“This is the only thing what I know for making,” she said, creasing the bow. “I am one time making good roses, but I’m forgetting for how to start.”
“Look,” Neil said. “My mom’s a therapist and she deals with this kind of stuff all the time. You think it’s your fault or something. It’s not your fault. He probably has cameras and stuff like that all over his house. You need to tell the police. I mean, there are still other people living with him, right? Other, like, girls?” He was probably talking louder than he should have been, but he was getting worked up. He lowered his voice, remembering how his mom talked to clients when they called her at home with an emergency. “Magdute,” he said, “this is not your fault.”
“This is funny that you keep calling me Magdute. My name actually is Magdalena,” she said. “Magdute—this is, like, name for some little girl.”
Normally Neil would have been embarrassed, but he wasn’t going to let this go.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Magdalena. I think you should call the police. If you don’t, then I will, because I really think it’s sick that he’s, you know, filming in the bathroom.”
“I told you, this is not for Internet. I am really checking this good.”
“That’s not the point,” Neil said, taking out his phone as if he had the number for the Swindon vice squad programmed in.
“Don’t call the police,” Magdalena said.
“I think it’s my responsibility,” he said.
“Okay, Neil, that is not a good idea,” she said. “Calling police will really not help anyone and it will make a lot of trouble for Barry. Actually he is pretty okay guy sometimes and he have helped me a lot, so don’t do this, okay?”
They looked at each other for a minute.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Neil said.
“Yeah,” Magdalena said. “There are really a lot of things that doesn’t make any sense.”
After that the conversation was pretty awkward, especially when it turned out that Magdalena didn’t even have a ticket to Vilnius yet, and needed to borrow money from Neil to buy one. The ticket cost sixty euros, which was most of his weekly stipend from Professor Piot, and Neil knew there was, like, zero chance she’d pay him back. He was honestly pretty pissed. He felt like he was being taken advantage of, but he knew that, as usual, he’d be nice, say no problem, and it would ruin his day. So it might have been with a little more force than was necessary that he scooted his chair out from the table, not really caring if it made a big screech across the floor, saying he’d have to go find an ATM. As he did, he accidentally knocked over the chair next to him, where Magdalena had put the shoebox she was carrying. Neil tried to catch it as it fell, and ended up batting the box into a table leg. The top flew off, and a Ziploc bag tumbled out. Magdalena gave a little gasp and when Neil picked it up, the seam of the bag broke and powder started pouring out.
“Shit, I’m really sorry,” Neil said, cupping his hand under the leak.
“Oh my God,” Magdalena said. She dove under the table and started scooping up what had fallen down there. Neil dumped his handful back into the shoebox and ducked down to help her. He sneezed as a puff of fine white dust rose up.
Then the realization of what was happening hit him with all the weight of a cell door slamming shut: Magdalena suddenly leaving Britain with bags full of some kind of powder. Had Barry put her up to this? The powder was dirty white, it had a slight yellowish tint. Jesus, Neil thought. Words he didn’t know the precise meanings of, like horse and flake and dust and snow, started running through his head. Little cracks appeared in what had been his entire life up until that moment. The cracks grew and Neil’s future, all his hard work, his potential, the scholarships he’d won and his dreams of thick books with his name on them, all of it crumbled around him as he crouched under the café table with the cigarette butts and paper cups and pale dust all over his clothes.
Not realizing there was a hole in the bottom, Magdalena was frantically scooping the stuff back into the bag—which, by the way, was one of those gallon-size freezer bags, it was not small, and it was mostly full. The German mother grabbed her nearest child and pulled it away. A guy with a laptop next to them was standing to get a better view. Magdalena was crying and Neil realized for the first time in his life how quickly the tables could turn, how somebody who took honors seminars and was extremely conscientious about not bringing so much as a ball point pen into the archives could become, tout à coup, a fugitive from the law. He found himself scooting backward. He banged his head on the underside of the table. Dust puffed off his shirt when he stood up. The guards in their pincer formation hadn’t noticed yet, but they were headed in Neil’s direction, their gaze sweeping across the station like a pendulum with each step they took. In a moment they would see. Every instinct in Neil’s body was tensed to run.
Magdalena, on the other hand, seemed totally unconcerned by the fact that the whole world was watching her scoop up a shoebox’s worth of the stuff. She had stopped her frenzied sweeping and was kneeling under the table with her face in her hands, sobbing. There were smudges of it in her hair. A crowd was gathering, and the three guards with their giant guns were coming toward them, now at a quicker pace. Neil, as usual, was totally fucked.
“Magdalena,” he hissed. “Magdalena, get up,” but she was crying, keening, with her feet bent under her at funny angles and a string of spit hanging out of her mouth.
“What’s happening here?” one of the guards said in French.
“I don’t know,” Neil said. “She had this box and it fell.” The guard looked at him oddly, and Neil realized he’d said “helmet” instead of “box.” The guard squatted down and asked Magdalena what was going on. She just went on crying.
“Does she speak French?” he asked Neil.
“I don’t think so,” Neil said. And he had an idea. “I just met her,” he said. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“Lina, Lina, Lina, Lina,” Magdalena was saying. Another guard came over. His finger rested on the trigger of his gun.
“What’s this?” the second guard asked. The first guard dipped his finger in the powder, the way they did on TV.
“Cendres,” said the first guard.
“Oh là là,” said the second. “A member of the family?” he asked Neil.
By the time Neil remembered what cendres meant, the first guard was giving Magdalena some napkins and helping her scoop up the last bits, including one or two largish fragments of what looked like soup bones.
When they had gotten most of it, the first guard said something to the second, who went and got a trash bag from a janitor’s cart that was standing by. He wrapped the torn Ziploc bag in the trash bag and knotted it tight, then put it back in the shoebox and helped her up. “Apology and condolence,” he said to her in English, with a little bow, and he and the other guards went on their way.
Magdalena wiped her face. Neil wanted to die.