The roads were getting steeper. The Pyrenees, Olaf said. Brit told them to be sure they were drinking plenty of water. As they hiked up hillsides covered with olive groves, Magdalena listened to Rachel talk about her days doing junk, sleeping in doorways and robbing her mum, and it occurred to Magdalena that the things she’d gotten used to reading as her mother reached for a pan or changed her skirt or stretched out her toes to let the polish dry had something in common. They were stories Magdalena had heard as a little girl, or they were hints of stories her mother might someday decide to tell her, and a number included phrases in the imperative tense—don’t pick the thin-stemmed mushrooms, check that the butcher’s scale is zero to begin with—as if her mother had made notes across her skin of the things that Magdalena ought to know.
But Magdalena’s mother’s body did not say Magdalena anywhere, and as they walked and she listened to Rachel cycle through the stories of her life, Magdalena let herself wonder why. Maybe, like Lina, her mother had things written under her hair. Maybe Magdalena’s name had gotten lost in her ear or covered over by the birthmark behind her mother’s knee. There had been no Magdalena on Lina either, or on Ivan or Andrius, Magdalena’s boyfriend in high school, or on Marija or Ruta or even Rachel, but it couldn’t be that Magdalena was meant to come and go without leaving so much as her name; she had seen herself on Neil: Magdalena Bikauskait? unmistakable in the hollow of his eye. In the station in Paris, when she’d lifted the bit of hair that stuck out over Neil’s ear, she hadn’t seen any words of explanation. Her name was a fact on his face, like his blood type and the dates his children would be born and the place he went to high school, and she thought about this too as the languages on the other pilgrims became more varied, leaving her understanding only the names—Marias, Paolos, Gottfrieds, Kristofers, Josés, and Adriennes—on strangers’ cheeks and hands and dusty legs. When she told the fortune of somebody covered in a language she couldn’t understand she learned to choose a name and say it carefully, and often she was able to tell from the look on the customer’s face whether Paolo or Kristofer was that person’s father or their son, a lost love, ex-husband, or favorite saint. She wondered what Neil would say if a stranger on the road looked into a crystal or fussed with a deck of cards and then said “Magdalena Bikauskait?” to him. Would he look confused? Or would he recognize a logic to that name that no one else would understand?
They crossed the border into Spain. The roads were busy with pilgrims hurrying to finish in time for the saint’s feast day and every time they stopped to rest, Rachel found someone who wanted a fortune told. They could buy sandwiches now, and they had their own bunks at the pilgrims’ hostels. Calluses formed around the threads in Magdalena’s feet. Rachel said it was disgusting, but she had to admit that Magdalena had been right, it stopped the blisters.
By then Magdalena had enough money for a decent pair of boots. Brit offered to take her shopping for the kind that breathed, but when they came to a town that had all the big outlet stores, Magdalena told Brit that she’d decided to use the money for something else. Of all the things written on her mother’s skin, there was one story that Magdalena knew the beginning to, but not the end—and besides, she’d spent her childhood reading pay your debts off the inside of her mother’s elbow whenever she rolled up her sleeves. When they stopped for the night, Magdalena asked at the desk for paper and an envelope and she got out the napkin where Neil had written his address. His last name struck her as a familiar fact. She’d seen those letters all her life on the soft skin below her mother’s collarbone, where the name Neil had said was his father’s had been given Lithuanian grammatical endings—Richardui Beartui—the dative form looking clumsy on those foreign words. It meant to Richard Beart or for him, turning Neil’s father into a noun whose meaning was incomplete standing alone like that, as if her mother had hugged the letters of the alphabet to her chest and come away with an unfinished sentence about a man in America claiming her heart.
Magdalena looked at the piece of blank paper the clerk had given her. Hello my dear Neil she wrote at the top, and stopped to think. She didn’t know quite how to make him understand, or where to begin. Rachel had met a group of German Wiccans and gone off to have a beer, so Magdalena had to ask one of the French nuns who taught school to help her with the English.
When she was finished she wrapped the letter around Neil’s sixty euros. She sealed the envelope and took it to the post office on their way out of town the next morning—though she knew from the warning across the back of her mother’s left knee that one should never send cash through the mail.
{NEIL}
Vilnius, June
Just like Magdalena had said, the bus ride to Vilnius took thirty-three hours. Sometime during the night they stopped beside a field, men went in front of the bus, women behind, and Neil woke the next morning as they crossed the German-Polish border wondering if he’d dreamed the sight of all those bare white bottoms twinkling in the moonlight. They stopped again in Warsaw, where everyone stood at a counter to eat potatoes and cold beet soup, then back on the bus. Fields and forests and little wooden farmhouses with thatched roofs went by, and Neil went in and out of dreams, waking to re-plan in his head for the hundredth time just how everything would happen. The bus rolled through pine forests and finally through hundreds of Soviet apartment buildings on the outskirts of Vilnius—some of them without glass in the windows, some with laundry hanging from cement balconies that seemed ready to chip off. Cracks ran like ivy along the seams of the buildings and Neil imagined again the scene in the pizza restaurant, preparing a little speech for himself, wishing Magdalena had left something so he could return it to her the way they did in movies. Madam, I believe this handkerchief is yours. He thought about lying. Magdalena? Is that you? I’m here to do some research and, I mean, what are the odds? But he settled on honesty. I just thought it would be nice to, like, see you again.