The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  Kayla and her podmates atop the final flight. The maw below, the doorway’s cramped funneling. Some of the girls crying, others calling names. One screams they’re headed toward the fire, that they should go back, they need to go back. Old John gasps and digs a finger beneath his collar. Heather little more than a ragdoll, and only Kayla and Betty’s grip saves her from falling. Betty’s assurances a steady chant—they’ll get through this, all of them together.

  The doors’ press eases when they enter the first-floor hallway, and in the flickering white, a haze, the smoke not heavy yet strong enough to leave a bite in Kayla’s throat. Another jam at the short entrance hallway. The nurse’s office. The guard’s post with its monitor views of flashing lights and empty hallways. The entrance doors held open, and the cold tempers the smoke. The Deacon props one door, Panda Bear on the other. The girls urged to hurry, hurry.

  Betty glances back. “Give me a hand, Linda.”

  Linda slides next to Heather. Betty doubles back to Old John. His arm on her shoulder. The slump in his walk and the paleness of his cheeks. The two of them the last to exit. The courtyard’s moonscape illumination. The wide front steps, the fenced entrance with its chute and double gates. The whites herded to one side, reds on the other, a mingling on the center walk. Nurse Amy runs forward as Betty eases Old John onto the steps.

  Kayla and the sisters huddle around Heather. The sisters with their hands pulled into their sleeves. Their steamy exhales in perfect rhythm. Heather blinks, a dazed awakening. Kayla takes off her jacket and slides it over Heather’s shoulders.

  “No.” Heather’s voice a whisper.

  Kayla zips the front. “We’ll share. How’s that?” Clouds of breath between them. Heather’s face masked then revealed. Kayla’s teeth chatter.

  Heather opens her mouth. Then the gunfire. The girls flinch, a collective stoop. One burst then another. The shots close enough to pierce the alarm’s wail. “Everybody sit! Sit!” The Deacon rushes down the entrance steps. Arms waving, the desperation of a flightless bird. The girls crouch. The macadam cold, its patches of ice and snow. The sisters hold hands. Heather sits and hugs her knees. Her gaze upon the ground.

  A voice behind Kayla. “Pretty exciting, isn’t it?”

  Donna squats on the center walkway. She scoots closer. Old John on the steps, his exhales filling and collapsing the paper bag Nurse Amy holds over his mouth. Betty still by his side. “I’m sure it’s nothing. The fire, I mean.” Donna leans forward. “Although your friend seems kind of shook up, doesn’t she?”

  Panda Bear exits. A sweep of light from the opened door. His grip tight on Ashley’s arm and a redirecting shove before he goes back inside. Donna smiles. “Those twins are heavy sleepers.” She waves. “Good to see she’s OK.” She turns to Kayla. A pause, and she reaches out. “Well, lookee here.”

  Kayla’s palm presses her cross against the base of her throat. Another burst of gunfire. One of the younger girls begins to cry.

  Donna lets her hand drop. “It’s pretty.”

  Panda Bear steps back outside. In his gloved hand, a smoldering trashcan. He waves away the smoke. A quick conference with the Deacon who then turns to Nurse Amy. More gunfire, closer. The Deacon grabs the trashcan only to drop it. He curses and waves his bare hand. A kick sends the can clattering across the courtyard, a rolling echo, a spill of ash and sparks and smoke.

  “Inside!” he yells. He stands atop the steps, the hand he grabbed the can with tucked beneath his opposite armpit. The hallway light spills around him. “Everyone inside! Hurry! Right to your pods!” The smaller girls run ahead. “Hurry, ladies! Hurry, please!”

  Donna stands. “A trashcan fire. Weird how that kind of shit can happen.”

  Kayla walks beside Heavy Metal. Glances back as she passes the others. Heather holding their rags and spray bottles. The sisters with their brooms in the main hallway, their work abandoned to trail along until Heavy Metal shoos them away. Stares from the redheads as they carry their week’s linens to the white stairwell. Tensions high since the fire, Kayla and the others returning to a ransacked pod. Footlockers opened, upended cots, shelves cleared—but the ceiling tiles untouched. Another party last night after lights out. An extra cigarette, an extra sip. Kayla with her mouth covered, the sisters crying as Betty put on a baboon’s face. A hunched circling, an inspection of footlockers, a scratching of her armpits and perplexed head.

  Their stash still a secret—and there’ve been no clashes with the whites—nonevents that make this surprise visit to the Deacon all the more perplexing. Kayla braces herself. The missing hammer. The truck keys. Perhaps the whites have bent the Deacon’s ear with rumors of alcohol and cigarettes. Maybe she’ll be asked to pee in a cup. She’s done it before, her old school’s drug policy. A locked door in the nurse’s office. The vice principal waiting outside. The awkward positioning of her hand and the stream’s splash. Only now she has a truth to hide, and how many times had Fran laughed, calling her “the world’s worst liar.”

  The Deacon’s office once the principal’s. Or so Kayla assumes. An outer chamber, filing cabinets, a secretary’s desk. The stink of coffee left too long in the pot. A wooden door. Heavy Metal’s knuckles rap the pebbled glass. The door eases open. The Deacon behind a wide desk, a phone to his ear. A series of waves and a gesture to sit. Another wave to dismiss his guard. He speaks into the phone. Official business, a few questions, terse replies. Figures jotted on a yellow pad. New additions to his coat. Ribbons and medals and pins.

  Kayla forces herself to breathe. Measured inhales, the count of three. A thin, decompressing release. Her folded hands on her lap an anchor. She tightens her grip then releases. A diversion from her body’s nervous current. She calms herself by looking around, an inventory of the mundane. The desk’s framed portraits. A wife shorter than a pair of teen boys, one boy serious, the other with a wide smile, all three in their Sunday best. Framed diplomas on the walls. College, seminary school. A photo of the Deacon shaking hands with the Mayor. Plaques, honors from civic groups. Shelves of binders and thick books. Trophies topped by golden basketball players. Kayla thinks of the principal who once worked here, of the magpie and the cuckoo.

  He hangs up. “I apologize for that.” He pushes aside his worn-covered Bible and sets a folder on the desk. WHS stamped in red, Kayla’s name on the folder’s tab. He opens the cover and sifts through the papers. Year-end report cards, citations for sports and volunteer work. The stapled reports from psychologists, many highlighted in yellow, tables and statistics and dry narratives. The little girl who triangulated concepts and experienced them in three dimensions. A gift, the way some could play music by ear. A talent masked by the lack of awkwardness that burdened so many with her condition.

  “Forgive me,” he says. He licks his fingers and turns another page. “I wanted to reread this section one more time before we spoke.”

  Kayla sits back. Relief, at least a bit. Her attention on the folder. Glued inside the front cover, a string of picture-day portraits. Nine images, nine years counted back. Kindergarten. Second grade’s missing front teeth. Fifth, the dress her grandmother had sewn. Sixth grade’s braces. Seventh the year she let her hair grow. Artificial backgrounds, and lost in time, the moments before the bulbs’ flash. The shuffling of a long line, the last minute fixing of hair, the photographer’s urgings to sit up straight. Then the last picture. The war and Shut-In two months away. Her smile genuine, unknowing. Her eyes yet to witnesses so much. The hermit crab’s urge to hollow out that girl and crawl inside. The wish to slip back into the luxury of quantum possibilities.

  The Deacon sets down the report. “It takes some time for records to catch up. Yours just came a few days ago. Usually I just meet with girls who have a disciplinary history.” He smiles. “But your file, I must admit, is interesting in a very different way.”

  He pulls one paper aside. “The nurse will need that.” He flips through a few more pages. “What do you think about your classes here? Are they too easy?
”

  She clears her throat. “Yes.”

  “Mr. James told me as much.” He gestures toward the file’s papers. “And this confirms it. Are you bored here?”

  “Not really. Not overall. I think Mr. James is a good teacher. He tries to help everyone.”

  “Yes, he’s a fine Christian.”

  Her vertebrae like a string pulled taut then plucked. The Deacon’s eyes searching, a mining of spaces she doesn’t want him to know. A violation, and the tremors strengthen, the epicenter in her core, in the meat beneath her ribs. The Deacon’s voice recedes beneath her temples’ squish.

  “Are you cold?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I could turn up the heat.”

  “No.” A pause. “Thank you.”

  He rises and walks toward her and rests on the desk’s edge. A polite distance observed, yet he still looms. The window light blocked, and around him, an eclipse’s ragged shine. The leg closest to Kayla crosses over the opposite knee. A pose easy to imagine rehearsed in a bedroom mirror. A grooming of details—the hands clasped on his crossed knee, his fatherly grin. In Kayla, spasms, the urge to rock.

  He speaks. Words as practiced as his pose. A speech more intimate than his morning convocations. His delivery punctuated with nods and a wink that makes Kayla shudder. Few words penetrate her fog—loss and empty spaces and how the ultimate test of character was the path one chose during difficult times—yet at the fog’s center, a scintillating and mute clarity. The play of his Adam’s apple above his white collar. The sway of his new medals. His hands’ knuckled ridges, hands at rest but which she sees in a bloodless grip around bats and ropes. Around a naked girl’s throat. His tone calm yet beneath, the rumble of screaming men. Of drumbeats. She breathes deep and her tremors ebb into a hardening. A stone in her gut. The weight of hatred.

  “I know there are activities I don’t see. Some more egregious than others.” He uncrosses his leg and returns his foot to the floor. “It’s obvious you’re a very intelligent young lady. And I see you’re different than the others. Your father a professor, your mother a writer.” He leans forward, a tone of intimates, of near equals. “I’d like you to be my eyes and ears in the red wing. Not a tattletale or a snitch. But someone who’d give me a heads-up about other things. Important things. The things that could lead to trouble. I don’t want any more of my girls to go the way Carolyn did.” He smiles. “And of course, I’d make my appreciation known in ways that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Perhaps you could make some phone calls here in my office. Or we could help you send out some letters.”

  Kayla stares. He’s waiting, but she can’t leave her clear center and step back into the fog. He leans against his desk. “Think about it.” He clasps his hands. “And in the meantime, let’s pray for the strength to make wise decisions.”

  He lowers his head. His lips move, his eyes closed, and with God on his tongue, and it becomes safe to stare. The cold branches through her, and with it, a revelation. Murder—for the first time, she can justify the spilling of blood. An equation balanced. A quantity discerned. A subtraction deserved.

  The girls outside. Another steely afternoon. Kayla thinks of Eskimos and their words for snow. Her own vocabulary growing for a sunless sky. Gray. Ash. Pencil. Dust. Christmas decorations in a few nearby homes. Light strings in the windows. Cardboard Santas behind fogged glass. The reds shiver alongside the fence. Their shoes tap for warmth. Betty calls out directions as Panda Bear unlocks the first gate and Heavy Metal enters the fenced chute. The girls’ football on the other side of the barbed wire, a careless punt, Betty taking blame for the ball’s trajectory. “Guess the NFL ain’t calling anytime soon,” she calls to Heavy Metal as he steps onto the sidewalk. “Over there. Across the street. It rolled behind that car. Maybe under it.”

  Kayla breaks from the crowd’s fringe. Her hands in her pockets and her gaze down, a pose, she hopes, of thoughtless wandering. The macadam by the loading dock deserted. The breeze stiffer here. Heather nearby, hands in her pockets. A nod, and Kayla crouches by the pickup’s door. Another pantomime, the tying of her shoe. She glances up. The cafeteria’s fogged windows, her pod above. She lifts the door’s handle. A click and the door swings back. Her body low, a pained angle, her elbows and chest on the seat. A toolbox on the passenger side. A thermos. A pair of rubber boots. A scent that takes her back to waking in Fran’s garage. She slides the key into the ignition. A quarter turn, a guitar’s blasting stab. The crackle of blown speakers.

  She slides the key back into her pocket. A nod from Heather; the door’s shutting click masked by the girls’ cheers. The ball retrieved and tossed over the fence. Betty’s hands reach above the others. A snag and a return to the younger girls.

  “Thank you!” Betty cries.

  The girls line up in the entrance hallway. The fluorescent lights above, the furnace-rumble in Kayla’s sneakers. The whites in front, the reds behind. Nurse Amy and Panda Bear by the door. Heavy Metal pulling up the rear. The Deacon paces from front to back, lips moving, a final headcount. The younger ones chat; Kayla and the older girls quiet. All anxious. This night of memories. The fear of abandoning the known. The fear of revisiting what was. Kayla rubs her fur collar against her neck. Nurse Amy calls for everyone to don their hats and gloves. The radio predicting single digits. Old John steps from the doorway of the video monitor room and helps a young red pull her hat over her ears. “It’s a cold, cold night, sweetie.”

  The Deacon claims the space between the reds and the whites. His voice fills the hallway. “Two by two! Two by two!” His nerves betrayed by his officious stride, his fretful gaze. “Four blocks and we stay together. No one lags, no one wanders. No one decides to set the pace themselves.” He calls ahead. “Ready when you are.”

  The double doors open. A rush of cold, exclamations from the girls in front. The line inches forward, and is it the wind’s sting or are the lights actually dimming, another fade, the building’s currents receding before the chill. The papers tacked to the hallway’s billboard rustle. “Jesus,” Betty says, her words muffled by her wrapped scarf. “I ain’t cut out for this shit.”

  Outside, a backup on the wide steps, a funnel through the fenced chute. Kayla’s shoulder brushes Heather’s in the narrow passage. The school’s floodlights behind and a walk through chain-link shadows. The sidewalk and Heavy Metal locks the gate behind them. Kayla turns. This her first step outside the fence since the warm, rainy night she arrived. A night no longer real. A night they all experienced—red and white. The school’s lights shine, the windows’ illusion of warmth. The plow fixed to the pickup’s bumper, another forecast of snow, and from the kitchen, whispers of shortages—sugar, coffee, rice. The Deacon steps into the street. His gloved hand waves, a stern urging for Kayla and the other stragglers to close ranks. “Only a couple blocks. Let’s stay together.”

  Kayla’s seen the church steeple from the common room. The view from iso even prettier, a white pillar above the roofs. A cross against the clouds. The Deacon’s surprise dinner announcement—the arrangements he made for the girls to attend a Christmas Eve candlelight service. His wide smile wilted beneath the girls’ silence. Their progress slow. The numbing wind, and the girls bow their heads or turn their backs, their scarfs like fluttering banners. The unshoveled sections of sidewalk. The slip of shoes over paths rutted and icy. They pass a window fogged and ringed with lights. Kayla pictures her attic, the cardboard box of ornaments and tangled lights, their globes of red and green, and she wonders if the mob took those too. She slows as she passes the corner’s burned house. Glassless windows and collapsed walls. The blurring of snow on charred remains.

  They could run, Kayla thinks. The five of them scattered in different directions. The Deacon could outstride her for a block or two, but if she got a head start, he’d never catch her. But they have no plans, no rendezvous point, no beckoning sanctuary. And part of her is frightened. The world suddenly so vast. These caged months, a horizon snuffed by walls
and fences. The maze of unfamiliar streets. The canopy of a frigid sky. The sensation of being swallowed whole.

  A commotion at the line’s front as they turn the next corner. Nurse Amy and the Deacon usher the girls to the far sidewalk. Nurse Amy in the street, her hands outstretched, a crossing guard’s pose. “Don’t look, don’t look,” she says, but Kayla can see the whites’ upturned faces in the streetlight. The younger girls gasping, the older ones silent. The Deacon’s stern admonishments to hurry. To keep their eyes down.

  Betty the first to reach the corner. “Holy fuck.” The sisters clutch each other’s sleeves. Heather’s gloved hand seeks Kayla’s, a tug as they cross the narrow street.

  The church waits at the next corner. On the block in between, a single light pole, and dangling from its branching arm, a man hung from a rope. The lamp’s shine close and harsh, the light of Renaissance angels. The man’s head slumped to the side, snow in his hair, on his eyelashes and brows. Snow on his shoulders and the folds of his shirt. His socks and shoes taken, his feet as blue as his face. A sign pinned to his chest. Traitor. The mob that knotted the rope gone. Below, the dead man’s shadow on the street.

  “Hurry, children.” The Deacon waves his long arms, his face pale and ruddy. Kayla slows, powerless to pick up her pace or divert her gaze. Heather tugs her hand, a whisper: “Come on, baby.” The rope angles down, its knotted end secured around a porch railing. “Kayla!” the Deacon cries, and she finds her feet again. A look back as they near the church. The man frozen, belonging to neither the earth nor the stars.

  Their sneakers on the church’s brownstone steps. Kayla thinks of the old quarries outside town. A watery pit she visited with her father, a perch on a high cliff, their voices and echoes captured in a well of stones. The heavy oak doors close behind them. The girls cram into the dim vestibule. The organ’s murmur. The smell of perfume and winter coats and incense. The squeak of sneakers over the floor’s stone. The hanged man half a block away, but Kayla brushes her shoulder, feeling his shadow. On a side table, flowers in a vase. Kayla’s finger circles a soft petal. A lifetime has passed since she’s seen a bloom. Thoughts of her father’s garden, and in her, another kind of pull, the knowing that somewhere near, flowers grow. A hothouse carved from the cold, a place of light and warmth and color.