“I made up loads of packages, but the others, you know, they’re so weighted down with packs and things they can’t bear the extra. But you haven’t got much.” The woman handed Magdalena a paper bag filled with buns. “The sisters had a bit of fun making bread from the old pilgrim recipes. It’ll take your teeth out but it won’t go bad. Let me get you some jam to go with it.” The woman reached past Magdalena’s head and opened a little cabinet behind her. Lost dog, Bishop’s Gate, bone cancer, Joey Dolan’s orchard with the apple blossoms out, it said across her arm. “You’ll get hungry, you’ll see—I’ve done the Way twice myself, but the old knees aren’t the same anymore.” She gave Magdalena a jar of orange-colored jam. “Our tree had such a crop, I’ve got more preserves than I know what to do with.” On the jar was a handwritten label. Apricot.
Magdalena had seen that word in typeface along Lina’s hairline so often that she had stopped seeing it, but she’d never realized that it was English. It didn’t look like an English word somehow, and yet there it was, written neatly in blue ink on the side of the jar.
“It’s apricot,” the woman said. “I don’t remember a year they were so sweet. Come and see the garden—you can pick as many as you like. Eat them as you walk, they’ll keep you regular. You’d be surprised how many pilgrims forget that sort of thing.”
Magdalena knew she should give the jar back to the woman and leave, bury the sight of the word in the part of her mind she made a habit of not going into. Instead, she let the nun rummage for an empty grocery sack and followed her outside and across the parking lot to a walled garden behind the rectory. “Soaks in the sun,” the woman said. “You should have seen our cherries.”
She knew she shouldn’t, but in another moment Magdalena was taking her glasses out of her bag and putting them on, and yes, there in the garden was a tree with its branches weighted down with little orange fruits. Some had freckles from the sun, and the ground was covered with the ones that had gone brown.
“It breaks my heart to see them spoil,” the woman said.
After the ambulance men lifted Lina off the kitchen floor, carried her into Magdalena’s room, and were gathering their things to go, one of them spoke to her quietly. For a person so young and with no obvious medical condition, there would have to be an inquest, he said. The body couldn’t be left alone. The ambulance men left and a police officer came to stay in the flat until the autopsy people could come in the morning. The policeman was black and his skin was very dark—not one word showed through. He kept offering to wait outside in the hallway, but Magdalena said no. They had left the door to Magdalena’s room open a crack, and she didn’t want to be alone with the thing that looked like Lina but was not anymore. So she made the policeman cup after cup of tea, even though she knew he didn’t want any, and they waited on like that till morning.
After the coroner’s people came to take Lina away and the policeman left, thanking her for the tea because he didn’t know what else to say, Magdalena could not stay alone in the flat, not just then, when so many things were just exactly the same—Lina’s shoes just as she’d left them, one on top of the other with the toes pointed inward like they were ashamed to have been left like that in the middle of the room—while other things, the little sheaths of plastic from the needles they had used on her, did not belong at all.
It seemed important to get the picture on Lina’s camera developed, but first Magdalena had to finish the roll of film. She walked to the park down the street. There were children playing. The face of one little girl was darkened by line after line of text. There were little words around her eyes, and bigger ones across her cheeks. Magdalena took a picture. She took a picture of a little boy whose dimples were spoiled by what was written there, and of a middle-aged man reading a newspaper on a park bench, whose nose reminded Magdalena of pictures of her father, but who had big block letters like stains across the rest of him.
The pictures came back to her in the opposite order from how they had been taken, and when Magdalena got to the one of the little girl in the park, her skin empty now in the photograph, she skipped the one that came next, which would be of Lina asleep on the couch. She didn’t know why she had thought she wanted to see it.
A few days later, while the inquest was being made, the police department telephoned Magdalena. They had found a policewoman who spoke Lithuanian to tell her what the coroner had found. Lina had eaten the seeds of an entire case of wild Turkish abrikosai, apparently by putting the fruits, pits and all, into a high-powered blender—which the police had found unwashed on Dov’s kitchen counter, a slush of skin and cracked seeds at the bottom and cyanide residue staining the blades. The policewoman began asking questions. Had Lina meant to do it? Could it have been an accident? Didn’t she know that the pits were poisonous? “Poisonous?” Magdalena asked. She’d never heard that before. “Of course,” the policewoman said. “Peaches too.” Why would Lina have put a whole box of them in the blender? Was she upset? Was she having problems in her life? Magdalena tried to explain that Lina was like that sometimes, that she scratched people’s names into her legs with paperclips when she was happy and lit fires in the sink when she got mad. And through all of it, with all the questions and the arrangements that had to be made, the calls to her mother in America and the trouble they had finding the place where Ruta was living, Magdalena never thought to ask what abrikosai were in English.
Magdalena took the grocery sack from the nun, who told her to help herself from the tree and be sure to latch the garden gate when she was done. The nun walked back toward the church, pinching dead blossoms as she passed a flowerbed. Magdalena went into the garden and picked one of the fruits. Its skin was soft, a shade lighter than the orange-colored jam the nun had given her. She could feel that the flesh was loose around the pit. She took a bite.
Somehow she hadn’t realized that the things written on Lina’s skin were happening one by one until there was nothing left for the future. There were no descriptions of marriages or children or disease, and when she’d cut off all of Lina’s hair, Magdalena had seen that acute cyanide-induced respiratory failure after ingesting the seeds of 30–40 wild Turkish came before that old word visible just below her hairline. Ap-ree-tsots was how Magdalena had always thought of it, but the c was meant to be pronounced like a k and not a ts like in Lithuanian because the word was English: apricots. And, as Lina stood with her head bowed over the sink and a hundred other things printed across her scalp, Magdalena had tried hard not to understand.
Stupid shitty Lina, to put apricots in the blender without even taking out the pits and then to come home to Magdalena as if she knew Magdalena would never have been able to believe it if she hadn’t seen it all the way through. It was the only thing that Magdalena could be grateful for. It was better to be left with the memories of that night pinned up like postcards behind her eyelids than to be like Ruta Valentukien?, who would never really know how to believe that Lina was gone. It was better to have been there, starting with the rosy shadow around Lina’s lips, then the chewing sound that woke Magdalena in the middle of the night, and on through the whole thing, the breathing, the thick paste that filled up her mouth, the sound her lungs began making when it was nearly over, the men from the ambulance and the time it took them to come up the stairs, the needles, the plastic gloves, and the little plastic caps they left littered on the floor.