The letter arrives on a Friday. Slit and resealed with a sticker, of course, as all their letters are: Inspected for your safety—PACT. It had caused confusion at the post office, the clerk unfolding the paper inside, studying it, passing it up to his supervisor, then the boss. But eventually it had been deemed harmless and sent on its way. No return address, only a New York, NY postmark, six days old. On the outside, his name—Bird—and because of this he knows it is from his mother.
He has not been Bird for a long time.
We named you Noah after your father’s father, his mother told him once. Bird was all your own doing.
The word that, when he said it, felt like him. Something that did not belong on earth, a small quick thing. An inquisitive chirp, a self that curled up at the edges.
The school hadn’t liked it. Bird is not a name, they’d said, his name is Noah. His kindergarten teacher, fuming: He won’t answer when I call him. He only answers to Bird.
Because his name is Bird, his mother said. He answers to Bird, so I suggest you call him that, birth certificate be damned. She’d taken a Sharpie to every handout that came home, crossing off Noah, writing Bird on the dotted line instead.
That was his mother: formidable and ferocious when her child was in need.
In the end the school conceded, though after that the teacher had written Bird in quotation marks, like a gangster’s nickname. Dear “Bird,” please remember to have your mother sign your permission slip. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Gardner, “Bird” is respectful and studious but needs to participate more fully in class. It wasn’t until he was nine, after his mother left, that he became Noah.
His father says it’s for the best, and won’t let anyone call him Bird anymore.
If anyone calls you that, he says, you correct them. You say: Sorry, no, that’s not my name.
It was one of the many changes that took place after his mother left. A new apartment, a new school, a new job for his father. An entirely new life. As if his father had wanted to transform them completely, so that if his mother ever came back, she wouldn’t even know how to find them.
He’d passed his old kindergarten teacher on the street last year, on his way home. Well, hello, Noah, she said, how are you this morning? and he could not tell whether it was smugness or pity in her voice.
He is twelve now; he has been Noah for three years, but Noah still feels like one of those Halloween masks, something rubbery and awkward he doesn’t quite know how to wear.
So now, out of the blue: a letter from his mother. It looks like her handwriting—and no one else would call him that. Bird. After all these years he forgets her voice sometimes; when he tries to summon it, it slips away like a shadow dissolving in the dark.
He opens the envelope with trembling hands. Three years without a single word, but finally he’ll understand. Why she left. Where she’s been.
But inside: nothing but a drawing. A whole sheet of paper, covered edge to edge in drawings no bigger than a dime: cats. Big cats, little cats, striped and calico and tuxedo, sitting pert, licking their paws, lolling in puddles of sunlight. Doodles really, like the ones his mother drew on his lunch bags many years ago, like the ones he sometimes draws in his class notebooks today. Barely more than a few curved lines, but recognizable. Alive. That’s all—no message, no words even, just cat after cat in ballpoint squiggle. Something about it tugs at the back of his mind, but he can’t quite hook it.
He turns the paper over, looking for clues, but the back of the page is blank.
Do you remember anything about your mother, Sadie had asked him once. They were on the playground, atop the climbing structure, the slide yawning down before them. Fifth grade, the last year with recess. Everything too small for them by then, meant for little children. Across the blacktop they watched their classmates hunting each other out: ready or not, here I come.
The truth was that he did, but he didn’t feel like sharing, even with Sadie. Their motherlessness bound them together, but it was different, what had happened to them. What had happened with their mothers.
Not much, he’d said, do you remember much about yours?
Sadie grabbed the bar over the slide and hoisted herself, as if doing a chin-up.
Only that she was a hero, she said.
Bird said nothing. Everyone knew that Sadie’s parents had been deemed unfit to raise her and that’s how she’d ended up with her foster family, and at their school. There were all kinds of stories about them: that even though Sadie’s mother was Black and her father was white they were Chinese sympathizers selling out America. All kinds of stories about Sadie, too: that when the officers came to take her away she’d bitten one and ran screaming back to her parents, and they’d had to cart her off in handcuffs. That this wasn’t even her first foster family, that she’d been re-placed more than once because she caused so much trouble. That even after she’d been removed, her parents kept on trying to overturn PACT, like they didn’t care about getting her back; that they’d been arrested and were in jail somewhere. He suspected there were stories about him, too, but he didn’t want to know.
Anyway, Sadie went on, as soon as I’m old enough I’m going back home to Baltimore and find them both.
She was a year older than Bird, even though they were in the same grade, and she never let him forget it. Had to repeat, the parents whispered at pickup, with pity in their voices. Because of her upbringing. But even a new start can’t straighten her out.
How, Bird had asked.
Sadie didn’t answer, and after a minute she let go of the bar and slumped down beside him, a small defiant heap. The next year, just as school ended, Sadie disappeared—and now, in seventh grade, Bird is all alone again.
It is just past five: his father will be home soon, and if he sees the letter he’ll make Bird burn it. They don’t have any of his mother’s things, not even her clothes. After she’d gone away, his father burned her books in the fireplace, smashed the cell phone she’d left behind, piled everything else in a heap at the curb. Forget about her, he’d said. By morning, people living rough had picked the pile clean. A few weeks later, when they moved to their apartment on campus, they’d left even the bed his parents had shared. Now his father sleeps in a twin, on the lower bunk, beneath Bird.
He should burn the letter himself. It isn’t safe, having anything of hers around. More than this: when he sees his name, his old name, on the envelope, a door inside him creaks open and a draft snakes in. Sometimes when he sees sleeping figures huddled on the sidewalk, he scans them, searching for something familiar. Sometimes he finds it—a polka-dot scarf, a red-flowered shirt, a woolen hat slouching over their eyes—and for a moment, he believes it is her. It is easier if she’s gone forever, if she never comes back.
His father’s key scratches at the keyhole, wriggling its way into the stiff lock.
Bird darts to the bedroom, lifts his blankets, tucks the letter between pillow and case.
He doesn’t remember much about his mother, but he remembers this: she always had a plan. She would not have taken the trouble to find their new address, and the risk of writing him, for no reason. Therefore this letter must mean something. He tells himself this, again and again.
She’d left them, that was all his father would say.
And then, getting down on his knees to look Bird in the eye: It’s for the best. Forget about her. I’m not going anywhere, that’s all you need to know.
Back then, Bird hadn’t known what she’d done. He only knew that for weeks he’d heard his parents’ muffled voices in the kitchen long after he was supposed to be asleep. Usually it was a soothing murmur that lulled him to sleep in minutes, a sign that all was well. But lately it had been a tug-of-war instead: first his father’s voice, then his mother’s, bracing itself, gritting its teeth.
Even then he’d understood it was better not to ask questions. He’d simply nodded, and let his father, warm and solid, draw him into his arms.
It wasn’t until later that he learned the truth, hurled at him on the playground like a stone to the cheek: Your mom is a traitor. D. J. Pierce, spitting on the ground beside Bird’s sneakers.
Everyone knew his mother was a Person of Asian Origin. Kung-PAOs, some kids called them. This was not news. You could see it in Bird’s face, if you looked: all the parts of him that weren’t quite his father, hints in the tilt of his cheekbones, the shape of his eyes. Being a PAO, the authorities reminded everyone, was not itself a crime. PACT is not about race, the president was always saying, it is about patriotism and mindset.
But your mom started riots, D. J. said. My parents said so. She was a danger to society and they were coming for her and that’s why she ran away.
His father had warned him about this. People will say all kinds of things, he’d told Bird. You just focus on school. You say, we have nothing to do with her. You say, she’s not a part of my life anymore.
He’d said it.
We have nothing to do with her, my dad and me. She’s not a part of my life anymore.
Inside him his heart tightened and creaked. On the blacktop, the wad of D. J.’s spit glistened and frothed.
By the time his father comes into the apartment, Bird is sitting at the table with his schoolbooks. On a normal day he’d jump up, offer a side-armed hug. Today, still thinking about the letter, he hunches over his homework and avoids his father’s eyes.
Elevator’s out again, his father says.
They live on the top floor of one of the dorms, ten flights up. A newer building, but the university is so old even the newer buildings are outdated.
We’ve been around since before the United States was a country, his father likes to say. He says we as if he is still a faculty member, though he hasn’t been for years. Now he works at the college library, keeping records, shelving books, and the apartment comes with the job. Bird understands this is a perk, that his father’s hourly wage is small and money is tight, but to him it doesn’t seem like much of a benefit. Before, they’d had a whole house with a yard and a garden. Now they have a tiny two-room dorm: a single bedroom he and his father share, a living room with a kitchenette at one end. A two-burner stove; a mini fridge too small to hold a carton of milk upright. Below them, students come and go; every year they have new neighbors, and by the time they get to know people’s faces, they are gone. In the summer there is no air-conditioning; in the winter the radiators click on full blast. And when the balky elevator refuses to run, the only way up or down is the stairs.
Well, his father says. One hand goes to the knot of his tie, working it loose. I’ll let the super know.
Bird keeps his eyes on his papers, but he can feel his father’s gaze pause on him. Waiting for him to look up. He doesn’t dare.
Today’s English assignment: In a paragraph, explain what PACT stands for and why it is crucial for our national security. Provide three specific examples. He knows just what he should say; they study it in school every year. The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. In kindergarten they called it a promise: We promise to protect American values. We promise to watch over each other. Each year they learn the same thing, just in bigger words. During these lessons, his teachers usually looked at Bird, rather pointedly, and then the rest of the class turned to look, too.
He pushes the essay aside and focuses on math instead. Suppose the GDP of China is $15 trillion and it increases 6% per year. If America’s GDP is $24 trillion but it increases at only 2% per year, how many years before China’s GDP is more than America’s? It’s easier, where there are numbers. Where he can be sure of right and wrong.
Everything all right, Noah? his father says, and Bird nods, makes a vague gesture at his notebook.
Just a lot of homework, he says, and his father, apparently satisfied, goes into the bedroom to change.
Bird carries a one, draws a neat box around the final sum. There is no point in telling his father about his day: each day is the same. The walk to school, along the same route. The pledge, the anthem, shuffling from class to class keeping his head down, trying not to attract attention in the hallway, never raising his hand. On the best days, everyone ignores him; most days, he’s picked on or pitied. He’s not sure which he dislikes more, but he blames both on his mother.
There is never much point in asking his father about his day, either. As far as he can tell, his father’s days are unvarying: roll the cart through the stacks, place a book in its spot, repeat. Back in the shelving room, another cart will be waiting. Sisyphean, his father said, when he first began. He used to teach linguistics; he loves books and words; he is fluent in six languages, can read another eight. It’s he who told Bird the story of Sisyphus, forever rolling the same stone up a hill. His father loves myths and obscure Latin roots and words so long you had to practice before rattling them off like a rosary. He used to interrupt his own sentences to explain a complicated term, to wander off the path of his thought down a switchback trail, telling Bird the history of the word, where it came from, its whole life story and all its siblings and cousins. Scraping back the layers of its meaning. Once Bird had loved it, too, back when he was younger, back when his father was still a professor and his mother was still here and everything was different. When he’d still thought stories could explain anything.
These days, his father doesn’t talk much about words. He is tired from the long days at the library that grind his eyes into sand; he comes home surrounded by a hush, as if it’s soaked into him from the stacks, the cool sweet-stale air, the gloom that hovers at your shoulder, barely pushed back by the single light in each aisle. Bird doesn’t ask him, either, for the same reason his father doesn’t like to talk about his mother: both of them would rather not miss these things they can’t get back.
Still: she returns in sudden flashes. Like scraps of half-remembered dreams.
Her laugh, sudden as a seal’s bark, a raucous burst that threw her whole head back. Unladylike, she’d called it, with pride. The way she’d drum her fingers while she was thinking, her thoughts so restless she could not be still. And this one: late at night, Bird ill with a rasping cold. Waking from a sweaty sleep, panicked, coughing and crying, his chest full of hot glue. Certain he was going to die. His mother, draping a towel over the bedside lamp, curling up beside him, setting her cool cheek to his forehead. Holding him until he fell asleep, holding him all night. Each time he half woke, her arms were still around him, and the fear that rose in him like a ruffled thing grew smooth and sleek again.
Together they sit at the table, Bird drumming a pencil against his worksheet, his father studiously combing through the newspaper. Everyone else in the world gets their news online, scrolling through the top stories, pulling phones from pockets at the ding of a breaking-news alert. Once his father had, too, but after they moved he’d given up his phone and his laptop. I’m just old-fashioned, he said, when Bird asked. These days he reads the newspaper, front to back. Every word, he says, every single day. This is as close as he comes to bragging. Between problems, Bird tries not to look toward the bedroom, where the letter lies in wait. Instead he studies the headlines on the front page that screens him from his father. sharp eye of neighborhood watch foils potential insurrection in dc.
Bird calculates. If a Korean car costs $15,000 but lasts only 3 years, while an American car costs $20,000 but lasts 10 years, how much money would be saved over 50 years by purchasing only American cars? If a virus spreads exponentially through a population of 10 million, and doubles its rate of growth every day—
Across the table, his father inverts the newspaper.
There is only the essay left. Haltingly, Bird picks his way through the assignment, building a lopsided paragraph word by word. PACT is a very important law that ended the Crisis and keeps our country safe, because—
He is relieved when his father folds the paper and checks his watch, when he can abandon the essay and set his pencil down.
Almost six thirty, his father says. Come on, let’s get something to eat.
They cross the street to the dining hall for dinner. Another alleged perk of the job: no one has to cook; handy for a single dad. If, through some unforeseen delay, they miss dinner, his father scrambles—a blue box of macaroni from the cupboard, perhaps; a scanty meal that leaves them both hungry. Before his mother left, they’d eaten together, a circle of three at the kitchen table, his parents chatting and laughing as they ate, afterward his mother singing softly as she washed the dishes and his father dried.
They find a spot in the back corner of the dining hall where they can eat alone. Around them, students cluster in twos and threes, the low murmur of their whispered conversations like an air current in the room. Bird knows none of their names and only a few of their faces; he’s not in the habit of looking people in the eye. Just keep on walking, his father always says if passersby stare, their gazes like centipedes on Bird’s face. Bird is grateful that he isn’t expected to smile and nod to the students, to make small talk. They do not know his name either, and anyway, by the end of the year, they will all be gone.
They have almost finished eating when there’s a commotion outside. A scuffle and a crash, the screeching of wheels. Sirens.
Stay here, Bird’s father says. He runs to the window and joins the students already gathering there, peering out onto the street. All around the dining hall, abandoned plates grow cold. Blue and white lights strobe across the ceiling and walls. Bird does not get up. Whatever it is will pass. Stay away from trouble, his father always tells him, which to his father means anything that attracts attention. You see any trouble, his father once said, you run the other way. This is his father: trudging through life, head bowed.
But the murmur in the dining hall grows louder. More sirens, more lights, casting shadows that swell and loom, monstrous, on the ceiling. Outside, a tangle of angry voices and the jostle of bodies, booted feet on pavement. He’s never heard anything like this and part of him wants to run to the window, to peek out and see what’s going on. The other part of him wants to duck under the table and hide, like the small scared creature he suddenly knows himself to be. From the street comes a scratchy burst of megaphone: This is the Cambridge Police. Please shelter in place. Stay away from windows until further notification.
Around the dining hall, students scurry back to their tables, and Peggy, the dining-hall manager, skirts the room, yanking the curtains shut. The air tingles with whispers. Bird imagines an angry mob outside, barricades of trash and furniture, Molotov cocktails and flames. All the photos from the Crisis they’ve studied in school, come to life. He jitters his knee against the table leg until his father returns, and then the jittering transfers itself inside him, to the hollow part of his chest.
What’s going on, Bird asks.
His father shakes his head.
Some disruption, he says. I think. And then, noticing Bird’s wide eyes: It’s okay, Noah. The authorities are here. They have everything under control.
During the Crisis, disruptions happened all the time; they’ve learned this over and over in school, for as long as he can remember. Everyone out of work, factories gone idle, shortages of everything; mobs had looted stores and rioted in the streets, lighting whole neighborhoods ablaze. The nation paralyzed in the turmoil.
It was impossible, his social studies teacher had said, to lead a productive life.
He’d flicked to another slide on the smartboard. Streets in rubble, windows smashed. A tank in the middle of Wall Street. Smoke rising in an orange haze beneath the St. Louis Arch.
That, young ladies and gentlemen, is why you are fortunate to be living in an age where PACT has made disruptive protests a thing of the past.
And it’s true, for most of Bird’s life disruptions have been vanishingly rare. PACT has been the law for over a decade, passed with overwhelming majorities in both House and Senate, signed by the president in record time. Poll after poll still shows huge public support.
Except: over the past few months, strange things have been happening all over—not strikes and marches and riots like the disruptions they’ve learned about in class, but something new. Weird and apparently pointless stunts, too bizarre not to report, all of them anonymous, all of them aimed at PACT itself. In Memphis, ski-masked figures emptied a dump truck of ping-pong balls into the river and fled, leaving a plume of white orbs in their wake. A miniature red heart drawn on each, above the words end pact. Just last week, two drones had unfurled a banner across the Brooklyn Bridge, arch to arch. fuck pact, it read. Within thirty minutes, the state police had closed the bridge, rolled a cherry picker to the support towers, and taken it down—but Bird has seen the photos, snapped on phones and unleashed online; all the news stations and sites had run them, and even some papers, too. The big banner with bold black lettering, and beneath it, a splotchy red heart like a splash of blood.
In New York, traffic had snarled for hours with the bridge closed: people had posted videos showing long lines of cars, a chain of red lights stretching into the night. We didn’t get home until midnight, one driver told reporters. Under his eyes, dark rings bloomed like smudges of smoke. We were basically held hostage, he said, and no one knew what was going on—I mean, it was like terrorism. News reports calculated the gasoline wasted, the carbon monoxide released, the economic cost of those lost hours. Rumor had it that people were still finding ping-pong balls floating in the Mississippi; Memphis police released a photograph of a duck they said had choked, gullet bulging with tumor-like lumps.
Absolutely unacceptable behavior, his social studies teacher had sniffed. If any of you ever get wind of someone planning disruptions like these, it’s your civic duty under PACT to report it to the authorities.
They’d gotten an impromptu lecture and an extra assignment: Write a five-paragraph essay explaining how recent disturbances to the peace have endangered public safety for all. Bird’s hand had curled and cramped.
And here is a disruption right outside the dining hall. Bird is equally terrified and fascinated. What is it: An attack? A riot? A bomb?
From across the table, his father takes his hand. Something he did often when Bird was still small, something he almost never does anymore now that Bird is older, something Bird—secretly—misses. His father’s hand is soft and uncalloused, the hand of a man who works with his mind. His fingers wrap warm and strong around Bird’s, gently stilling them.
You know where it comes from? his father says. Dis- means apart. Like disturb, distend, dismember.
His father’s oldest habit: taking words apart like old clocks to show the gears still ticking inside. He is trying to calm Bird, as if telling a bedtime story. To distract him, maybe even to distract himself.
Plus rupt: to break. As in erupt, to break out; interrupt, to break between; abrupt, broken from.
His father’s voice rises half an octave in his excitement, a guitar string coming into tune. So disruption, he says, really means breaking apart. Smashing to pieces.
Bird thinks of train tracks uprooted, highways barricaded, buildings crumbling. He thinks of the photos they’ve been shown in school, protesters hurling rocks, riot officers crouched behind a wall of shields. From outside they hear indistinct screeches from police radios, voices swelling in and out of range. Around them, the students bend over their phones, looking for explanations, posting updates.
It’s okay, Noah, his father says. It’ll all be over soon. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
I’m not afraid, Bird says. And he isn’t, exactly. It isn’t fear that spiderwebs across his skin. It’s like the charge in the air before a storm, some immense and shocking potential.
About twenty minutes later another megaphone announcement crackles through the drawn curtains and the double panes of glass. It is safe to resume normal activities. Please alert authorities to any further suspicious activity.
Around them, the students begin to trickle away, depositing their trays at the wash station and hurrying off to their dorm rooms, complaining about the delay. It is past eight thirty, and everyone suddenly has somewhere else they wish to be. As Bird and his father gather their things, Peggy begins to open the curtains again, revealing the darkened street. Behind her, other dining-hall workers dart from table to table with dishcloths and spray bottles of cleaner; another shoves a push broom hastily across the tiles, collecting spilled cereal and scattered bread crumbs.
I’ll get those for you, Peggy, Bird’s father says, and Peggy gives him a grateful nod.
You take care, Mr. Gardner, Peggy says, as she hurries back into the kitchen. Bird fidgets, waiting, until his father has reopened each set of curtains, and they can head home again.
Outside the air is brisk and still. All the police cars have gone, and all the people, too; the block is deserted. He looks for signs of the disruption—craters, scorched buildings, broken glass. Nothing. Then, as they cross the street back toward the dorm, Bird sees it on the ground: spray-painted, blood-red against the asphalt, right in the center of the intersection. The size of a car, impossible to miss. A heart, he realizes, just like the banner in Brooklyn. And circling it this time, a ring of words. bring back our missing hearts.
A tingle snakes over his skin.
As they cross, he slows, reading the letters again. our missing hearts. The half-dried paint sticks to the soles of his sneakers; his breath sticks, hot, in his throat. He glances at his father, searching for a glimmer of recognition. But his father tugs him by the arm. Pulling him away, not even looking down. Not meeting Bird’s eye.
Getting late, his father says. Better head in.
She’d been a poet, his mother.
A famous one, Sadie had added, and he’d shrugged. Was there such a thing?
Are you kidding, Sadie said, everyone’s heard of Margaret Miu.
She considered.
Well, she said, they’ve heard her poem, at least.
At first it had just been a phrase, like any other.
Not long after his mother left, Bird had found a slip of paper on the bus, thin as a dead butterfly’s wing, in the gap between seat and wall. One of dozens. His father snatched it from his hand and crumpled it, tossed it to the floor.
Don’t pick up garbage, Noah, he said.
But Bird had already read the words at the top: all our missing hearts.
A phrase he’d never heard before but that sprang up elsewhere in the months, then years, after his mother had gone. Graffitied in the bike tunnel, on the wall of the basketball court, on the plywood around a long-stalled construction site. don’t forget our missing hearts. Scrawled across the neighborhood-watch posters with a fat-bladed brush: where are our missing hearts? And on pamphlets, appearing overnight one memorable morning: pinned under the wipers of parked cars, scattered on the sidewalk, caught against the concrete feet of lampposts. Palm-sized, xeroxed handbills reading simply this: all our missing hearts.
The next day, the graffiti was painted over, the posters replaced, the pamphlets swept away like dead leaves. Everything so clean he might have imagined it all.
It didn’t mean anything to him then.
It’s an anti-PACT slogan, his father said curtly, when Bird asked. From people who want to overturn PACT. Crazy people, he’d added. Real lunatics.
You’d have to be a lunatic, Bird had agreed, to overturn PACT. PACT had helped end the Crisis; PACT kept things peaceful and safe. Even kindergarteners knew that. PACT was common sense, really: If you acted unpatriotic, there would be consequences. If you didn’t, then what were you worried about? And if you saw or heard of something unpatriotic, it was your duty to let the authorities know. He has never known a world without PACT; it is as axiomatic as gravity, or Thou shalt not kill. He didn’t understand why anyone would oppose it, what any of this had to do with hearts, how a heart could be missing. How could you survive without your heart beating inside you?
It made no sense until he met Sadie. Who’d been removed from her home and re-placed, because her parents had protested PACT.
Didn’t you know? she’d said. What the consequences were? Bird. Come on.
She tapped the worksheet they’d been given as homework: The Three Pillars of PACT. Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society. And there, beneath Sadie’s finger: Protects children from environments espousing harmful views.
Even then, he hadn’t wanted to believe it. Maybe there were a few PACT removals, but they couldn’t happen much—or why did no one talk about it? Sure, every now and then, you heard of a case like Sadie, but surely those were exceptions. If it happened, you really must have done something dangerous, your kid needed to be protected—from you, and whatever you were doing or saying. What’s next, some people said, you think molesters and child-beaters deserve to keep their kids, too?
He’d said this to Sadie, without thinking, and she went silent. Then she wadded up her sandwich in a ball of tuna and mayonnaise and smashed it into his face. By the time he wiped his eyes clear, she was gone, and all afternoon, the stink of fish clung to his hair and skin.
A few days later Sadie had pulled something from her backpack.
Look, she’d said. The first words she’d spoken to him since. Bird, look what I found.
A newspaper, corners tattered, ink smudged to gray. Almost two years old already. And there, just below the fold, a headline: local poet tied to insurrections. His mother’s photo, a dimple hovering at the edge of her smile. Around him, the world went hazy and gray.
Where did you get this, he asked, and Sadie shrugged.
At the library.
It’s become the rallying cry at anti-PACT riots across the nation, but its roots are here—terrifyingly close to home. The phrase increasingly being used to attack the widely supported national security law is the brainchild of local woman Margaret Miu, pulled from her book of poems Our Missing Hearts. Miu, who is the child of Chinese immigrants and has a young son—
The words wobbled out of focus then.
You know what this means, Bird, Sadie said. She raised herself onto her toes, the way she always did when excited. Your mom—
He did know, then. Why she’d left them. Why they never spoke about her.
She’s one of them, Sadie said. She’s out there somewhere. Organizing protests. Fighting PACT. Working to overturn it and bring kids home. Just like my parents.
Her eyes darkened and took on a far-off gleam. As if she were gazing right through Bird to something revelatory just beyond.
Maybe they’re together, out there, she said.
Bird had thought it was just one of Sadie’s wishful fantasies. His mother, the ringleader of all this? Improbable, if not impossible. Yet there were her words, emblazoned on all those signs and banners to overthrow PACT, all over the country.
What the news calls people who protest PACT: Seditious subversives. Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society. Words he’d had to look up in his father’s dictionary, back then, alongside excise and eradicate.
Every time they spotted his mother’s words—in news reports, on someone’s phone—Sadie elbowed Bird as if they’d sighted a celebrity. Evidence of his mother, out there, elsewhere, so worried about somebody else’s children though she’d left her own behind. The irony of it leached into his veins.
Now it is no longer elsewhere. Here are his mother’s words, streaked across his street in blood-red. Her letter upstairs, in his pillow. The same splash of red heart from the Brooklyn Bridge, there on the pavement at his feet. He glances over his shoulder, scanning the dark corners of the courtyard, not sure if the coldness in his throat is hope or dread, if he wants to run into her arms or drag her from her hiding place into the light. But there is no one there, and his father tugs his arm, and he follows his father inside and up the stairs.
Back in the dorm, sweaty and tired from their climb, his father peels off his coat and hangs it on its peg. Bird settles down to finish his homework, but his mind buzzes, unruly. He glances at the window toward the courtyard below, but all he can see is their own shabby apartment reflected in the glass. In front of him, his half-finished essay trails into blank white space.
Dad, he says.
Across the room, his father looks up from his book. He is reading a dictionary, leafing idly from page to page: an old habit Bird finds both peculiar and endearing. Long ago his parents would spend evenings like this, on the couch with their books, and sometimes Bird would drape himself over his father’s shoulder, then his mother’s, sounding out the longest words he could find. These days, the dictionaries are the only books in the apartment, the only books they’d kept when they moved. From his father’s eyes Bird can see he was centuries away, wandering the zigzagging past of some archaic word. He regrets having to call him back from that peaceful golden place. But he has to know.
You haven’t—he clears his throat—you haven’t heard from her, have you?
For a moment his father’s face goes very still. Though Bird hasn’t spoken her name, he doesn’t need to: both of them know who he means. There is only one her, for them. Then his father shuts the dictionary with a thump.
Of course not, he says, and comes to stand at Bird’s elbow. Looming over him. He sets a hand on Bird’s shoulder.
She is not a part of your life anymore. As far as we’re concerned, she doesn’t exist. Do you understand, Noah? Tell me you understand.
Bird knows exactly what he should say—Of course, I understand—but the words clog in his throat. But she is, he wants to say. She does, I don’t, she has something to say, she has something to tell me, this is a loose end that needs to be tied off—or unraveled. In this moment of hesitation his father glances over Bird’s shoulder at the unfinished essay on the table.
Let me see, he says.
His father hasn’t been a professor for years but he can’t stop himself from trying to teach. His brain is like a big dog penned in his skull, restless and pacing, aching for a run. Already he’s leaning over Bird’s homework, tugging the paper from the crook of Bird’s arm.
I’m not done yet, Bird protests, and bites the eraser end of his pencil. Graphite and rubber flake onto his tongue. His father shakes his head.
This needs to be much clearer, he says. Look—here, where you say PACT is very important for national security. You need to be much more specific, much more forceful: PACT is a crucial part of keeping America safe from being undermined by foreign influences.
With one finger he traces a line, smudging Bird’s cursive.
Or here. You need to show your teacher you really get this—there should be absolutely no question you understand. PACT protects innocent children from being indoctrinated with false, subversive, un-American ideas by unfit and unpatriotic parents.
He taps the paper.
Go on, he says, jabbing at the loose-leaf. Write that down.
Bird stares back at his father with set jaw and angry, liquid eyes. They have never been like this before: two flinty stones striking off sparks.
Do it, his father says, and Bird does, and his father lets out a deep breath and retreats into the bedroom, dictionary in hand.
After he’s finished his homework and brushed his teeth, Bird turns out the lights in the apartment and slips behind the curtains. From here he can see across the street to the dining hall, closed now, lit only by the faint red glow of the exit signs inside. As he watches, a truck pulls to the curb and flicks off its headlights. The shadowy figure of a man gets out, carries something to the center of the road, begins to work. It takes Bird a minute to understand what’s happening: the something is a bucket of paint and a large roller brush. He is painting over the heart, and by morning it will be gone.
Noah, his father says from the doorway. Time for bed.
That night, while his father snores faintly beneath him, Bird worms a hand into his pillowcase, feeling for the faint edges of the envelope. Carefully he slips out the letter, flattens it out. He keeps a penlight in the top bunk so he can read while his father is sleeping, and he clicks it on.
In the watery light the cats are a tangle of angles and curves. A secret message? A code? Letters in their stripes, perhaps, in the points of their ears or the bends of their tails? He turns the letter this way and that, traces the ballpoint lines with the beam. On a tabby he thinks he spots an M; the arched leg of a black cat looks like an S, or maybe an N. But he can’t be certain.
He’s about to tuck the letter away when he sees it, the little circle of light bringing it into crisp focus like a magnifying glass. Down in the corner, where a page number would be: a rectangle, the size of his pinky fingernail. Inside it another rectangle, a bit smaller. The cats, of course, ignore it; unless you looked closely, you would miss it between them. But it catches Bird’s attention. What is it? A framed picture of nothing, perhaps. An old-fashioned television set, screen blank. A window with a flat plane of glass.
He studies it. A dot on one side, two tiny hinges on the other. A door. A door on a box, a cabinet shut up tight. A faint breeze flutters a page in the back corner of his brain, then settles again. A story his mother told him, long ago. She’d always been telling him stories—fairy tales, fables, legends, myths: a rainbow of different, beautiful lies. But now, seeing the picture, it’s familiar. Cats, and a cabinet, and a boy. He can’t quite remember it, but he knows it is there. How did it go?
Once upon a time. Once upon a time there was—a boy who loved cats.
He waits, hoping for his mother’s voice to come back to him, to fill in the rest of the story. A ball given a shove downhill. But there’s only the whispery sound of his father breathing. He can’t remember what his mother’s voice sounds like. The voice he hears in his head is his own.
