She made mistakes sometimes, or accidentally revealed information that even the cards weren’t supposed to know. Once or twice in the beginning people made her put the deck away before she was finished and hurried off, looking at Magdalena oddly and crossing themselves. But as they went along she developed the techniques of a confidence man or a sideshow illusionist, deciding first what she was going to reveal to her customers and then asking them questions that came just close enough to the answers she wanted that they left impressed, not knowing how, exactly, but assuming that Magdalena was using some sort of subtle hypnosis or psychological sleight-of-hand.
Sometimes as she walked Magdalena wondered if any of the gypsy women in the markets had the problem of knowing more than was profitable. She’d tried for such a long time not to think too much about why she saw words where she did or if she was the only one. Knowing madness or worse might be hiding underneath questions that went too deep, Magdalena had always tiptoed through her own mind when she had to, and stayed out when she could. But maybe it was the way the road to Spain stretched in front of her until it narrowed to a pinprick and disappeared into blue, or the way fields and hills rose and fell for as far as she could see. Surrounded by so much space and sky Magdalena began letting go of her old habit of pinching off her thoughts before they could get away from her, and for the first time in a long time she let them roll all the way to their ends.
She thought about the things that made no sense: the Scottish nun they’d met whose skin was taken up entirely with the names of wild birds. Or a teacher she’d had in high school who had a recipe for buckwheat soup on her forehead. There was someone else, she couldn’t remember who, whose skin was covered with a list of library books a lifetime long, and the dates that they were due. She remembered the man she’d met on the street in Paris, who’d sounded like an American but had an old saying that her mother liked written in Lithuanian across his face.
She thought about the words on her mother’s skin, as familiar to Magdalena as the sound of her voice. Her mother had Juozas, the name of Magdalena’s baby brother, on her arm, and Rimantas, the name of Magdalena’s father, on her forehead—that was where, her mother had told her, her father had gotten flustered and kissed her, instead of on the lips, as they stood at the altar. The details of a gall bladder operation that her mother had had as a girl circled a scar on her stomach, and a patch of skin without a scar described a hysterectomy with minor complications. On the back of her mother’s wrist was her favorite joke about the priest and the tailor, which made her laugh so much when she told it that she always skipped the best part, and her mother’s thighs were wrapped in superstitions—if you drop a comb be sure to step on it, never sleep in moonlight, a dream of brown bread means a happy home, a rabbit means life, a barking dog means death, the devil dances at weddings, never whistle indoors—things she’d learned from Magdalena’s great-grandmother, who, as an old woman, had saved her fingernail clippings in little bags, knowing she would need them to climb the icy mountain that in the old Lithuanian stories was the only way to Paradise.
But as they walked toward Spain there were days when the only thing that could take Magdalena’s mind off her feet was to think about her father. Her mother hardly ever talked about him, and they’d never had anything to do with Magdalena’s aunts and uncles and cousins on his side, who blamed Magdalena’s mother for the things that had gone wrong. “You have his eyes,” her mother sometimes said to her, and when Magdalena was young and her mother was sad, sometimes Magdalena would feel her way around the house, keeping them closed so her mother wouldn’t be reminded of the man in the photographs, who had strong hands and a tired face and eyes as clear as glass.
“He thought about things too much,” her mother said once. “He went around in circles in his mind, and after Juozas was born he couldn’t take it anymore.” Magdalena remembered that her mother had said “after Juozas was born,” not “after Juozas died.” The two things had happened on the same day, and it was possible that Magdalena’s mother thought of the two events as one, or that she said it like that because she couldn’t bring herself, still, after all the years, to say it the other way. But as she walked, Magdalena let herself wonder, out loud inside her own head for the first time, if it was possible that her father had stopped wanting to go on living when his son was born and he saw that there was just one date written on the baby’s skin.
They walked through fields dense with tiny flowers that left streaks of pollen across their ankles. Rachel had fits of rasping sneezes—hay fever it said across the bridge of her nose—and Magdalena wondered if her father had ever guessed that there might be others like him. In London it had happened to her twice. Magdalena had seen them, or she might have—both times she’d tried so hard not to believe it that now she couldn’t be sure. There had been a man with no shoes in a tube station who’d looked at her with eyes like mirrors in an empty room and smiled in recognition. The other time it was a child, a little boy she’d seen at an outdoor market in Islington whose pale gaze was all the more noticeable because his skin was dark. He’d been holding his mother’s hand, watching the people pass by, mouthing the words.
They passed a market on the outskirts of a little town. The nuns bought a bucket of tomatoes and Rachel and Magdalena ate them like apples as they walked. Magdalena thought about how her father had died right around the time she learned the alphabet. She wondered if he’d ever taken her to a place crowded with people and watched to see if she moved her lips.
She thought about the list that began at the nape of her mother’s neck and continued in small print all down her back, recording each drink she’d had in the days and weeks and months after Magdalena’s father died. The last entry came just above her mother’s pants line—it sometimes showed when she bent over and her shirt rode up—saying 3.2 liters Stumbras Vodka under birches. Out of the whole world only Magdalena could possibly know it was a reference to the day when, having lost a baby and a husband, and then, if the log was right, 152 nights to Stumbras, Magdalena’s mother had bundled Magdalena, age four, into her snowsuit, collected the bottles under her arm, and together they’d gone into the woods behind their old apartment building, where they unscrewed and dumped each one, holding their noses and watching the liquid burn little holes in the snow under a stand of birch trees, which, Magdalena’s great-grandmother used to say, house the spirits of men who die too soon.