burnings and lynchings, the violence regrettable, the motivation understandable. The necessity of cleansing a nation’s soul, and just as Christ bled for us, so, too, must we bleed for Him. Tears on her cheeks now, and her voice trembles: “This great country has been chosen. We are the elect. Our survival and greatness waits in our surrender to the highest power—”

  The signal dies, blips then darkness. My father clicks the remote. A cooking show, a baseball game—but on the major channels, only black screens. Finally, a flustered anchor, his words strained, and then the cut-away. Distant shots of a roiling mushroom cloud.

  My mother silent. My father pale. I am made of stone. We are a family of stone. My chest d
ry and deep, a hollowness beneath my ribs that leaves me gasping. Static on TV and static between my ears. More shaky images. The horrible plume and the gasps of witnesses. A dozen different angles, nauseating jumpcuts as my father clicks the remote. The room vibrates—or is it just me—my awareness swimming in the overlap of images and voices. The scene over a hundred miles away, but I feel its impact right outside our door, and I know this is no good for any of us. I cross my arms and rock, a shaking off of haze and static, and in me, a stone’s sinking in deep water. The lack of oxygen and pressure all around. The rocking forces my lungs to work, the physics of bellows and madmen.

  Chestnut lifts his head and sniffs. My father springs to his feet. “The burgers.”

  I stand, my muscles commandeered by fidgets and short circuits. A chill swirls beneath my ribs. A heartbeat of cold, fluttering wings.

  The den’s window looks upon the backyard. My father lifts the grill’s lid and disappears into a smoky chuff. His arm waves as he scoops the burgers.

  My mother offers cereal, but none of us are hungry. The burgers’ least burnt bits salvaged for Chestnut’s bowl. We’re sickened yet mesmerized by the TV reports, and facts soon yield to speculation. Angry pundits declare the rules of war no longer apply, and the radicals and their ilk deserve what they have coming. The First Lady, the country’s brightest stars. Preachers who lived only to spread the word. Children and families who’d gathered for peace. Here are our nation’s martyrs. Here are the innocents owed justice and revenge.

  Hours pass, darkness, and finally we eat, toast for me, warm with melted butter, a simple comfort and with the taste on my tongue comes the night’s first tears. First from my father, then my mother and me. On TV, reports from Jacksonville and Cleveland and Des Moines. Bloodshed in the streets. The homes of dissidents set ablaze. The patriots’ flag of red and white waves before charging crowds. Then the crash from the living room.