The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  Donna looks up. “Where’re you keeping it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh—one more thing.”

  Kayla pauses in the doorway. “You’re not getting anything more.”

  “I want that necklace.” She tucks the box under her arm and smiles. “You should see yourself. All that tough-girl shit just washed right out of you, didn’t it? Give me the fucking necklace or I’m bringing the Deacon up. The beanpole motherfucker will have no trouble lifting every goddamn tile, and when he finds your shit, I’m guessing you’ll be saying goodbye to your girl Betty.” She frowns. “That would make you sad, wouldn’t it?”

  A pained heartbeat. Her throat constricted. White sparks across her eyes. Distance in her limbs as she kneels. The lid’s squeaking hinges. Her hand lost in her clothes’ soft folds. A cupping of the delicate chain.

  Donna holds out her hand. Kayla lets the necklace slip, a coiling of chain then the crucifix. Donna pauses. “I’ll give it back if you tell me how your father died.”

  “They hung him.” A desert in Kayla’s throat. Her gaze fixed on Donna’s hand. “There were twenty of them. Maybe more. All of them cowards.” She looks Donna in the eye. Her words deliberate, sturdy, lifted on a rising tide. “Not one of them was half the man my father was. Not one. They beat him. They put a rope around his neck and pulled him up. He choked. He turned white then blue. He fought and kicked. Then he didn’t.”

  Donna silent, and when she speaks, a new tone, even and steely. “I saw half my father’s face ripped off. Just like that. I turned my back. He’d just picked me up from practice. He did everything after my mom died. A car drove by. The blast swallowed every other sound—the birds, the kids in the street. I turned, and he was lying in the driveway. I went to hold him and the gray shit of his brain was all over my hands. I still feel it there.” She opens her hand and studies the necklace. “His one eye was looking at me. His lips were moving. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know anything.” She sighs. “The fuckers who shot him listened to people like your father, and none of them, your father included, was half the man he was.” She tosses the necklace onto Kayla’s cot. “Keep it. It’s a piece of shit anyway.”

  Kayla retrieves the necklace. Its weight a whisper after the heaviness of seeing it in Donna’s palm.

  “I heard you think your mother’s alive.”

  “She is.”

  “You’re fucking naïve for someone who’s supposed to be so goddamn smart.” Donna brushes past her then turns in the hallway. “Everything from before is dead for us. White, red—it doesn’t matter. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t.”

  The room dark. The girls on the floor by the window. Chris wears the new slippers, the rest of their Christmas take in the circle’s center. The window closed, but the cigarette’s blowback lingers. Betty holds the whiskey to her lips. A sip then a closing of eyes. “Thanks for making sure those bitches didn’t get the good stuff, Oakmont.”

  “Peppermint schnapps.” Linda makes a face. “Yuck.”

  “They got enough,” Heather says. “They should’ve gotten shit.”

  Silence. The building’s rhythms, water and steam. A train along the riverside tracks. “I wonder where we’ll be next Christmas,” Chris says.

  “Here,” Heather says. “Or someplace like it.”

  “I hope we’re still together,” Linda says. “Well, I hope you find your mom, Kayla. But the rest of us, I hope we’re together.”

  “I hope. I wish.” Betty climbs atop the desk and pushes aside the ceiling tile. “I’m tired of hoping and wishing just to have a fair fucking shake.” She returns the bottle and produces the truck key. She shakes the ring, a faint jingle. “We need to make a plan, just in case shit gets real in a hurry.” She replaces the tile and sits with the others. “A bust-out script if they try to split us up.”

  Chris takes the key. “Does anyone know how to drive?”

  “Shit,” Betty says. “Driving can’t be that hard if those morons do it.”

  “It’s a stick shift,” Linda says. “I have no idea how that works.”

  Kayla holds out her hand and Chris gives her the key. “I’ve driven stick. On my father’s truck. A couple times, not a lot.”

  Betty smiles. “Well, we’ve got ourselves a driver. Old Oakmont’s going to be our chauffer. That makes a sweet deal even sweeter.”

  Kayla tosses Betty the key. “Didn’t say I was any good.”

  “Better than any of us,” Heather says.

  “We got us a key and a truck and a driver.” Betty pushes up the ceiling tile and returns the key. “The hardest part’s already done, right?”

  “We could start thinking about the details of how to do it,” Linda says.

  “One always needs to explore their options.” Chris pauses. She reaches out and squeezes her sister’s hand. “That’s what our mom used to say.”

  “Have a plan,” Kayla says, her voice soft.

  “Let’s take a week,” Heather says. “All of us start looking at things in a new way. And every night, we’ll compare notes.”

  A smile on Chris’s face. “It’ll be kind of like spying. Like in the movies”

  “What about the trash?” Kayla asks. “Heather and I do the cafeteria, and I’ll bet there’s shit we can use in there, stuff they just throw out.” She turns to Linda. “You could do the same with the office trash.”

  “There’s always takeout menus in the guard’s break room,” Linda says.

  “So we breakout and then get some fucking eggrolls?” Betty says.

  “A lot of them have little maps on them, you know? We put a few of them together, and we’d have a better idea of where we’re going.”

  Betty puts an arm around Linda’s shoulder. “Now that’s solid thinking, my sister.”

  “And the guards throw out old pens sometimes,” Chris says. She stabs the circle’s empty center. “We could melt the plastic and make a knife-type thingy. Kind of like how Carolyn did.”

  “See?” Heather says. “There’re all kinds of shit we can bring together. Everything we find, everything we see, we’ll bring back here.”

  “We might have to wait until the plow comes off the truck.” Chris takes off the slippers and sets them on the circle’s pile. “That’s pretty conspicuous.”

  “That’s fine,” Kayla says. “It’s not about going tomorrow or next week or even next month. It’s about us making a plan. A good plan that could get us out of here, just in case. All of us.”

  “All of us,” Heather says.

  The sister’s unison: “All of us.”

  “Goddamn right, all of us,” Betty says.

  “Then it’s settled,” Heather says. “Every night we’ll meet and talk. We’ll keep notes. When people come and go. When they use the bathroom. When they have lunch. And we’ll pocket anything that looks like it could help us. Not one of us who isn’t smarter than Heavy Metal and Panda Bear put together. We ought to be able to find any number of fuckups in their routine.”

  Linda turns to Betty. “You’ve got to promise not to do anything to get into trouble. I’m afraid what happened to Carolyn will happen to you.”

  “‘Not do anything?’ That’s pretty vague.”

  “You know what she means,” Chris says.

  Betty raises her hand. “I hereby promise not to fuck up. I promise to lead a quiet and peaceful life—”

  An explosion shakes the windows. A shock in Kayla’s chest. Snow dislodged from the window cage mesh, a breath of gray. Voices and cries from other rooms. The rhythm of Old John’s limping run. The concussion lingers, a resonating in Kayla’s gut. The girls gather at the window. A plume billows over the rooftops—a half dozen or more blocks away—Kayla shocked by the distance, her assumption the bomb had gone off across the street. “Fucking A,” Betty says.

  “The police station’s somewhere over there,” Heather says. “At least I think it is.”

  “Or was,” Betty says.

  Sirens wail, and the girls
settle back into their cots. Flashes of red on the windows and ceiling. The sisters’ beds pushed together. “Can I come over?” Kayla whispers.

  “Yes,” Heather says.

  The floor cold beneath Kayla’s socks. Her bed lifted and set near Heather’s. A scrape as she pushes the last few inches. Their opened coats on top of them, a final layer of warmth, and beneath the coats, the girls hold hands. More sirens, then gunfire, short bursts. Kayla still, waiting for the next shot.

  Linda’s voice first. Thin, soft, her inflections muted, her sister joining before the chorus. Kayla hasn’t sung “From Here to There” since a sunny day on her father’s campus. A life with no claim upon her now. The room’s chill on her lips, she sings, the five of them together for the second verse. More a prayer than an anthem.

  A lull after they finish. Chris the first to speak. “Goodnight, Betty. Goodnight, Kayla and Heather.”

  “Night, Betty,” Linda says. “Night, Kayla—”

  “Can’t we just say ‘Goodnight, everybody?’” Betty asks. “Like this—goodnight, ladies. I love you all.”

  “That’s nice,” Linda says.

  “Fucking A,” Betty says.

  The sisters laugh. Heather whispers, loud enough for only Kayla to hear. “Night, Kayla.”

  “Goodnight.”

  A week passes. A secret thrill for Kayla, for all of them. A new awareness, a perception that pushes aside the drudgery. At night, they hold their meetings. The rationing of cigarettes. Their whiskey down to the last pint. A plastic shopping bag fills with their scourings—twine, plastic silverware, thumbtacks, a nearly depleted roll of duct tape.

  Linda and Chris focus on the guards. Their lunch breaks and check-ins. The days they pull the overnight shift. How long Heavy Metal spends in the lav with the morning paper. When Panda Bear texts his girlfriend. Betty feigns a series of migraines. The nurse’s office, the cool washrag pulled from her eyes as she notes the front hallway’s comings and goings. The teachers and deliverymen. The handful of cafeteria workers who attend the Deacon’s after-lunch prayer session.

  Heather and Kayla’s attention on the pickup, the delivery gate and its lock and the keys that jangle from the guards’ rings. The gate swings back for food deliveries and the laundry’s weekly drop off. Kayla counts the seconds it takes a guard to exit a running truck, open the gate, and lock it from the other side. She times the minutes needed to secure the plow. They identify the cars parked curbside. Nurse Amy and Mr. James’s minivans. The rusting wheel wells and chrome muffler of Panda Bear’s low-slung beater. The Deacon’s black pickup.

  Heather keeps their notes. The tablet they received for Christmas, names replaced with symbols, times recorded in an arithmetic code Kayla taught her. Linda cuts a square for each player. Their identifying symbol in the center. The Deacon’s halo. Panda Bear’s cellphone. A devil-horn salute for Heavy Metal. The upper right corner for their arrival time. Lower right for departure. Upper left for their schedules’ irregularities. Lower left the wild card space. Other squares cut for the cafeteria’s schedule, the truck, the front and back gates. The papers laid out across the semicircle’s center. The girls arranging and rearranging, Kayla seeking patterns and sharing them with the others. Whispered debates, possibilities headier than whiskey. Should they go on a weekend or weekday? Morning or evening? Bad weather or good? Who should join Kayla in the truck’s cab? Should they escape beneath a diversion’s cover?

  The meetings end. The papers gathered. Their final conversations dreamy conjectures. Kayla’s grandmother’s house their goal. Five girls in a rattling pickup, the blind navigation of side streets until they reach the river road. The others not interested in Kayla’s worries about finding her way; instead, they demand her stories, tales embellished for their entertainment. The haze over morning pastures. Spring’s goldenrod. July’s fireflies and bullfrogs. The warmth of a December hearth. Her grandmother’s garden, as large as a basketball court. The pear and apple trees. The wandering chickens.

  The girls back in their cots. The lull before sleep. Betty’s voice: “Chickens and bullfrogs. Who’d have thought I’d ever end up in a crazy, fucking place like that?”

  Heather and Kayla nudge their dust piles toward the cafeteria’s back alcove. Their brooms’ whisper and the cafeteria radio’s patriotic songs. A moment’s hesitation, the pocketing of a bobby pin before they sweep the pile into a dustpan. They pause by the loading-dock door. Outside, Heavy Metal starts the truck. Haze from the exhaust. The engine running as he pushes back the gate, the ritual repeated once he’s pulled into the street. Heather’s fingers squeeze the mop handle’s notches.

  The girls in the utility closet. Their spray bottles and rags shelved. Kayla turns, a step back when she finds Donna leaning in the doorway. In Donna’s hands, a stapled packet, a page flipped, then another. She hums the new anthem as her finger runs down the printed list. “Found this in the Deacon’s office.” She turns another page. The closet’s naked bulb behind Kayla, and her shadow falls over the lines of names and addresses. “Guess I should return it before he notices.” She smiles at Kayla. “Your last name’s Kellerman, right?”

  Kayla silent.

  “That’s what I thought.” Donna’s finger inches down the list. “These are all the folks who’ve been processed through holding at the stadium. Must be a few thousand. They sure are busy there.” She turns another page. “Kellerman. It’s not the most common name, is it? Still, there’s a few. But I’m not seeing any women’s names—”

  Kayla snatches the packet. Kellerman and a first name she doesn’t know. Kellerman, Alex and Kellerman, William—her uncles. She sees them in the summer sun, her house’s open second floor, the blue sky above. A buckling in her knees, their reduction to ink on paper. Kayla tries to force her mother’s name between theirs. Her eyes blinking, the papers flipped as she checks her maiden name. Nothing.

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Donna tugs at her ponytail, a crack of gum. “Where would she be if she never found her way to—”

  Her words cut short by the mop handle Heather thrusts into her gut. Donna doubles over and chokes on swallowed gum. Heather grabs Donna’s hair and delivers a sharp knee to her face. Donna drops to her knees. Heather rears back, a final, grunting kick to Donna’s side. Heather takes the packet and lets it drop. A quick stamp, a page-tearing twist of her sneaker. A dirty imprint. “Explain that to the Deacon, cunt.”

  Heather exits the closet. Kayla next, Donna moaning as she steps over her. Heather grips Kayla’s hand. A leading through the cafeteria. “There’s always hope, Kay,” she says. “That’s all we need to tell ourselves.”

  The girls at dinner. The early sunset, the windows dark. Betty and the sisters intent, a hushed retelling of Heather’s scrape with Donna. The news radiates out, whispers at the surrounding tables. Heather’s tone without pride or vengeance. She pauses then adds: “It was stupid. I shouldn’t have. Not with our other plans.”

  Heavy Metal outside the cafeteria’s main doors, his walkie-talkie to his ear. Unsupervised, the girls gather by the back windows. The first snowflakes, a gauzy curtain beneath the loading door light. Snow gathers on Panda Bear’s cap, steam from his mouth as he secures the pickup’s plow. Kayla tells of watching Heavy Metal earlier in the day, the gate unlocked, passed through, relocked. The truck running the whole time.

  Betty rests her forehead against the glass. “You really think you could drive that beast, Oakmont?”

  Kayla imagines her sneakered feet, the lineup of pedals. Right foot up and left foot down, the shifter wrestled, the double bump of railroad tracks. “I think I can.”

  “Then maybe it’s time to move,” Betty says. “The sooner the better.”

  “Hey you!” Heavy Metal yells. He stands inside the cafeteria doors. “Away from those windows! The rest of you finish up and drop off your plates. Let’s go!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Betty shuffles to the door. Her voice low. “I’m trying to think of things I’ll miss about
this place, but I’m coming up empty.”

  “Nurse Amy?” Linda says.

  “Old John,” Chris adds. “Mr. James.”

  Betty smiles, an arm around each sister’s shoulder. “You two are a pain in the ass, you know that?”

  “Knock it off,” Heavy Metal barks. “Hands to yourself. Back in line.”

  Betty raises her hands, a mock surrender, a smile on her face, but Heavy Metal’s gaze unnerves Kayla. A new energy in him tonight, his slouch and indifference gone. He remains near on their walk back upstairs, the walkie-talkie by his mouth, a series of check-ins. Kayla fears for Heather, a pang that spikes when the girls find the Deacon and Old John waiting in the upstairs hallway.

  The Deacon’s voice stern. “Everyone to their rooms. Doors shut and no coming out until I say so.” He points to Betty. “You stay where you are.”

  Betty’s arms crossed, the Deacon’s stare returned. Old John hobbles past and shoos the younger girls into their pods.

  “Don’t let anyone out,” the Deacon says. He turns back to Betty. “We’re going into your room. Sit on your bunks with your hands on your laps. Not a word out of anyone.”

  Betty tilts her head. “What’s going—”

  “Not a word!” The Deacon’s face red. He extends his long arm and points. “Go!”

  The girls sit. The sisters side by side until the Deacon snaps. “On your own damn bunks!” Heavy Metal the last to enter, the door shut behind him. The Deacon plants his fists against his hips. “Does anyone want to come clean?”

  Linda raises her hand.

  “Well?” the Deacon says.

  “Clean about what?”

  “Oh, good Lord.” He turns to Heavy Metal. “You start there. I’ll take this one.”

  Heavy Metal opens Kayla’s footlocker. He reaches in, her underwear and socks and scrubs tossed to the floor. Kayla bites her lip, the dullard’s paws, her necklace’s delicate chain. The Deacon turns Linda’s footlocker onto its side and kicks through her belongings. Chris’s footlocker next.