Sometimes Magdalena wondered what would have happened to her if the world hadn’t started going blurry when she was six or seven years old, when she was still sounding out people’s foreheads like other kids sounded out street signs, when she had cried because she was the only one in her class who had to wear glasses, not knowing that nearsightedness had been given to her like a blessing. Perfect vision and she might have ended up like her father in the bathtub, wrists open like books.
By the time she was ten or eleven Magdalena had stopped wearing her glasses, and she passed her adolescence in a fog. When she and Lina first moved to London she put them on again, and even let Lina talk her into getting contact lenses because they looked better. In London only Lina’s skin had words she understood without even trying—and those she already knew by heart—so Magdalena made an appointment with an optometrist and then walked around the city marveling at the mortar that suddenly appeared between bricks. But now that she’d learned English well enough to find herself accidentally understanding most of what was written there at the hairline or over an eyebrow, she preferred to leave her glasses off and let the world melt around her.
The haze was not ideal. Magdalena had permanent bruises on her shins from bumping into things, and at times like this it would be nice to know where buildings stopped and streets began. She was at the bus station, she knew that much, but she seemed to have gotten turned around. Colors and shapes smeared together and nothing looked familiar.
Magdalena tried to think back to her first day in Swindon, when she’d gotten off the bus from London with Barry’s address written on a scrap of paper. Which way had she gone? Probably in the other direction. She had been trying to balance Lina’s old suitcase on its one good wheel while she held the shoebox with the ashes in the other hand. She’d dropped the box and a fine dust puffed out; she remembered kneeling to pick up the shoebox and watching the dust settle between cobblestones, which meant she must have been on the other side of the bus station because this street was paved.
Nearly a year had gone by since that first day in Swindon and the shoebox was still under her bed, waiting to go home. But that wasn’t what Magdalena wanted to think about. She kept her glasses in her bag, chose a direction, and started walking.
If Lina were there they would walk together, arm in arm like old women. They would make it halfway across town and then suddenly, dramatically, Lina would be too exhausted to go on. Or she would decide that the other direction was better after all and she’d wave down some man in a nice car and get him to give them a ride. Magdalena would read three children or something she didn’t understand, like pneumonectomy across his forehead—things that were easy to ignore. And when he let them off they’d have to find another ride back into town. Lina was like that, always getting them into places they shouldn’t be. She never thought things through—it said so across the arches of her feet.
A car honked at her, and Magdalena realized she’d ended up in the middle of the street. Without her glasses, the curb a few feet away melted into the fuzzy gray of the gutter and she had to feel with her toes to find the sidewalk. She did this expertly, with no sudden falterings, because it was better to whack her shins sometimes than to look like a blind person and have somebody come up close to give her their arm.
Off to her right there was a shape taller than the rest. That would be the church she and Neil had passed on their way to the bus stop. She pressed her fingertips against the sides of her eyes. Sometimes that made her vision sharper, though she had to be careful to avoid looking at a woman who was passing. The woman was already close enough that Magdalena could see dark patches of text across her cheeks.
Magdalena always told Barry that she had to be at work at quarter to three, a lie that gave her three hours to meet Ivan, or, lately, to call Ivan and walk around waiting for him to call her back. It often didn’t happen, and Magdalena would get all the way to the Sainsbury’s on the edge of town before she had to turn back if she wanted to make it to her shift on time, with her feet already hurting.
Having Ivan for a boyfriend had seemed like a good idea at the time, when Magdalena first came to Swindon and needed a reason to get out of Barry’s house. It was Zosia, the Polish girl’s, advice to her. “Get a boyfriend,” Zosia said when Magdalena first moved into the bedroom next to Barry’s study. “He’ll call you a whore but he’ll leave you alone.” Barry hated boyfriends, but he was a little scared of them too. So when Ivan asked her to get a drink with him one night after the bar closed, Magdalena didn’t say no.
Ivan was different from the men Lina used to try to get Magdalena to go out with when they were in London. After a while Lina gave up on her, but there was a time when she was always arranging double dates for them, choosing for Magdalena some older guy who’d made money on the stock market and invested it collecting photographs of circus freaks or old-time jazz records, things Magdalena learned she had better not pretend the slightest interest in; if she did, the men would call her for a second date and she’d have to grab her phone quick to keep Lina from answering it for her and saying yes.
But Ivan had no investments besides an old Vespa he’d fixed up himself, with red flame decals pasted on the sides. Magdalena was pretty sure Ivan was seeing other girls, but she liked to ride with him on the Vespa on weekends, when he’d pick her up in front of Barry’s house and they’d go out past the brown edges of town until they got to fields of yellow rapeseed, the little engine, which wasn’t made to be taken on the motorway, sputtering under the weight of the two of them.
But the thing she liked best about Ivan was his skin. Magdalena knew some Russian but she couldn’t read it, and Ivan’s body remained a mystery because even though he claimed to be one hundred percent British now that he’d been in Swindon for most of his life, there wasn’t a single word in English on him anywhere, Magdalena had made sure of that. So even though he was the kind of boyfriend Lina would have said they’d outgrown before they were even in high school, Magdalena didn’t like the thought of leaving him and his incomprehensible skin and finding somebody new, steeling herself to look closely at a body that would most likely tell her all sorts of things she would rather not know. It was easier to keep filling her afternoons walking around Swindon, waiting for her phone to ring.
Lina used to say men had a kind of radar. They never called if you were waiting for them. The trick was to do something that sent a signal out into the universe showing that you didn’t care. Lina used to throw away jewelry or other things that she’d been given and sure enough, as soon as she’d flushed a pair of earrings down the toilet, the phone would ring. Magdalena didn’t believe in those kinds of things, but even so, not for the first time, she erased Ivan’s number from her phone. But still he didn’t call.