The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  The nurse: “These aren’t the white stairs.”

  “Does it matter if everyone’s in class—”

  Nurse Amy points up the stairwell. “Turn around and go down the other side. Now. Didn’t the hallway guard stop you?”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  The nurse sighs. “Up, up, ladies. And I will check with the guard. And Mr. Thompson.”

  The girls in white walk back up. The blond pauses at the top’s landing. “Have a good day, Nurse Amy.” The redhead lumbering in her wake.

  Nurse Amy holds the door. Behind her, a hand-painted poster of blue and red and green. Positivity, Productivity, Community. “This is the red stairwell,” the nurse says. “And on the second floor of this wing are the red pods and classrooms. Each side has a common room for TV and gatherings. Whites can’t be on the red side unless they’re supervised, just like you need to be if you ever pass the guard’s post and venture into the white side.” As Heather passes, the nurse asks, “How’s Betty this morning?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Heather says.

  They pause in the wide hallway. To their left and right, long corridors lined with shut doors. From the hall’s end, a hesitant piano, a disharmony soothed by children’s voices, one of the patriotic anthems Kayla heard blaring from Slater’s porch. Kayla arranges the layout in her head. The east wing. The red stairs. A shorter hallway before them, its center marked by a pair of sawhorses and a metal desk. A man in a green scrub top settles behind the desk. His hands readjust his belt, a newspaper beneath his arm. The nurse turns to Kayla. “Betty’s going to test you a little, I imagine. She’s in your classes. And your pod. It takes her a while to get used to new things. Stand up for yourself but give her a little room. She usually warms up in time.” They pause outside a classroom’s shut door. “Think that’s good advice, Heather?”

  Heather purses her lips. A moment of pause then, “Yes.”

  The nurse knocks. Kayla looks through the door’s small window. A middle-aged man strides from his podium and opens the door. A lanyard and a dangling ID, a loosened tie and rolled-up sleeves. A mustache and thinning hair.

  He opens the door and sighs. “Another one?”

  “Her name’s Kayla,” the nurse says.

  He steps aside. The whispers behind him. “Come on in. Not like we’re doing anything important.”

  Heather’s faint smile. “Nurse Amy said you wouldn’t mind the interruption.”

  “Did she?”

  Kayla the last to enter. Nurse Amy and Mr. James huddle behind the desk. Notes on the chalkboard—fur trade, Mississippi. The east-facing windows tall and yellowed. The city’s grit, the soot of fires. An avalanche of dirtied sun. The girls sitting near the windows reduced to shadows. Her hands clasped before her, Heather drifts to the window just beyond the teacher’s desk. Her thin frame at first a silhouette, then consumed by the glare.

  A rippling of whispers. The words new girl repeated. The weight of stares upon Kayla. She lifts her gaze. The voices fade, and she studies the dust motes’ sun-lit dance. Their journeys random, yet in them, she discerns the loops and dips of her graphs. Testaments to hidden forces and random beauty. Her father told her each recognition of beauty was an invitation, and Kayla trades her body’s anchoring physics for a place amid the swirl. A memory. Fifth grade, the riverside. Summer blue and the sun bright upon the water. Kayla blew dandelion seeds, her cheeks wet with tears. A black dress for her and her mother. Her father in his coat and tie, bare feet and rolled-up pants. Her mother braided Kayla’s hair as they sat on a boulder. The water lapped the rock, a lullaby’s rhythm. The dandelion seeds lifted on the breeze. A moment taken to regroup after Kayla’s grandfather’s funeral.

  “You don’t think he’s in heaven, do you?” In her, the exhaustion of tears allowed to run dry. A trance woven by the water, by the tug of her mother’s hands.

  “I like to think of him on a journey.” He lifted a smooth stone from the water’s edge and cupped it in his palm. “One I’m not wise enough to understand. And I’m sure for a guy like your grandpa, it’s a wonderful and amazing trip.”

  “But it’s not the him we know that’s doing that.”

  He threw the stone, a small splash, and joined them on the boulder. He slid his unknotted tie through his collar. “His body is on its own journey, the type of journey this world takes. The tangible things. The things we can see.” He wrapped the tie around her neck and secured a knot. “The things that made grandpa the guy we loved, they’re not the kinds of gifts we can hold in our hands. That’s the part I think is on the journey. Maybe heaven. Or someplace like it.” He smiled. “I like to think it’s all a mystery, which is pretty cool.”

  “In Mass they talk about the mystery of faith.”

  “There are a lot of good things we can learn from Mass.”

  Kayla smiled. “Like you ever go.”

  He nodded. “I should. I will. More at least.”

  A crane flew past, wings outstretched, a glide inches above the water’s surface. “What do you think happens?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What do you want to happen?”

  “I’d like to think that when we go, we’re released into the all and everything of this life. The oceans and the clouds, the forests and cities. All of it and us just tumbling through.”

  A sharp voice shatters her drift. “Are you deaf, girl?”

  Kayla blinks and struggles to pinpoint the voice amid the shadows and glare.

  Mr. James steps from behind his desk. “That’s enough, Betty.”

  “I’m just asking where she’s from, Mr. J.” The girl’s tone jarring after Kayla’s drift. “I asked twice, and she’s just staring into space.” Laughter from the others. “I’m worried she’s deaf. Maybe deaf and dumb. Maybe both kinds of dumb.”

  “I assure you she’s not,” Mr. James says. “Although there are some mornings I wish I was.”

  “Oakmont.” Kayla’s voice dry, still lost amid the river’s purr.

  “What’s that, girl?”

  “Oakmont,” Kayla says. She takes a breath. “I’m from Oakmont.”

  “Oakmont? Like south along the river? Isn’t that fancy. Most Oakmont girls get to wear white. Who’s slumming it now, Miss Oakmont?”

  More laughter. The nurse, her clipboard tucked beneath her arm, rests a hand on Kayla’s shoulder. “Not a girl here I didn’t check in. Not one of you who didn’t come in a bit shook up, no matter where you’re from or how tough you thought you were. In that way, there aren’t any of you who’re different than the rest.”

  “That’s the truth, Nurse Amy.” Kayla still unable to see Betty’s face. “And now tell us another truth—you like us better than them snooty whites. Just a little bit, right?”

  The nurse smiles. “You know I don’t love one color more than the other. Being fair to all is the only kind of love I’m dishing here.”

  “I was thinking about coming with you, Nurse Amy,” Betty says. “If it’s OK with Mr. James.”

  Mr. James returns to his podium. “That would be agreeable with me.”

  “And what ails you, Betty?”

  “Stomach ache.” She groans. “Did you see breakfast today?”

  “You know the rules for getting out of class,” the nurse says.

  Other girls join Betty, a lilting chorus: “Fever. Blood. Vomit.”

  “Very good.” The nurse offers a final squeeze for Kayla’s shoulder.

  Betty calls out: “I still love you, Nurse Amy!”

  A wave as she exits. “And I love you, too.”

  The class’s laughter cut short when Mr. James asks Heather to escort Kayla to Carolyn’s desk. Heather steps from the window, a lifting from the light. She leads them down a narrow aisle. A science fact—a hydrogen atom is over 99.9999% empty space, and as she walks, Kayla imagines herself in the same way. Her heart her nucleus, her will and awareness a spinning electron. The machine free to claim the empty space she’s left hollow. She
squints against the light, but with each step, more comes into focus. Girls in maroon scrub tops. Betty with arms folded and an unapologetic stare. A scrutiny mirrored by the others. Kayla both the new girl and an echo of their stories. Five rows, five desks each, only a few empty seats. Heather motions to the desk behind hers.

  The desks old. Hinged wooden lids, varnished and nicked. Kayla’s with a pair of etched initials—cj. Mr. James at the class’s front. “Let’s get back to the business at hand, people. Page 88.”

  Heather turns. She holds up her book. A blue cover. A painting of the Founding Fathers. Men in frilly shirts and leggings and powdered wigs. “In your desk,” Heather whispers.

  Kayla lifts the lid. A whine of hinges. Inside, a slim metal ledge, a broken pencil. Kayla unrolls a balled paper scrap. A girl’s handwriting, a passed note, a smear of ink. The page torn, its message lost. Kayla slides out the blue-covered book and sets it on the desktop.

  Mr. James speaks. The roots of the French and Indian War. The book’s binding loose. Inside the cover, a twenty-year string of previous owners. Over the names, a red stamp—DISCARDED. Kayla turns the pages, a parade of pictures and maps. New World explorers. The Columbian Exchange. The Pilgrims and the hardship of New England winters. All of it old news. Mr. James lectures about a young George Washington’s military exploits at Fort Necessity. Kayla studies Washington’s dashing portrait on page 88 and imagines the truths unwritten. Genocide. Smallpox. The brutality of the Middle Passage. Her father’s voice: “The victors write the history books. The rest of us have to be smart enough to read between the lines.”

  Kayla looks up from the book. The girl beside Heather turns in her seat. Her hair short and oddly shorn. Her stare blank and unashamed.

  History ends at 9:00. The French defeated, the Revolution brewing. Math next, a switching of texts. Betty’s desk lid slams. A mumbled apology. Her head down fifteen minutes later and her arms folded on her unopened book. The plotting and graphing of lines, the linear relations Kayla learned in second grade. Mr. James walks the aisles. He lets Betty sleep and crouches beside the girl with the cropped hair. A red pencil from his shirt pocket, a line sketched as he explains the connection between equation and graph. A sigh when he stands, a rub of his knee. He picks up Kayla’s worksheet and sets it back down. “Very nice,” he says.

  Betty lifts her head and twirls her finger. A tone sarcastic and bored. “Yeah, Oakmont.”

  The class dismisses at 10:30, and the girls file out for their morning work shifts. “You’re with me,” Heather says.

  Betty’s shoulder bumps Kayla’s. Betty shuffling, her eyes half closed, but open enough to know what she’s doing. Anger flares in Kayla’s hollowed space. She endured Missy Blough’s barbs for months before uttering a word, but she’s shed that version of herself. She thinks again of a tennis ball and a flashlight, the notion of shared yet opposite worlds, and she wonders how she can be both dead on the inside yet so raw. Betty mumbles, “Watch where you’re going, Oakmont.”

  Before Kayla can respond, Heather tugs her arm and leads her down their wing’s stairwell. They keep to the line’s left even though they’re alone. Heather opens the door and allows Kayla to pass. They walk the downstairs hallway and pass the side corridor that leads to the main entrance and nurse’s office. Kayla committing it all to memory. Steps and doors, windows and hallways. Her footsteps a path marked in red. Her eyes open, a dovetailing of the visual and physical. A map of her own. Her desires to know and analyze ramped from the conceptual to the imperative of survival.

  “They limit the passing time between us and the whites,” Heather says. “Their classes end five minutes earlier. They eat before us. We’ll see them after meals and in Large Group after breakfast. Outside that, they like to keep us apart.”

  A push through the cafeteria’s swinging doors. A tiled floor. White walls and beneath the high ceiling lights, the fog of dishwashers and boiling pots. The serving line to their left. Stainless steel, a runner for trays, glass shields and empty warming wells. The kitchen entrances behind, and from them, the clatter of trays slid in and out of ovens. The call of women’s voices. A radio and the warm scent of dough. The floor claimed by circular tables, each with eight bolted seats. Caged windows along the far wall. A sturdy woman in a hairnet and blue rubber gloves stacks trays and silverware in the line’s cart.

  Heather leads Kayla to a nook in the cafeteria’s rear. “Wait here,” she says and slips inside a supply closet. The closet opposite an alarmed door. The door’s window looks out on a dumpster and small loading dock. Next to the closet, another door marked Staff Only. Kayla steps into the nook’s cramped space, the cafeteria cut from sight, and glances out the door’s window. Beyond the loading dock, the schoolyard macadam. The razor-wire fence. Beyond the fence, a line of row homes where life, she assumes, goes on uninterrupted.

  Heather closes the closet with a nudge of her hip. In her hands, spray bottles and white cloths. She hands one of each to Kayla. She nods to each door. “That’s the loading dock. And that’s the back stairwell. We’re not supposed to use that unless we’re with a guard.”

  The girls work together, each taking half a table, the surfaces sprayed and wiped. “Do you usually do this on your own?” Kayla asks.

  “Carolyn used to help me.” She pulls back her hair and tucks it beneath her collar.

  “Where did she go?”

  “Away. That’s all we know. That’s all we ever know. She and Betty were pretty tight. At least when they weren’t fighting.” Heather’s rubbing harder when she hits a stubborn spot. The bolted chairs tremble. The veins in her arms strain blue. “Cafeteria’s not bad. There’s worse places.” She grins. “Maybe not, but still, it isn’t bad, considering.”

  The last table, and they return to the supply closet. Heather takes Kayla’s rag and bottle and emerges with a pair of wide dust mops. They start at the cafeteria’s back. The mop heads silent and gliding, a twisting to reach beneath the tables.

  Women in hairnets settle serving trays into the line’s wells. Their mitted hands lift the trays’ lids. Rising steam, their faces veiled. Rice, a pale mix of corn and beans, squares of white fish in a buttery sauce. Dirt collects along the twined fringes of Kayla’s mop, and in her, the sense of rift. The desire to claim her body for herself. Her fear the machine’s sustenance also carries its seed. Balancing this, her pocketed necklace. Scant grams yet a connection as heavy as chains. A woman in a stained apron lifts another lid, more fish. The fish’s stink, the woman’s fogged glasses. Kayla nudges her dirt pile and studies the food. She’ll accept the machine’s offerings and spit out the seeds. She’ll keep herself strong. She’ll put together the pieces and recognize her deliverance when it stands before her.

  The woman with the fogged glasses speaks. “Wake up, you.”

  Kayla guides her mop’s pile to meet Heather’s. The girls crouch. Heather sweeps the dirt, Kayla holding the dustpan.

  A guard enters. A young man, a key-jangling belt. More adornments around his straining belly—a walkie-talkie, a set of zip ties, a baton. He calls to the women behind the serving line. “Ready for round one?”

  Kayla dumps the last scoop into the garbage can and wipes her palms on her sweatpants. She rolls the trashcan to the cafeteria’s rear and waits as Heather returns their things to the supply closet. She follows Heather back to the entrance. Behind the guard, the doorway glass and a lineup of girls in white. In front, the blond girl from the steps. Behind her, the hulking redhead and a frowning brute who could only be her twin. All three with their eyes fixed on Kayla.

  Heather turns. Her tone passive yet clear. “Don’t let them stare you down.”

  The fog’s faded from the line worker’s glasses. She raises a spatula. “Send them in.”

  The entrance composed of two swinging doors. The girls in white behind the right door, a single file on their side of the hall. The guard waves Heather and Kayla through the left door. Another guard, this one stoop-shouldered and grandfathe
rly, straddles the taped center at the end of the white line. A murmur from the hall’s other side. New girl. New girl.

  Heather unflinching, a forward gaze, balance-beam steps. Kayla glances back. The girls in white staring. One with a raised middle finger. Another drags a thumb across her throat. Heather and Kayla reach the stairwell. The slanting bank of sun. Heather squinting, her pearl-shine skin. Her reedy voice. “Told you not to look at them.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Heather?”

  The girls pause. Nurse Amy at the stair’s bottom. Her words echo up the well’s concrete and cinderblock. “Take Kayla to your pod. She’ll take Carolyn’s bunk. I’ll bring her towel and linens.”

  Heather climbs the stairs. In Kayla, a shifting of memory and vision, new lines for her map. As she stepped from the police car, she blinked away the rain and saw another floor, its windows smaller and unlit. None of the stairwells she’s seen reach beyond the second. Perhaps she was mistaken, fooled by fear and the night.

  Mr. James’s class, then down the red wing to another door. Their sneakers’ light squeak across the tile. Inside, a narrow hallway and walls of unadorned plywood nailed to vertical beams. Kayla pictures her morning classroom cut in half. Five bunks. At the end of each bunk, a footlocker and small set of shelves. Along one wall, a long desk, mismatched chairs. The bunk in the near corner stripped. A footlocker with a yawning lid.

  Betty sits by the window. A vigil fixed on the schoolyard below. She turns once. Her chiding tone replaced by indifference. “You’re not in Kansas anymore, Oakmont.”

  Two girls sit cross-legged on opposite ends of a bunk. Playing cards in their hands, rummy runs and triplets and a long discard pile on the pilled blanket. The nearest girl the one with the oddly cropped hair. The other girl obviously her sister, the shared configurations of noses and eyes and chins.

  Heather gestures toward the girls. “That’s Linda and Chris.”

  “I’m Linda,” says the one with short hair. She offers a wave.