“It’s a wolf,” Magdalena said.
“You’re imagining things,” her mother said, which was a lie. No matter what angle you looked at it from, the stain was unmistakably a wolf with a long mean snout, and the snout was tinted pink with the blood of Ruta Valentukien?’s red curtains.
Not long after Magdalena’s mother got rid of the washing machine, Lina’s mother got sick and had to go away, and because her grandmother was so old, Lina came to stay with Magdalena and her mother. A cold wind blew all winter long. Magdalena’s mother baked cakes to warm the apartment and then left the oven open while the three of them huddled under the wolf and warmed their hands over the pan. It snowed and the wind blew straight from Sweden. Freedom wind, the newspapers called it, and that was the year the Russians left, they became Lithuanians again and people sang in the streets. There were flowers everywhere and Magdalena’s mother came home from the store with a banana. She cut it into three parts and they ate it with a knife and fork. Magdalena’s mother picked out all the tiny seeds and Lina tried to eat the rind—that was how little they knew about bananas. Magdalena and Lina shared the foldout couch and they made angels in the snow on the way to school.
It was the year that Magdalena learned to read.
“What’s ap-ree-tsots?” Magdalena asked Lina one day. They were walking to school.
“I don’t know,” Lina said. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Why don’t you know what it means?” Magdalena said.
“What what means?”
“Ap-ree-tsots,” Magdalena said, pronouncing the sound of each letter carefully.
“Why should I know what it means?” Lina said.
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said. “Why is it on your face if you don’t know what it means?”
“It isn’t on my face.”
“Yes it is,” Magdalena said. “Right there.” She spelled it. The letters came down from Lina’s hairline and ended over her eye.
“A-P- what?” Lina said.
It was a strange-looking word, and when Magdalena put the sounds together what came out didn’t make any sense. “Ap-ree-tsots.”
“I don’t think there is a word like that,” Lina said, and when they passed a shop window Lina looked in at her reflection. “There’s nothing there,” she said.
Magdalena’s mother’s skin also said things that Magdalena didn’t understand. She could read the name of her father on her mother’s forehead, and the name of her baby brother who died, which was written in the cradle of her mother’s arm, but there were also some longer words she’d never heard before. When she asked her mother what they meant her mother told her she was imagining things. “Let me write my name too,” Magdalena said one day, holding a pen from her school bag.
“You’re imagining things,” her mother said again, looking mad when Magdalena said she would only write it very small, next to where Juozas, her brother’s name, was written on her mother’s arm. And then Magdalena understood. The words were something not to be talked about, like the fact that the fortune-telling stain had gotten permanently stuck in the shape of a wolf. After that, Magdalena tried very hard not to let her mother see that she was looking at the words, just like she looked hard at the tablecloth at mealtimes to help her mother forget about the stain on the ceiling, and bit by bit Magdalena learned to read the words in her head without making a sound.
Ivan walked away. Magdalena stood by the fountain and finished her cigarette. She dropped it into the fountain, and—why not?—she made a wish. She wondered what she would do that night, instead of going to work. She kicked the fountain hard enough to hurt her toes, then she started walking. She walked until she was back in front of the yellow church, which Neil had said was beautiful. Magdalena hadn’t gone into a church for a long time, but she went in now.
They were supposed to have been best friends for life. They would marry millionaire brothers and connect their houses by an underground tunnel. They would name their daughters after each other and drink coffee together in the afternoons.
It was Lina who decided they should go to London. Magdalena was nineteen and Lina was twenty, and they were looking out over Vilnius from up by the old castle, drinking a bottle of wine and chewing on bits of the cork that had crumbled down into it because as usual they hadn’t had anything but their house keys for opening the bottle. They were sharing a set of keys again because Lina’s mother had just gone back into the hospital. Magdalena thought about telling Lina that Ruta’s skin didn’t say she would die there, but she didn’t want to get into what it did say, and after all, who knew whether what it said was true. So in the end Magdalena said nothing, and it was Lina who looked out over the city and told Magdalena she was going to London. London, the English spelling, was written high across Lina’s forehead, and though Magdalena’s own skin had nothing to say about it, there was no question that she would go with her.
Actually, Magdalena’s skin had nothing to say about anything. Her entire body, from the bottoms of her feet to the bit of her nose she could just barely see if she closed one eye and squinted, was empty of words. Most of the time her own blankness was a relief, though sometimes, when she let herself think about it too much, Magdalena wondered why she alone had been left unmarked, as though the ability to read what it said on the people around her meant she’d have no stories of her own.
Aziz was Lina’s first real conquest in London. She met him at the bar where she worked and he took her out on a private boat along the Thames. One night Lina took too much of some pale pink powder Aziz had brought back from Morocco and woke up all alone in a cream-colored limousine with a big dent in its fender and a bump on her head. She was sorry she hadn’t told Magdalena where she was going, she said, sitting on the kitchen counter the next morning, opening and closing the silverware drawer with her toes while Magdalena rushed around getting ready for work. She’d be more careful next time, she said, but Magdalena knew it was a lie: Lina had drunk champagne in a long white car, she had heard each bubble rise and break against a crystal glass and she had breathed the air that was trapped inside them. She had watched the city lights flow like a river around her, and she was not going to start being careful now.