“Yeah, all right,” Rachel said, and for a while neither of them said anything.
Rachel seemed to have twice as much skin as everyone else. It swelled the space between the top of her shorts and the bottom of her tank top and stretched the leather cords of the pendants around her neck. All that skin had a number of sad things written on it, some of which Rachel told her in not quite the same versions as they walked, Rachel panting a little and wiping the sweat from her forehead with the loose insides of her arms, where Magdalena read starving on the left and broken by Colin with a date a year in the future on the right.
“Are you walking for penitence?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said, because she didn’t understand the word.
“I’m doing a cleansing,” Rachel said. Rachel didn’t believe in guilt, she said, or negative thinking. Magdalena nodded. They walked for a little while and then Rachel said, “And also for penitence, yeah. You know.” Magdalena didn’t say anything, but pretty soon Rachel was repeating the story that everyone, even the French nuns who couldn’t understand, had already heard, about falling pregnant and how they’d taken her son away when he was born and put him in care. “He was in a bad way, shakes, you know, and problems with his lungs. You know?” She kept asking Magdalena if she knew. Magdalena nodded. He’d been born too small, too early, with a long list of poisons in his little veins that Rachel wore, in alphabetical order, down her arm. “I don’t even know if he made out alright. They told me, you know, maybe he wouldn’t.” Still Magdalena didn’t say anything, though she did know, the answer was set out clearly along Rachel’s hairline, almost exactly where on Lina’s face the word apricots had been.
That night she and Rachel split the cost of a bed at the hostel. The nuns brushed their teeth and Magdalena eased her feet out of her sandals and ran a needle and thread through each of her blisters, like her mother used to do when she got home from work, cutting the thread after every stitch so that the ends stuck out of the blister on either side. “What are you doing that for?” Rachel said.
“For letting the water out,” Magdalena said. “So they don’t get big. I can do for you too.”
“Fuck no,” Rachel said. “Trying to stay away from needles, yeah?”
Rachel watched Magdalena for a little while, then said, “Want me to read your Tarot?” Magdalena didn’t know what she was talking about, but she said okay, and Rachel took a small wooden box wrapped in a blue silk scarf out of her backpack. “Blue is my aura,” she said, and opened the box. She spread the scarf out on the bed and shuffled a deck of fortune-telling cards.
Some of the markets in Vilnius had gypsies or old Russian women who read fortunes, and once Lina and Magdalena had paid to have theirs told from a deck of cards with the corners all gone. Magdalena couldn’t remember whose idea it had been, probably Lina’s. They’d taken the money out of what Magdalena’s mother had given them to buy vegetables, and her mother must have known what they’d done when they came home empty-handed except for a few cucumbers, flushed with conspiracy and awed by the images of blindfolded men with swords, lovers, the Hanged Man, and the Fool.
Rachel shuffled the cards and told Magdalena to cut them, then dealt a few face down in a semicircle on the blue scarf. She flipped them over one by one. Magdalena only half-listened, wondering why people who had a choice would want to know what was coming. She remembered the cards the gypsy woman had used, thick and oily from so many years of being stroked by dark fingers.
Magdalena and Lina had been too young then to care much about the future; they’d only wanted to find out if the boys they would marry were in their class at school, and Lina had asked the gypsy woman when her mother would be coming home. The woman caressed the cards with her fingertips as if she were coaxing Time to give the answer up, then said that for a question like that they would need to pay extra. Magdalena said no, but Lina made her give what was left of the vegetable money to the woman, who closed her eyes, turned over a final card, and let her fingers play across it. “She will come by this time next month,” the woman said. Lina was so happy she ran all the way home, leaving Magdalena to hunt for a few spotted cucumbers that had been thrown away, so she’d have something to give her mother. But a month passed, then two and three, and still Ruta didn’t come.
When Rachel had finished explaining Magdalena’s cards to her, telling her she would find love and warning her to stay away from Virgos, Magdalena put her glasses on and asked if she could try. She shuffled the cards as Rachel had done and laid them out across the scarf.
Magdalena knew that Rachel had probably asked the cards a thousand times for news about her son, and she needed to make sure that this time Rachel believed them. So, as she turned the cards over, Magdalena scanned Rachel’s face and neck for dates, picking out the ones that had already passed and looking for bits of information that Rachel would recognize. “You have one young sister I think,” Magdalena said.
“It says that?” Rachel said.
“It’s here,” Magdalena said. “This card with the woman by the gate means sister. You have been taking care of her, I think, when you are a child.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “What else does it say?”
“You have some hard things in your life. You have some problems with health when you are young. Things with the heart.”
“Where does it say that?” Rachel said.
“Oh, just there,” Magdalena said, and when Rachel pressed her for how she knew how to read the cards so well, Magdalena told her a story about a grandmother who was a gypsy and had taught her all the old ways.
Magdalena turned over more cards until she found some that looked like they could mean what she wanted to say.
“And here and here in the pieces of money and this with the child on the horse, this is about your son.”
“What does it say?” Rachel said.
“He is doing okay,” Magdalena said.
“Yeah?” Rachel said.
“He will have brown eyes and draw you a picture.”
“Yeah?” Rachel said again. “You’re sure?”
“This is for sure,” Magdalena said. “He lives with some nice people, you will see him some day.” She didn’t want to say too much more, so she turned over another card.
“But what about that?” Rachel said. The next card was the Devil.
“This one says only you have one not-so-good man in your life,” Magdalena said.
“Is that supposed to be Andy, does it say?” Rachel asked, squinting at the figure on the card.
“Colin,” Magdalena said, not thinking. Rachel looked at her strangely.
“How do you know about Colin?” she said.