The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  Left at the next intersection. A grinding of gears, a near stall. The fence’s bottom rail rakes the macadam, and the shrill cry crowds her thoughts. She imagines the view from the third floor. A few blocks west, and the street begins its gentle slope. West to the river.

  A pothole, and with it, the fence buckles. Kayla wrestles the wheel, but she can’t save the plow from gouging a row of parked cars. Sparks fly, the clash of metal. The snap of mirrors. Another tug of the wheel, a righting, and ahead, blocks down the street’s center, Front Street’s lit vein. Beyond, darkness and the river. Sirens behind her. Her bloodied hands tight on the wheel.

  A man steps from the curb. She cuts the wheel. A spin on the ice, and the plow broadsides a car along the opposite curb. Her chest slams the steering wheel, and her forehead cracks the windshield. A blank moment until she surfaces into a peculiar stillness. The street seen through the windshield’s spiderweb. She stumbles from the cab, a listing stagger down the street’s center. The parked car lifted over the curb and wedged against a stoop. Steam from the pickup’s crumpled hood.

  Darkness. A removal from the continuum of moments, a jump cut and an emergence into the haze. She blinks, desperate to align sight and thought, to comprehend beyond the cacophony of car alarms and barking dogs. A porch light switches on then another. She walks backwards, both watching and distancing herself. A hand on her forehead, the warmth of swelling flesh. A wince, the pain a call to move.

  Her run a series of lurches and recoveries. Her knees throbbing, her chest. She blinks the blood from her eyes, her blood, she realizes, its warmth twisting to the corner of her lips. A voice: “Hey! Hey you! Come back here!” She moves faster, a jerking momentum, the street’s sinking grade.

  She pauses in a building’s shadow. Front Street ahead of her—the road lit and empty. She crosses, a discordant note in the stillness. She climbs a fence, the top snaring her sleeve, a fall onto the other side. She scrambles down the long embankment. The snow up to her thighs. Each reeling step dims the city’s lights. Relief as the darkness claims her.

  IV.

  You’re near. I feel you close. You’re beside me in this bone-deep cold, here on this edge of dawn in the river’s mist and the fog of my mind. You’re here with me on this slope of scrub and trash, the train tracks below and beyond that, the river, its ice and the groan of its hidden current. You’re with me, and for that, I’m thankful because I don’t want to be alone. Because your presence is the anchor saving me from bleeding into the cold and mist and pain.

  Pain, yes, but don’t worry, mom. Don’t worry, dad. Don’t worry because pain is liquid. Pain flows and pain evaporates. The knot on my forehead will recede, the steering wheel’s bruise will heal. The maze of my thoughts will surrender its patterns, but while these ailments press close upon me tonight, I’m thankful for you, mom. Thankful for you, dad. Thankful for your light in this fog. For your whispers so close.

  Dawn, and remember the ones we witnessed, dad? The low highway sun on the way to a Saturday tournament, the rattle of my gear and the way you’d let me sleep if I wanted, but most often, you let me talk, my nerves, the pregame butterflies I was never able to shake, and behind me now, that same sun, an illumination on Front Street’s morning flow, a blinding through grimy windshields. Fifty feet up this bank waits the world that wants to consume me, and here I wait, shivering in the shadows, my spot kicked clear of snow, a woodsman’s survival technique, and see, dad, I did listen, I always listened in some form or another. Always, and look how beautiful, mom, the kind of image you wrestled into your poems, the stillness and hardscrabble beauty, and I’m sorry for never taking the time to read all your work, and if I had your book with me now, I’d read it front to back and back to front, just to hear your voice. Just to stand inside your mind. I look across the river, and the same horizon-peeking light that keeps me in the shadows falls on the far shore, the glint of glass and metal, the cottony steam from rooftop vents, and as the sun lifts, the boundary of shadow and light pulls across the river’s glistening ice, a demarcation that creeps toward me, that will claim me, a sunrise different from every other because it will put a period on last night, a locking into an unchangeable past and a truth I will never be able to deny. And I’m sorry, dad. Sorry for who I’ve become. Sorry for swinging that hammer, the blow that shattered both another girl’s skull and all the easy stories I’d believed about myself—that I was good and kind and fair. That I wasn’t like the mob I so hated.

  The sun lifts and the shadow inches closer, and when the light reaches me, I know this long night will be done, Front Street’s sirens and flashing lights, the bloody shine in the dark, and me lurking below, still as the river fish half-frozen beneath the ice, and of course the sirens were for me, even the helicopter with its sweeping beam, the eye of God upon the tracks and ice and knotted brambles, but last night, not even God could find me curled into a ball and tucked beneath the slope’s branches.

  A crusted tarp lifts itself from the dark, and I can’t help but believe it’s a gift from you, dad; a sign from you, mom—and although I’ve never believed in such things before, I do now, I must now, because logic and order have abandoned me or perhaps I’ve abandoned them. I’m concussed, I realize this, and I embrace my mind’s haze as a shaman embraces his visions, and I’ve got to hope that in this fog waits a new logic, one encoded in symbols, none more immediate and true than the tarp I approach on hands and knees in these last shadowed moments. The snap of twigs and the snare of stickers, and I kick away the snow, the material stiff as I fold the tarp lengthwise and then cover it with snow and twigs until the blue disappears. The sun is almost upon me, and a spike enters my dulled rhythms, the fear I’ll be betrayed, that God’s vision comes not with man’s light but with His own, and I slide into the fold, trying to ease my shaking, careful not to disturb my camouflage, and once inside, I pull the edge and seal out the world and bury myself.

  The cold heavier here, the frozen earth, the colder touch of my snow-soaked sweatpants and socks, and what I wouldn’t give to be sitting in front of our fireplace, dad, its heat and crackle and the knowing all I needed to see you was to turn my head, the knowing you had built our home with your hands and that even if you were at work, you were still always close, a presence as real as the fire’s warmth, and I’m sorry for not appreciating these gifts I was given so easily. Sorry for not understanding the scientific truths of decay and reduction that awaited my memories. Sorry for not realizing what was true in the moment wouldn’t be true forever.

  The sun touches the tarp, slivers of blue, and despite the material’s stink of mildew and old leaves and fish, I think of the pool where Fran and I mouthed the names of boys we longed to kiss, boys I’d later hate after seeing them run to watch a fire, anxious to witness the ugliness, and now I’ll never get to kiss a boy or go to the prom or do all the pretty things a girl should, yet I’ve done things, haven’t I, and that’s why I’m here, isn’t it. I grow thirsty, and I reach from my shell to cup a handful of snow. The cold numbs my tongue, and I wince back the pain in my molars until the snow melts. A swallow, and with it, a stab in my throat then relief.

  I blow into my reddened palm then cover it with my glove, an awkward wedging of left over right. I see you, mom, your head shaking and a sigh, your loving exasperation for your forgetful daughter. I see the glove and imagine its fate. On the street by a wrecked truck. Caught on the fence atop the riverbank slope or tangled in the brush below. I flex my bare hand, blow, and my breath curls against my palm. I’m sorry, mom, I was always losing something, hats and bags, losing track of time, losing my bearings as I rode my bike, lost in my head’s tangle—and I rest my hand over my mouth and understand now there are new hauntings I can never forget, not visual but tactile, a tattooing of muscle and bone, the vibrations carried on my skin and in my flesh. I flex my fingers and feel the body’s thud from below as I held the window’s wire mesh, feel the buck of a steering wheel and a hammer’s bone-breaking impact. No, mom, I can’
t forget these. I turn my hand one way then the other. I’ve abandoned my world of theories and become my body, defined by its deeds and limited by its wounds.

  The morning sun short-lived, and within a few hours, a light snow. My fog comes and goes. I lie still, the tarp’s edge lifted, a slivered view. The brambles a forest. The iced river an ocean. The cold stubborn, and I fight the stiffness by flexing a joint at a time, a progression from fingers to wrists, elbows to shoulders, one arm then the other. Then my legs, only I have trouble when I reach my feet. I can imagine them, can twist and see my sneakers’ laces and leather and rubber, but the signal between my toes and brain fades in my body’s static.

  The breeze picks up, and on it, the radio’s predicted freeze. The flakes slant and the dead grasses whisper and the tarp ripples over me, the material anchored beneath my sneakers and shoulders, and I wonder if anyone’s noticed my patch of blue, the cars on the bridge, the helicopters. I think of perspective, views close and far, and I think of slim margins and the hours between now and nightfall.

  I hear the ruffle first, a flutter like tiny wings, before the plastic bag tumbles into view. The bag catches in the grass, and I reach out, a finger looped through the thin handle. The bag, its fresh white long faded, fills with the breeze, a billowing almost beautiful, and just beneath the plastic’s snap, the call of voices, not one voice but many, whispers upon whispers upon whispers. I relax my finger and the bag tumbles, snared for a moment then gone.

  The day passes, and I’d trade my remaining glove for a slice of your bread, mom, fresh from the oven and the butter melting and a thick spread of grandma’s jam. And what I wouldn’t give to trade the cold of the snow against my teeth for the warmth of our kitchen and the chance to hear your songs instead of the tarp’s rustle. But I can dream of you, mom, and I do, this glazed sleep, this suspension an awareness from the pool’s bottom, a place below the pain’s surface. Here I’m with you, but when I reach out, you’re gone, and I can no more hold you than I can hold the morning mist, but holding on is all that matters now, and I’ll hold on to you with all my might, and I won’t go back to the machine because they’ll crack me open, my head and ribs and gut. They’ll hollow me out, and I’ll be laid bare with nowhere to hide you and everything else I love.

  Snow piles on the tarp, my cocoon dimmed, the trapped air of the Shut-In’s gas mask, and how strange, dad, to see you in your gear, your smile traded for insect eyes and my insect reflection staring back from your mask, and the fears we had then don’t matter now, the worry of inhaling poison and future disease. No, dad, the things we needed to fear lived next door. We breathed the same air in the supermarket lines and darkened movie theaters. They idled next to us at red-light intersections, their windows rolled up, their radios tuned to preachers of a different truth. What we had to fear wasn’t a drifting toxin but the kind of poison that burrows deep into one’s heart, and I love you, dad, but how could you not have seen that?

  The things I listen for: booted footsteps and leashed dogs, a gun’s cocked hammer. What I hear: Front Street’s traffic, the honk of passing geese. I slip in and out of the fog before I’m shaken into consciousness. I imagine tanks, wild horses, a thousand marching soldiers. I imagine Linda’s edge of the world picked up and all of it rushing toward me, a drowning in steel and brick and bodies. I lift the tarp’s edge. Flurries traces the dark I hadn’t realized had fallen. The tremors build, a compression of sound, a horn that pains my ears. The headlamp a hurtling star, and with the tracks less than twenty yards away, the gust lifts my tarp. The locomotive streams by, and behind it, a long line of cars, the clatter of steel, the rolling tons. Car after car until the end. The rattle thins and the quiet rushes back.

  I lie on my side, the tarp no longer covering me, and I’m sorry, mom, for all the mornings I lingered in bed, ignoring your calls and savoring those extra minutes, the day’s waiting crush less real than my inertia, and you outside my door, mom, never cross, understanding, I believe, what school was like for a girl so different, the genius, the freak. I sit, my joints stiff and unwilling. I’m coming, mom, and thank you for the moments you allowed me to lull, and I just need a minute to let my inner tides adjust to a new gravity, to blink back the dizziness that makes standing feel like an acrobat’s trick. I scoop another handful of snow into my mouth and wait for the fog to recede.

  The sky black, and around me, the blue radiance of ice and fresh snow. The cold takes my breath, a chill so intense I feel as if my heart is beating at the center of a stalled world. I pull down my sweats and crouch, and the pee patters below me. In degrees, I straighten myself. I stand, swaying, the wind, my dizziness. Complaints from my knees to my neck. My spine a pained conduit that lifts my pulse into my skull. I close my eyes, hoping the dark will ease my sway before doubling over and vomiting.

  Remember, dad, that Christmas I lost to the flu? How you sat on my bed and explained a fever’s war within, a clash of protectors and invaders. I gag and gasp and vomit again, although there’s little to come up. My hands on my knees and my throat’s raw ache and everything blurred by tears, prisms and halos around the opposite shore’s lights. My first steps little more than a shuffle, my sneakers barely lifting, a set of parallel tracks and the crackle of dead grass, and in each step, reverberations of the crash, the physical imprint on my shoulders and knees and every bone in between. Gravity draws me to the tracks then works against me as I stagger up the rail bed.

  The tracks stretch, a two-pronged compass of north and south. I turn, a single step, and seal my fate, the frozen river to my right, the tangle-growth embankment to my left, and beyond that, the city, its lights snared in the branches of the tallest trees. Front Street’s hum drifts above me, a surface of light and activity, while I plod through the icy depths. A truck honks, the faint call, and Betty, I know you’re up there, and I hope you’re not as lost and alone as me, and I’ll miss never being called Oakmont again, and dad, I know I thought you were naïve, but I guess I was, too, both of us blind to so much.

  South, and in the distance, the tracks converge, a study in perspective, a point that pulls away with every step, a trick of the eye that will lead me back. The river’s hidden flow and my graceless steps, the wooden ties and the packed snow. Eight miles. We’ve hiked father than that, mom, a trail along the Appalachian Ridge, a halfway spot where we lunched on boulders as large as our house. Eight miles and I’ll be home by sunrise, and in me, the strength of one who has no options left, the liberation from notions of happy endings, the freedom of being whittled to body and will.

  South, and mom, when I was four, you told me about Lao Tzu and the journey of a thousand miles, and you laughed when I doubted you, not the concept but the unit of measure, and we researched the li, the Chinese length approximately a third of the English mile, and our private joke that a journey of three hundred thirty-three and a third miles begins with a single step, and ahead of me waits twenty-four li, and who would smile at that but you, mom, and now that’s gone too, the li and our thousand other secrets, all of them stolen, and my pace picks up.

  The city’s south-end bridge looms, towering arches of concrete and stone, a stretch between shores and shadows beneath, and above the occasional lights of passing cars. Each step brings a wince, and I think of the documentaries we watched, dad, the mountain climbers’ tales of frostbite, their bodies surviving but their toes, sometimes whole feet, gone, but I accept the pain just as surely as I accept each inhale’s frigid pang. I look up, the bridge no closer than it was before, and I have to remind myself I’m still moving, still walking, and when I look up again, I’m beneath the span, my fog, my empty thoughts, graffiti on the walls and a collection of crates and tarps, a circle of stones cradling charred logs, a hobo’s village abandoned, and the wind kicks up and turns back on itself, the soot and snow, and for a moment, I’m blinded, a deeper dark, yet I keep moving, shuffling, the ties beneath me, and folded into the dark, the crunch of snow and deeper still, the stone-cast echo of my breath and the
river’s buried purr, and in the dark, I lose myself, my skin gone and all that is elemental cast into the night, and as I emerge from the arch, I squint, my vision’s slow return, and I understand I am nobody. I am gone. And I’m born again, alone and new.

  Notions of miles and li prove slippery, and the act of putting one foot in front of the other seems both miraculous and as automatic as my pulse. I switch the glove and tuck my bare hand beneath the opposite armpit. I pause only to eat snow or squat and pee. The brush masses, ragged and bent and sickly. The river falls away, hidden by growth, only to reappear and fall away again. The snow has stopped, yet the breeze stings of ice. I look up, and the clouds are thinning, the coming of this winter’s coldest night, and above, the constellations you showed me, dad. Orion and Canis Major. Hunters and their dogs.

  Time abandons me, and in the stillness of bare trees and frozen water, I can see the fog I carry, a moat that warps light and sound, yet which, at its heart, shines a slim yet resilient clarity. The singular understanding that I’m going home to a home that no longer exists. The notion illogical yet more true than any postulate or theorem, and what am I but an orphan returning to be with you, mom. With you, dad.

  The vines and brambles rustle, and I halt atop the raised track, nearly toppling, my body robbed of grace by exhaustion and hunger and wooden feet. The clatter grows, a wavering in the scrub then the magical alchemy of wood to flesh as not twenty yards ahead, a buck steps into the clearing. The buck’s head held high, its majestic rack, and behind him, two doe. The beasts in no hurry, the cold’s dulled rhythms, their lack of fear. The buck gone as quickly as he appeared, a melting back into the riverside brush. The first doe close behind, but the second pauses atop the tracks, her head turned, and considers me. I manage a single step, the fragile balance lost, and the doe slips away.