It was possible that the letters were a reference to another Magdalena Bikauskait?, although even back home it wasn’t such a common name. Maybe there was more to it and the name came at the end of a sentence that began under his hair. Magdalena squinted toward the bus stop and waved her arms.
In a moment a shape detached itself from the bus and hurried toward her, colors resorting themselves as he got nearer until Neil’s jeans became distinct from his sweatshirt and a smudge of orange became his hair. The edges of him sharpened and then, when he got near enough, panting a little, the words on his face came into focus. There it was: Magdalena Bikauskait?, just above his cheekbone. She handed him the package.
“Gosh, thanks,” Neil said, and he was running back to the bus before Magdalena had a chance to ask him to lift up the hair by his ear so she could see if the name followed other words across his temple.
Magdalena waited until she heard the bus leave, and then she looked around, wondering which side of the bus station she was on. But the streets were nothing more than wedges cut into a wash of tan and gray. Out of habit she took her glasses out and started to put them on, just to get her bearings, but she stopped. A crowd of little shapes was coming toward her in twos.
In another moment they were all around her, bobbing at the edges of her sight in smears of green uniforms. “Sixty degrees north-northwest!” an adult voice called out. The little shapes pivoted in their pairs, bumping into Magdalena.
“North northwest!” the leader said. “Kimberly! Emily! What do we say?”
“Sorry, Miss.”
“Sorry, Miss,” and they circled what she now saw was a compass held like a fiddler crab on the palm of one of their hands. Magdalena took out her phone and pretended to check the time to avoid seeing their faces.
“Ours’s stuck.”
“Ours’s too.”
“Follow Becky,” the leader said. “Right. Forty paces north-northwest. Careful as you cross the street. Careful! Kimberly!” and the little shapes ducked back into the haze.
Then the street was empty, but Magdalena put her glasses back in her bag just to be safe. It was bad enough when she accidentally got too close to an old person and it said inflammatory heart disease or lung infection or regret across their face. Nobody wanted to see something like that on a child. There would be other things written there too: Lives at No. 12 Hollbury Mews. Air stewardess. Marries Ronald. Finds a sea anemone. But sometimes a face that said loved across the lips when it smiled would have a never hidden in the dimple, and Magdalena had learned a long time ago that it was better not to look at all. Old people could have whole sentences disappear in their wrinkles, but Magdalena did not like looking at children, with their skin so smooth across their faces that it was hard to ignore what it said.
For as long as Magdalena could remember the words had always been there, although she didn’t used to think of them as words. At first she didn’t think of them as anything, they were just extensions of a person’s skin, like eyebrows or the chicken pox or the long brown birthmark on the back of her mother’s knee—which her mother told her was a footprint left there many years ago by fairies, who sometimes walked over children as they slept. So for a while when she was very young Magdalena thought that the other kind of marks had also been left by fairies, who were known for making trouble and who must have walked up and down each person’s body with ink on their shoes.
But the marks turned into letters when Magdalena started school. “Who can show us the letter A?” the teacher said. The class pointed to the chalkboard, and Magdalena pointed to the chin of Tomas Kukauskas sitting next to her.
Pretty soon the letters came together into words and each person’s body became a puzzle. Once when her teacher bent over to correct her exercises, Magdalena looked at the marks that curled out of her teacher’s nose and disappeared into her ear and found that she could read them.
“Magdalena, if you have a question say it out loud so we all can hear,” her teacher said as Magdalena tried to fit her mouth around the letters. The first word was long, but when she made each sound and then made them all together she realized it was somebody’s name: MY-KO-LAS.
“MYKOLAS,” she said. She followed the letters along her teacher’s cheek, stringing the sounds together like they had been taught to do. The second word was even longer: “ISN’T-COMING-BACK,” Magdalena said. It was all one word in Lithuanian. Her teacher stood up so sharply that her pen made a mark across Magdalena’s paper, as if she’d gotten all the answers wrong.
“What did you say?” her teacher asked. Magdalena said it again. She stacked the sounds of the letters on top of one another, and when they came out of her mouth they were words.
“Who told you that?” her teacher said. The class was quiet.
“I read it,” Magdalena said.
“Where did you read it?” her teacher asked.
“There.” Magdalena pointed to the place beside her teacher’s nose. Her teacher brought her hands up to her face and Magdalena thought she was going to wipe away the writing. But she only rested her fingers against her lips for a moment.
“Finish your work,” she said.
When the teacher passed her again, Magdalena took another look. It was hard to keep all the sounds in her head and remember where she’d started, but if she said them aloud and listened to her own voice, then the shapes became sounds and the sounds became words. “MYKOLAS-ISN’T-COMING-BACK.”
Magdalena’s teacher put her hands to her face again, then reached for the chalkboard rag and looked for a clean part. Magdalena craned her neck to read the words one more time before her teacher wiped them away. “MYKOLAS-ISN’T-COMING-BACK.”
“Stop saying that!” her teacher said. The class looked up. The teacher pressed her face into the chalkboard rag and the chalk dust powdered her cheeks. Magdalena wanted to say the words just one more time, but she stayed quiet. And as it turned out, these words weren’t like the ones on the chalkboard. Even though tears ran down her teacher’s face, they did not get washed away.