She held out the letter. Mission took it, saw his best friend’s name written on the outside, all the other names crossed out.
“I can leave it for him, sure. The last two times I stopped by there, they said he was unavailable.”
Mrs. Crowe nodded as if this was to be expected. “Ask for Jeffery, he’s the head of security down there, one of my boys. You tell him that this is from me and that I said you should hand it to Rodny yourself. In person.” She waved her hands in the air, little trembling blurs. “I’ll write Jeffery a note.”
Mission glanced up at the clock on the wall while she dug into her desk for a pen and ink. Soon, the hallways would begin filling with youthful chatter and the opening and slamming of lockers. He waited patiently while she scratched her note. In the while, he scanned the walls at the old motivators, as Mrs. Crowe like to call the posters and banners she made.
You can be anything, one of them said. It featured a crude drawing of a boy and a girl standing on a huge mound. The mound was green and the sky blue, just like in the picture books. Another one said: Dream to your heart’s delight. It had bands of color in a graceful sweep. The Crow had a name for the shape, but he’d forgotten what it was called. Another familiar one: Go new places. It featured a drawing of a crow perched in an impossibly large tree, it’s wings spread as if it were about to take flight.
“Jeffery is the bald one,” Mrs. Crowe said. She waved a hand over her own white and thinning hair to demonstrate.
“I know the one,” Mission said. It was a strange reminder that so many of the adults and elders throughout the silo had been her students as well. A locker was slammed in the hallway. Mission remembered when he was a kid how the rows and rows of tiny desks had filled the room. There were cubbies full of rolled mats for nap time, reminding him of the daily routine of clearing a space in the middle of the floor, finding his mat, and drifting off to sleep while the Crow sang to them. He missed those days. He missed the Old Time stories about a world full of impossible things. Leaning against that little desk, Mission suddenly felt as ancient as the Crow, just as impossibly distant from his youth.
“Give Jeffery this, and then see that Rodny gets my note. From you personally, okay?”
He grabbed his pack and slid both pieces of correspondence into his courier pouch. There was no mention of payment, just the twinge of guilt Mission felt for even thinking it. Digging into the pack reminded him of the items he had brought her, forgotten due to the previous night’s brawl.
“Oh, I brought you these from the farm.” He pulled out a few small cucumbers, two peppers, and a large tomato. He placed them on her desk. “For your veggie drinks,” he said.
Mrs. Crowe clasped her hands together and smiled with delight.
“Is there anything else you need next time I’m passing by?”
“These visits,” she said, her face a wrinkle of smiles. “All I care about are my little ones. Stop by whenever you can, okay?”
Mission squeezed her arm, which felt like a broomstick tucked into a sleeve. “I will,” he said. “And that reminds me: Jenine, Frankie, and Steven all told me to tell you hello. And I’m probably forgetting someone.”
“Those boys should come more often,” she told him, her voice a quiver.
“Not everyone gets around like I do,” he said. “I’m sure they’d like to see you more often as well.”
“You tell them,” she said. “Tell them I don’t have much time left—”
Mission laughed and waved off the morbid thought. “You probably told my grandfather the same thing when he was young, and his father before him.”
The Crow smiled as if this were true. “Predict the inevitable,” she said, “and you’re bound to be right one day.”
Mission smiled. He liked that. “Still, I wish you wouldn’t talk about dying. Nobody likes to hear it.”
“They may not like it, but a reminder is good.” She held out her arms, the sleeves of her flowered dress falling away and revealing the bandage once more. “Tell me, what do you see when you look at these hands?” She turned them over, back and forth. She studied them as if they belonged to another.
“I see time,” Mission blurted out, not sure where the thought came from. He tore his eyes away, suddenly finding her skin to be grotesque. Like shriveled potatoes found deep in the soil long after harvest time. He hated himself for feeling it.
“Time, sure,” Mrs. Crowe said. “There’s time here aplenty. But there’s remnants, too. I remember things being better, once. You think on the bad to remind yourself of the good.”
She studied her hands a moment longer as if looking for something else. When she lifted her gaze and peered at Mission, her eyes were shining with sadness. Mission could feel his own eyes watering, partly from discomfort, partly due to the somber pall that had been cast like a cold and wet blanket over the conversation. It reminded him that today was his birthday, a thought that tightened his neck and emptied his chest. He was sure the Crow knew what day it was. She just loved him enough not to say.
“I was beautiful, once, you know.” Mrs. Crowe withdrew her hands and folded them in her lap. “Once that’s gone, once it leaves us for good, no one will ever see it again.”
Mission felt a powerful urge to soothe her, to tell Mrs. Crowe that she was still beautiful in plenty of ways. She could still make music. Could paint. Few others remembered how. She could make children feel loved and safe, another bit of magic long forgotten.
“When I was your age,” the Crow said, smiling, “I could have any boy I wanted.”
She laughed, dispelling the tension and casting away the shadows that had fallen over their talk, but Mission believed her. He believed her even though he couldn’t picture it, couldn’t imagine away the wrinkles and the spots and the long strands of hair on her knuckles. Still, he believed her. He always did.
“The world is a lot like me, you know.” She lifted her gaze toward the ceiling and perhaps beyond. “The world was beautiful once, too.”
Mission sensed an Old Time story brewing like a storm of clouds. More lockers were slammed in the hallway, little voices gathering.
“Tell me,” Mission said, remembering the hours that had passed like eyeblinks at her feet, the songs she sang while children slept. “Tell me about the old world.”
The Old Crow’s eyes narrowed and settled on a dark corner of the room. A deep breath rattled in her once-proud chest. Her lips, furrowed with the wrinkles of time, parted, and a story began, a story Mission had heard a thousand times before. But it never got old, visiting this land of the Crow’s imagination. And as the little ones skipped into the room, they too fell silent and gathered around. They slipped into their tiny desks and followed along with the widest of eyes and the most open of unknowing minds these tales of a world, once beautiful, and now fairly forgotten.
•11•
The stories Mrs. Crowe made up were straight from the children’s books. There were blue skies and lands of green, white clouds and rainbows, animals like dogs and cats but bigger than people. Juvenile stuff. And yet, these fantastic tales of a better place somewhere impossibly distant left Mission feeling angry at the world he was stuck with. He thought this as he left the Up Top behind and wound his way past the farms and the levels of his youth. The promise of an elsewhere highlighted the flaws of the familiar. He had gone off to be a porter, to fly away and be all that he wished, and what he wished was to be further away than this world would allow.