The next morning, back at the table, she works faster, hands moving quickly, aware time is running out. She begins without preamble. Like plunging into the ocean before she has time to be afraid.
Two weeks after Bird’s ninth birthday. Over breakfast, Ethan had suddenly paused, stunned, and set his phone before her. Heads bent over the screen, they’d read the headline together: conflict erupts at protest; 6 injured, 1 dead. Below, a photo of a young Black woman—long braids pulled back in a ponytail, glasses, yellow hat. Still standing, eyes still clear and open, mouth still parted in a cry, a millisecond before her mind knows what her body already feels: a red rose of blood just starting to bloom on her chest. Clutched in her hands, a poster: all our missing hearts. And a caption: Protester Marie Johnson, 19, a first-year student at NYU from Philadelphia, was killed by a stray bullet in police response to anti-PACT riots Monday.
The first of many such articles, but they would all use the same photo.
This young woman—Marie—had read Margaret’s book in her dorm room. She was studying developmental psychology, planning to become a pediatrician, and with each news report of a child taken, the last lines of the last poem had come back to her, insistent as an infant’s cry. Nine years after PACT’s passage, there were more and more of them: the few that made the news here and there, framed as stories of negligence and endangerment, the parents portrayed as reckless and careless and callous; but others, too, shrouded in rumor and secrecy and shame.
Just rumors, some people scoffed; re-placements happened only in a few isolated cases. Others insisted PACT removals were a necessary evil: a rescue, for the child’s good, and society’s. Can’t rock the boat, one commenter wrote online, and be surprised when your kid gets washed overboard. But for every child you heard was taken, how many families said nothing, stopped protesting, stopped everything, hoping their good behavior would earn their children back?
The night before the march, Marie bought sheets of posterboard at the drugstore. With fat-tipped scented markers, she jigsawed words onto the sign, sketched the solemn face of a child below. After the march, they’d found the markers and the rest of the posterboard on the floor of her dorm room, blank and unused, beside a spread-eagled copy of Margaret’s book.
After that: vigils. Campaigns to remember Marie. Online, thousands of people changed their profile photos: Marie after Marie after Marie, a sea of them crying out, flushed with youth and fury and pulsing lost life, every one of them brandishing the poster with Margaret’s words. People googled those words, and up popped the name Margaret Miu, the title of her book. The poems she’d written while pregnant, in a sleep-deprived haze nursing Bird late at night, watching the sky turn from black to navy to bruised grayish-blue.
Not even her best line, she’d always thought, not even one of her best poems, and yet here it was. Clutched in this dying child’s hands.
Those lines began appearing online, the adopted slogan of those opposed to PACT. At the protests that sprang up here and there, quick flares of grief and rage. On pins, as graffiti, on hand-lettered T-shirts. They’re all over campus, Ethan said, wide-eyed. Margaret, seeing one for the first time, stopped dead in the street, jolting back to life only when someone behind bumped into her, cursed, and elbowed his way past. She felt as if she’d come around the corner and run into some uncanny version of herself. She had never been to a protest. She had never, in all honesty, thought much about PACT at all.
Someone painted the lines on the wall of the New York Department of Family Services, on the sidewalk outside the Justice Department. All over the country, anti-PACT marches began to spring up like brush fires. Anti-PACT protesters hurled eggs—then rocks—at the cars of pro-PACT senators and officials. Always, always carrying posters bearing Margaret’s lines. The protests were short and sporadic—but they were long enough for passersby to take photos, and soon those photos were everywhere, and so were Margaret’s words.
Who would ever, she said to Ethan, have expected a poem to go viral. Neither of them laughed. It was the least unbelievable thing of all the unbelievable things that had happened in the past few years.
Then a talk-radio show did an investigation into the sign, the poem. Margaret.
Who’s inspiring these lunatic protesters? he asked. Well, I’ll tell you: a radical female poet named Margaret Miu, lives in Cambridge, that liberal bubble. And—surprise surprise—she’s a kung-PAO.
A cable-news host who’d defended PACT from the beginning—Chinese American? he’d said, there’s no such thing; you know where their loyalties really lie—picked up the story. He scanned the photo from the back of Margaret’s book and flashed it on-screen. Letting her foreign face say it all.
People like this, he said, are the reason we need PACT. You know who her main audience is, who’s buying her books? I’ll tell you. I’ve looked up the figures. Young people. College kids, high school kids. Could be even middle schoolers, who knows. Kids at that age are so impressionable. And this woman’s influence is skyrocketing. You know what her sales figures show? Four thousand copies of her book sold last week alone. Six thousand this week. Next week it’ll be ten. I tell you, we’d better take a lot closer look at what’s in those poems. There’s a very real danger of our kids being corrupted. This is what PACT is for.
On message boards—and soon, in the authorities’ offices—people combed through Margaret’s lines. Scattered, to sprout elsewhere—might that not be an encouragement for spreading harmful ideas? This poem about a spider, clutching its empty egg sac—hollow and dry with only air inside—well, it wasn’t hard to interpret that as a metaphor for America, clinging to hollow ideals until it died. And this one, about tomatoes, disturbing their sturdy roots: how could you read these lines as anything other than urging others to strike at the roots of American stability?
The anti-American ideology was clear, which made it all the more dangerous that people were reading these poems—nearly fifty thousand copies sold so far, an unheard-of number for a book of poetry, especially from a minuscule press. That, in and of itself, was suspicious; of course the Pentagon should take a look; one could not rule out the possibility that messages were coded in the lines. Regardless, these poems weren’t just un-American, they were inciting rebellion. Endorsing and espousing terrorist activity. Persuading others to support insurrection. Look how many anti-PACT protests were happening.
It just goes to show, one official thought, as he branded Margaret’s file with a crisp red stamp. Born here, but clearly American in name only. Probably learned it from her parents. That foreign mindset rooted deep, he mused; maybe it twined all the way down in the DNA. Maybe it wasn’t ever possible to straighten their loyalties out.
Margaret got a call a week later from her publisher: they’d been ordered to cease publication of her book, to destroy any warehoused copies. Can they really do that, Margaret asked, and her editor sighed. He was a reedy, bespectacled white man who could recite Rilke from memory; the press operated out of a rented two-room office in Milwaukee. For weeks he’d been getting threatening emails and phone calls, the most recent one with detailed suggestions about what should be done to his seven-year-old daughter. That’s not all, he said. They’ve also sent a subpoena to look into our finances and our other authors. Not even just the Asian ones—everyone. To see if we’ve funded anyone else un-American. It was strongly implied that if we didn’t comply, they’d find ways to shut us down. I’m sorry, Margaret. I really am.
Within a month the publisher would shutter anyway, all its stock pulped, all its files deleted. Libraries, flooded with angry calls about the book, began to pull it from their shelves. PACT supporters held a rally in downtown Boston, collecting copies and burning them in an oilcan on City Hall Plaza. The post office began to monitor Margaret and Ethan’s mail.
It got worse. Someone dug online, posted their address and Margaret’s phone number on social media. Dont like this PAO CUNT & the poison she’s feedign our kids? he wrote. Call her up & tell her.
What are we going to do, she said to Ethan, as she silenced her phone. It had been ringing for the past twenty minutes and for a while she’d answered and hung up immediately, but every time it just began to ring again.
Ethan put his arms around her. He had already spoken to the police; there was nothing illegal, they informed him, about posting publicly available information. He’d sworn at them and hung up. It was Saturday morning, and on a normal day, they’d have been at the kitchen table eating waffles, sunlight streaming onto their plates. Instead, all morning Ethan had been pacing around the house, pulling the curtains shut, nudging Margaret and Bird away from windows.
It will stop, she assured him. It has to stop. They’ll get tired of it. I didn’t even do anything. I’ve never been to a protest. All I did was write a poem.
It didn’t stop. No one seemed to be getting tired except for Margaret and Ethan—and Bird. What’s wrong with your phone, Bird kept asking, who keeps calling? Rotten fish and bags of dog shit and broken glass began to appear on their front step, and one day, a single bullet, still in its casing. After that, Bird was no longer allowed to go outside alone, even into the backyard.
People are crazy, Ethan told him. Don’t worry. You’re safe.
Did you know, the talk-show host said a few days later, that this Margaret Miu—she has a kid? Nine years old. Yeah. Can you believe it? And his name—get this—his name is Bird.
The comments online:
That’s child abuse, right there. Enough said.
People like that shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.
Can you imagine what kind of shit she’s teaching him at home? Imagine having her as your mother.
Poor kid. Let’s pray Family Services checks them out soon.
That night, after they’d put Bird to bed, Ethan’s mother emailed him. My friend Betsy forwarded me this article about Margaret. It was the first of many articles, some of which she would forward and many of which she would simply read as they dinged, one by one and sometimes two or three at a time, into her inbox, forwarded by ostensibly well-wishing acquaintances: I remember you mentioned your son’s new wife (?). Is this the same Margaret Miu?!
As articles and news reports and headlines accumulated, Ethan’s parents read and discussed, measuring the woman they’d met and loved, the woman their son adored, the woman who’d borne their grandson, against the woman the news portrayed. The person they knew—or had they?—against the person everyone else seemed to see. How many times had they met her? How well could you know someone in that time? On their weekly phone calls, Ethan ranted to his parents about the latest developments—the anonymous emails filling Margaret’s inbox, the notes duct-taped to their front door. It was not until Ethan stopped speaking, exhausted by rage and fear, that he noticed his mother’s uncharacteristic silence.
She always seemed so kind, his mother said, in tones of profound sadness and betrayal, and Ethan understood then: a story had settled in his mother’s mind, and there was nothing he could do to rewrite it. In the weeks to come, Ethan’s parents did not call him, and when he and Bird moved to the dorm, he would not send them his forwarding address.
Then came the note. A scrap of paper from Bird’s teacher, Ms. Hernández, slipped surreptitiously into his bag. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Gardner, it read in her neat, looped cursive. Tall proud Ss. Upright and rigid-backed Ps. The school has received a call from Family Services. I have been summoned to speak with them Monday morning and they will likely wish to speak with you soon thereafter. And then: It seemed only fair to let you know.
A warning. A kindness, really.
She packed that night, a single bag. One she could carry on her back, small enough that she could walk as long as needed; a bedroll and all the cash they could gather. The bedroll had been Ethan’s originally. It’s warm, he said softly, pulling it from the back of the closet, and she could hear his voice snagging as they imagined all the nights to come when they would no longer be lying beside each other. She’d taken it and turned away quickly, bending over to buckle it to her bag, but in truth she couldn’t face the pain in his eyes, and wasn’t sure he could face the pain in hers. They’d agreed: she wouldn’t write, she wouldn’t call. Nothing that could be traced. She’d leave her phone behind. Any ties unsevered could unravel, so they would cut her, the traitorous PAO mother, out of their lives. They would give not even the slightest pretext to take Bird away. Whatever it takes, they agreed. Whatever needed to be done or said to keep him safe.
The next morning, she had tried to say goodbye. A Saturday, late October. The leaves just loosening from the trees. We’ll be fine, Ethan told her. Both of them understood he was reassuring himself as much as her. He buried his face in her hair, and Margaret burrowed against his chest, breathing him in, all the words she was not brave enough to speak trying desperately to escape her mouth. When they finally let each other go, neither could look at the other. Ethan hurriedly shut himself in the bedroom, because really, what else was there to say, and he couldn’t bear to watch her leave. Bird, oblivious, was kneeling on the living-room carpet, piecing together plastic brick after plastic brick. It was a house, and the roof kept falling in, the arch of it too high for his child’s hands.
Birdie, she said. Her voice splintering. Bird, I have to go.
She expected questions, as soon as he saw her backpack: a thing she never carried, which he certainly would notice. Why’re you carrying that? Where are you going? Can I come, too? But he didn’t turn. He hadn’t heard her at first, he was so absorbed in what he was doing, and she loved that about him, loved the way his attention focused, intense as summer heat, on the thing he wanted to understand.
Bird, she said again, louder this time. Birdie, my darling. I’m going now.
He did not turn around, and she was grateful for this: grateful not to see his eyes in this last moment, grateful that he did not run to her and press his face into her belly as he usually did, because how then could she ever hope to peel herself away.
Okay, he said, and she ached at his trust, how confident he was that she would be right back, as she always had. It was she who turned then, turned and hoisted her backpack on her shoulder and went straight out the door, before her heart could change her mind.
Two days later, when Family Services arrived, her things would already be piled on the curb. When they questioned him, Ethan would shake his head and his son’s heart would crack. No, he didn’t know where she’d gone. No, he didn’t share her views, not at all. Quite the opposite, to tell the truth. No, he couldn’t honestly say he was sorry. He’d tried to make things work for the sake of their son, but a man could only stand so much, right? Well—let’s just say he was relieved that she’d no longer be an influence. Yes, exactly. Much better off without.
Her books? Absolutely not. Seditious trash. He’d burned them all.
A bus to Philly, scarf pulled up, shielded by sunglasses. Eleven hundred dollars cash in her pocket, most of their savings. She did not have a plan just yet, only a hope: someone she thought might help, who might give her a place to pause and decide what to do next. But first, before she could pause, she needed to pay respects, to apologize. To atone. Slouched in her seat, she tugged her knit hat down nearly to the bridge of her nose, dug her chin into the collar of her coat. She refused to cry. Instead she watched the highway whir by in a blur of gray and white. Beside her, a man with a mustache snored, the roll of fat on his neck trembling with each breath.
The small suburb where Marie Johnson had grown up had neat green lawns dotted with flowering shrubs and old oak trees, tidy wooden houses with crisp coats of paint over edges softened by age. Marie’s house could have been any one of them: from the outside, it did not look like a house in mourning. But she knew it at once, from the news reports that had flashed it over and over on-screen, always with curtains shut tight against the cameras sizzling outside. Now, months later, the neighborhood had returned to some semblance of normalcy: a few yards down, a man yanked the chain of his leaf blower and it ground to life with a throaty growl; across the street an older woman in flowered gardening gloves deadheaded a chrysanthemum with schoolmarmish rigor. At Marie’s house, the only signs of life were the car in the driveway and the thin gap between the curtains, letting the afternoon sunlight slice inside.
As a girl, Marie must have played here. Maybe she turned floppy cartwheels on this patch of grass and chalked hopscotch grids on the sidewalk squares. Maybe she ran through the sprinkler on hot summer days, fleeing—then chasing—the curtain of spray. Margaret could see it, could hear her squeal, like Bird’s, rising like the peal of a bell. On her back, the rucksack chafed wide red welts into her shoulders. She rang the bell.
The woman who answered might have been ten years older than Margaret, but Margaret had the feeling she had lived lifetimes more. Her face was still young, but there was something worn and heavy about the way she carried herself, as if she had been stretched past what she should hold. Behind her a man, broad shoulders rounded and hunched, reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, a newspaper folded in his hand.
Mrs. Johnson, Margaret said. Mr. Johnson. I’m here about Marie.
It came pouring out of her then, in a confused torrent: apologies and confession, explanation and regret and self-recrimination. Her poems, her intent, her horror and sadness at Marie’s death. I didn’t mean, she kept saying. I never imagined. I didn’t expect. Even as the words slithered from her mouth back to her own ears she realized her mistake. What she desperately wanted—reassurance, comfort, absolution—she had no right to ask of them, and they had no reason to give to her.
They’re after me, she found herself saying. Pleading, half begging, her own fear shrill in her ears. They blame me for all this. And they’re right.
Before her, Marie’s parents stood in the entryway, impassive. Down the street, the man with the leaf blower cut the motor and the air went quiet. She was still on the front step; she hadn’t even waited, she thought, before laying all this at the feet of this man and this woman who had lost their child. It was hopeless, she was hopeless; how could you ever apologize for this.
I am so very sorry, she said finally, and turned to go.
What did you come here for, Marie’s father asked. He folded the newspaper in half, not angrily, but calmly. As if he had read enough news to last a lifetime, as if this were the last newspaper he would ever read again. He looked at her directly, without flinching: he was past fear, now. You think we have anything to say to you? he said. Our baby’s dead and you come here, looking for what. Wanting us to feel sorry for what you went through?
His voice was quiet, the kind of voice you’d use to talk in the library, and somehow this froze Margaret more than if he was shouting.
You think you know her? he went on. They all think they know her. Everybody thinks they know her, now. You got people wearing my little girl’s face on their chests, who don’t care about her or who she was. Just using her name to justify doing what they want. She’s nothing but a slogan to them. They don’t know the first thing about her. You don’t know the first thing about her either.
Around them, the ever-present noises of the suburbs—cars ambling by as if they had nowhere urgent to be, a sky-bound crow’s squawk, the inevitable dog bark from some indeterminable distance. Continuing on, as if nothing were amiss.
What is there to say, he finished.
He turned and retreated into the dark interior of the house.
For a moment, Margaret and Marie’s mother stood there on opposite sides of the doorway: Margaret frozen on the front step, the breeze chilly on the back of her neck, where sweat dampened her hair. Marie’s mother with one hand braced against the jamb, as if she were keeping the house from collapse. Eyes half squinted against the sun, her back cast in shadow. Studying Margaret. Margaret wondered what she saw. She thought, belatedly, of the Asian and Black worlds, orbiting each other warily, frozen at a distance in a precarious push-pull. In her childhood: a young Black girl shot, Los Angeles on fire, Korean stores aflame. Her parents had fumed, reading the news, indignant at the damage, the delinquency. And then, years later, a young Black man dead in a stairwell, a Chinese American cop’s finger on the trigger. There’d been outcry on all sides—an accident, police brutality, scapegoating—until the circles separated again into an uneasy truce. More than once, her mother had been shoved on the street by a Black teen, taunting her with ching-chong chants. Yet also: soon after she’d moved to New York, she’d been in Chinatown picking fruit from a cart when a Black man drove by in an SUV, rap blasting from the rolled-down windows so loud the pear in her hand shivered, and the shop owner, a wiry older Chinese man, gritted his teeth. Those thugs, he said, as if it were something they already agreed on, and spat, and she’d been so stunned that—to her shame—she’d simply nodded, paid, and darted away without a word. It weights her, this history, heavy as the pack on her back.
I’m sorry, Margaret said, again. I should go.
You have children? Marie’s mother asked suddenly.
One, Margaret said. I had a son. The past tense, unintended, shocks her. How easily her mind has accepted what her heart cannot. Have, she corrects herself. I have a son. But I won’t ever see him again.
A long pause between them, stretching and swelling until it wrapped around both of them, thick and plush. Then, to Margaret’s surprise, Marie’s mother reached out, touched Margaret’s wrist.
Welcome to the worst club in the world, she said.
The Johnsons’ house was cozy and tidy but everywhere there were signs of their daughter. Mr. Johnson, lips clamped shut, shook his head at his wife and disappeared up the stairs, but Mrs. Johnson led Margaret into the living room. On the mantel, a framed photograph of Marie in cap and gown, paper scroll in the crook of her arm like a sheaf of flowers. High school graduation, Mrs. Johnson said. Salutatorian. In the corner, a music stand, a flute case, sheet music covered in flurries of impossibly high notes.
She did marching band. But what she really loved was the classical stuff.
Her hand brushed the leatherette, wiping a fleck of dust from the latch.
I wanted her to keep it up in college. But she said she wouldn’t have time. She had so many plans.
Margaret still had not taken off her backpack; she was not sure if she was invited to stay. In this crowded living room she felt like a large and lumbering animal, every movement threatening to knock some part of the past to the floor. She held her breath, as if that might make her smaller and stiller, as if that might help anything.
Mrs. Johnson took a small china elephant from the mantel, turning it over. After a moment she found what she was looking for, held it up so Margaret could see: a thin seam of glue circling the uplifted trunk.
You see this? she said. My friend went on vacation, to India, and brought me back this. Marie was maybe seven, or eight? She loved it. She’d play with it, put it in her pocket, carry it around. One day I came home from work and she’d broken off the trunk. Did I give her hell. I told her she had no respect for other people’s things, didn’t I tell her to be careful, why didn’t she listen to me. No, Mama, she said to me, I wanted to see what was inside. She did it on purpose. I told her she was on punishment for a month. The next day I found it like this.
She tipped her palm where the little elephant stood, letting the light catch its curves.
She’d patched it back together. You can barely see where the break was. Only if you know where to look.
Gently she set the elephant back on the mantel.
That was Marie, she said. No one out there will remember those things. Just me.
The two women stood there in silence. In the shaft of light that sliced through the crack in the curtains, dust motes hovered.
Will you tell me, Margaret asked. She took the older woman’s hands between hers, and Mrs. Johnson did not pull back. A kindness that humbled Margaret, because it was one she had not earned. Will you tell me about her? she said. Who she was. What she was like.
I’ll tell you. But only if you promise to remember. That she was a real person, not a poster. That she was a child. My child.
She stayed for two days, listening. Letting Marie’s mother tell her anything and everything that came to mind. Mr. Johnson avoided her, eyeing her with brittle wariness, tucking his glasses into the breast pocket of his shirt before leaving the room.
He doesn’t trust you, Mrs. Johnson said, as her husband passed by in the hall. Not an apology; a simple statement of fact.
But Mrs. Johnson led her into Marie’s bedroom, where they sat together from sunup until darkness fell. Mrs. Johnson roamed the room, speaking softly, touching this and that, reminiscing. Picking up Marie’s hairbrush, her rings, the ocean-smoothed stones she’d kept on the windowsill, each awaking a memory like a talisman. None of the stories were important. A visit to an aunt in North Carolina, a day at Six Flags, Marie’s first trip to New York as a skinny, gawky adolescent: Mama, I want to live here. All the stories were unbearably important. The time, as a toddler, she’d farted in church, right after the minister had said Let us pray. The red shoes she’d loved so much she squashed her feet into them for months, refusing to give them up, insisting they still fit until they split at the seams. How, as a teenager, she’d clipped words she liked out of her magazines, saving them like confetti in a blue envelope—nebulous, muscovado, smithereens. I just like the way they sound, she’d said.
I don’t know what she wanted to do with them, Mrs. Johnson said.
She talked and talked, picking her way from memory to memory, crossing a wide ocean on stepping-stones. Remember this, Marie’s mother said, again and again. Hold on to it. As if memory were a bead that might spring from her fingers, clatter to the floor, roll into a crack and disappear. Which it was. At night, swaddled in her bedroll in the Johnsons’ living room, Margaret jotted down what Marie’s mother had said, each word echoing like a chime. But while Mrs. Johnson talked, Margaret simply listened and listened and listened.
The second night, Marie’s father stepped in from the hallway. He looked at his wife, sitting on their daughter’s flowery bed; at Margaret, cross-legged on the floor.
You know the last thing I said to her, he said.
No greeting, no introduction. As if he’d been waiting a long time to say just this.
She told me, on the phone. How there was this protest planned, protesting PACT, how she planned to go and hold up a sign. I said, Marie, that ain’t about you. You think those PAOs would stick their necks out for you? You think any of them care when we get followed in stores, or shot in traffic stops? Just let it be.
He paused.
She’d been doing research, he went on. Trying to trace our family tree. In high school, she got curious. She was at the library all the time, looking at databases and census records, trying to find her roots. Our roots. What she found was a big blank spot. No records, before Emancipation—except for one. A bill of sale, for my maybe-ancestor. Age eleven. To a Mr. Johnson in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Another pause. He looked down at Margaret, and she looked up at him. Listening.
I didn’t want her to go. But she was set on it. She just said: It’s wrong to take children from their families, Daddy. You know that. And she didn’t want to argue so we just hung up and the next day she went to that march.
He stood there, framed by the doorway, a strong man made fragile by grief. Margaret’s mother had crossed the street when she saw men like him approaching. Out of disdain? Out of fear? She didn’t know and wasn’t sure it mattered. At the factory where her father worked, there were only a handful of Black men, and her father hadn’t socialized with any of them. Not my kind of people, he’d said, and she hadn’t bothered to ask what he meant.
You weren’t wrong, Margaret said at last. You weren’t wrong. But neither was Marie.
A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.
Mr. Johnson settled himself down on the bed next to his wife, who put her arm around him and turned her face to his shoulder, and they sat there quietly, the three of them, in Marie’s room, Margaret a witness to what they’d lost.
After a long, long while, he said: You know what keeps coming back to me? This one night, I came home from work.
The memory seeping out of him, like water filtered through stone.
I don’t even remember how old she was. She might’ve been five, she might’ve been fifteen.
Margaret did not question; she understood this, how slippery and elastic time was in the fact of your child, how it seemed to move not in a line but in endless loops, circling back again and again, overwriting itself.
She was laughing, Marie’s father said. Laughing and laughing and laughing. Laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up. Laughing so hard tears were running down her face. I came in and I saw her there, rolling on the carpet. Just laughing. Marie, I said, what’s so funny? She just kept on laughing. Until I started laughing, too. I couldn’t help it.
He was half laughing again, as the memory of it swirled around him, pulling him back into the past.
Finally she calmed down and she just lay there. Catching her breath, looking at the ceiling, big smile still on her face. Marie, I said again, what’s so funny? She let out a big sigh. She looked so happy. Everything, she said. Everything.
She left Marie’s family with a request, and a name.
Put her in a poem, Mr. Johnson said, she’d like that. You put her in a poem, okay? Make other people remember her.
I’ll try, Margaret said, though she knew, already, that no poem could encapsulate Marie, just as no poem could encapsulate Bird. There would always be too much left unsaid.
Mrs. Johnson said nothing, just hugged Margaret, even tighter than Margaret hugged her. They would never speak again, but they were linked now, as those who’ve been through something terrible together are forever fused, in ways they don’t always understand.
The name was the librarian’s, though the Johnsons only knew her last: Mrs. Adelman this, Mrs. Adelman that, that’s all that came out of Marie’s mouth all of high school, her mother said, she spent all her free time over there. Across town; catch the bus on the corner. Margaret walked instead, following the trail of bus stop signs, the bus itself lumbering past her at encouraging intervals, reassuring her she was still on the path. By the time she reached the library, six buses had passed her, and perhaps it was because of this that she had the feeling, ascending the steps of the library, that she had been here before, that some previous version or versions of herself had already arrived, were already within, had already discovered what she herself was only now entering to find.
The library was not the vast marble hall she’d expected, but warm and cozy, the carpet and walls and shelves all the honeyed tan of an old leather armchair, like a great-aunt’s living room, and at the desk in the back corner sat only one librarian, an older woman with a streak of white slicing through her graying hair right at the temple—a lightning bolt emanating from her brain—and penetrating eyes, and the most regally upright posture Margaret had ever seen, and she had let her instinct guide her.
Mrs. Adelman? she said. I’m here about Marie.
The librarian said nothing at first, just studied Margaret in silence for a long time. As if they’d met in a past life and she was trying to place her. Then a change came across her face, like clouds in a strong breeze shifting across the sky.
Oh yes, she said. I know you.
Then, after a moment of quiet: I gave her your book, you know.
It was one of many books the librarian had given Marie over the years. They’d first struck up a friendship, the two of them, when Marie came in trying to trace her roots. Mrs. Adelman had helped her find the right archives and historical societies to contact, and she had been there, too, when Marie had reached the hole in the records where the rest of her lineage had been erased. Her own grandparents had fled Munich in the 1930s, but the rest of the family had stayed, and though it wasn’t the same, she knew the pain of fault lines in family history that you could not see across. Then, as Marie grew older and her interests broadened, Mrs. Adelman had loved following her mind, feeding this girl whose appetite to know was omnivorous and insatiable. Notes of a Native Son. Biographies of Gandhi and Grace Lee Boggs. Books on ecology, on tarot, on space exploration and climate change. And poetry, too: Marie had started with the poems from school, Keats and Wordsworth and Yeats, and had come looking for more, and the librarian had helped her find it: Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Ada Limón, Ross Gay. All of these books the librarian had given to Marie and Marie had dutifully returned each two weeks later, never once overdue. The week Marie headed off to college, she’d come to the library one last time and Mrs. Adelman had slipped a slim parcel in blue wrapping paper across the counter. Written inside the flyleaf: You never need to give this one back. On the cover, a close-up photo of a split pomegranate, seeds glistening like jewels.
We’ve removed it, Mrs. Adelman said. Not my decision. After Marie, people started calling in. Some of them wanted to borrow it. But then, once the talk-radio shows and those cable guys went after you, people got scared. How could we keep such a book, they wanted to know. If you were really a subversive, how could we risk letting young minds see it? In the end the higher-ups decided it was easier to just remove it. The mayor was nervous. Same thing’s been happening other places, according to my friends. Not just your book; anything with the remotest ties to China. Anything Asian. Anything that might be a risk.
It’s cowardly, Margaret said, and Mrs. Adelman said, Well, they’ve got children, too, you know.
There was a long silence.
Your son, Mrs. Adelman said. The news said you had a son. How old?
Nine, Margaret said. Ten in the summer.
In silence she tried to imagine Bird’s birthday. Would there be a cake? Candles? What would they celebrate? Would he miss her? All she can picture is a dark room.
So before they removed him, you removed yourself.
Margaret nodded dumbly.
It devastated Marie, Mrs. Adelman said. Those children taken to silence their parents, and the news not even mentioning it. Everyone staying quiet, pretending it didn’t happen, saying they deserved it. All those families, split apart.
On the news they showed only a few, the cases where it seemed clear-cut, the right answer obvious and uncomplicated.
How many? Margaret asked.
Too many, Mrs. Adelman said. Not just protesters, either. Anyone opposed to PACT. And more every day.
Margaret had the sudden feeling of picking up on a frequency she had not previously been able to hear. It had grown dark; by then the library had closed. No one had come in.
Hardly anyone comes in these days, Mrs. Adelman said. People are nervous. If they come in, they get what they want and go.
Where can I find them, Margaret asked. The families. How can I reach them.
I’ve heard, Mrs. Adelman said slowly. There are people starting to try to track down the children who’ve been taken. In hopes of reuniting them with their families.
Is that still possible, Margaret asked, if there are so many of them.
Nine years into PACT, it felt like fighting gravity, or the tide. These protests, people said, shaking their heads, on the news, in the streets. Exercises in futility. All it does is bother the rest of us.
The librarian shrugged. You tell me, she said. If the protests are nothing, then why are you here?
Where can I find these families, Margaret asked, and Mrs. Adelman said, I know of one.
She followed a trail of whispers. The name Mrs. Adelman provided led to more: a friend, a neighbor’s sister. I heard of someone. I know someone. No email, no cell phones, nothing that could be traced. One by one she found them, bearing the name of the one who’d sent her as a token of trust. Listening.
Gradually she began to understand how it happened. You said something and someone didn’t like it. You did something and someone didn’t like it, or perhaps you didn’t do something and someone didn’t like it. Maybe you were a journalist and you wrote an article that talked about re-placed children, or mentioned the attacks on Asian faces, or dared to question their demonization. Maybe you posted something on social media that criticized PACT, or the authorities, or America. Maybe you got promoted and your coworker got jealous. Maybe you did nothing at all. Someone would appear on your doorstep. Someone called, they’d say, though they would never say who, citing privacy, the sanctity of the system. It only works, they said, if people know they won’t be named.
Don’t worry, one of the officers would usually say. I’m sure it’s nothing. Just our duty to check.
Sometimes it did turn out to be nothing. If you were well connected, if you showed the proper deference, or if perhaps you had a friend in the mayor’s office or the statehouse or, even better, the federal government, if in their background investigation it turned out you’d donated money to the right groups, or perhaps if you were willing to donate money now—well, then, perhaps you could make clear that you would never instill dangerous ideologies in your child. But so often it was not nothing. Most often, by the time the officers came: there was something. You had done something, you had said something, you had not done something, you had not said something. If you didn’t have the resources to buy your way out with money or influence, at the end of it, they took your child and put them into the back seat of a car already waiting at the curb, and then they were gone.
She’d believed it was just a handful of extreme cases, the ones that made the news—high-profile, cautionary tales. But mostly, she learned—as she found one family, then another—it happened quietly. Nothing reported at all, their removals and re-placements unannounced. The families reported nothing themselves: speaking about PACT was complaining about PACT, which would only prove their disloyalty. Most of them stayed silent, hoping that in their silence, what had been taken would be returned. People began to hold their children closer, began to bite their tongues. They shied away from discussing PACT at all, afraid they might be next. Editors and producers wielded their red pens more freely: Let’s not say that, best not to ruffle feathers. It happened so slowly that you might not even notice it at all, like the sky turning from dusk to dark. The calculation everyone made before parting their lips, before setting fingers to keys: how important was it to say? You glanced at the crib in the corner, at your child sprawled on the rug with their toys.
By the time she’d spoken with five families, she understood: it was more people than she’d realized, more people than she’d ever thought of. It had been happening all along, and she’d never known. No, she admitted to herself: she’d never chosen to know.
By the seventh family, she had run out of money. She had to be careful, too: passersby might not recognize her offhand, but if the police stopped her, even on the slightest of pretexts, they would demand ID, and everything would unravel. She had an unconvincing fake license, purchased in an alley for a hundred dollars—another name, a photo of another Chinese woman who looked nothing like her except the part of her hair and the wary expression on her face. But the police would run it through the system and discover the fraud immediately. After that it would happen quickly: they would arrest her for using false ID, they’d investigate further, they’d check their files for persons of interest, and it would only be a matter of time before they figured out who she really was. Margaret Miu: dozens of counts of incitement to her name, one for every anti-PACT poster and protester bearing her words. And now, liable for Marie’s death, as well.
So she moved with caution: keeping to quiet streets, careful not to attract attention. She thought of her parents, the mantra of her entire childhood: Don’t stick out. So little had changed in all that time; it was just a little more obvious now. In her head she heard her mother’s stunned voice on that last phone call, pictured her father’s face in the moment before he was pushed. Unaware of what more was to come. Hide, they would have said to her. Head down, out of sight. But she did not want to hide. Now she understood that there were so many more stories than she’d imagined. Each person she spoke to knew another, sometimes two more, or three. In her head she did the math. Too many to ignore. How could everyone not know?
The bus dropped her in Chinatown, and she walked up, up, up, following Third as the street numbers climbed higher. The same route that her son would take years later. As she walked, she remembered the long treks uptown, after curfew, from that crowded apartment with Domi and her ex and his sister, up to the quiet golden bubble she and Ethan shared. She remembered, still, how to avoid the corners where policemen stood, the areas where she might be conspicuous, and she skirted these, taking the long way around, looping down side streets and around corners until she was sure she was in the clear. Working her way over to Park, she found it: the red brick townhouse with huge apple-green doors. The round window set in the white arch above, like a Cyclops’s watchful eye.
Hello, she said, as the door opened. A middle-aged white man wearing a decorous navy suit and a deferential expression. Is this still the Duchess residence?
When Margaret was at last ushered through the marble-floored entryway and up the sweeping staircase, there she was. A little plumper, a little older. New wrinkles creasing from nose to chin, bracketing her mouth. Eyes tired, faintly ringed. But still the same.
Well, well, Domi said. Look who it is.
She had never expected to see Domi again. After the way they’d parted, after the last thing Domi had said to her: Sellout. Whore. Fuck you. She’d put Domi out of her mind, packed their time together in the smallest box she could, taped it firmly shut. Then, years later, scrolling the news while Bird napped, she’d spotted a headline: the largest gift ever given to the New York Public Library. The name beneath leaping out like a ghost from the shadows. Electronics heiress Dominique Duchess. Duchess Technologies. And a photo. Last time she’d seen her, Domi had been in a man’s leather jacket and lug-soled boots, both hand-me-downs from Margaret. The blond of her ponytail streaked dark with sweat and grime. In the photo she was impeccable in a tailored Chanel suit. Her hair was blown to pale gold, clipped short in the businesslike bob Domi had always mocked: rich man’s wife, she’d called it, after her stepmother.
Margaret scrolled through the article. New head of Duchess Technologies. Founded by her late father—inherited after his death. Groundbreaking audio components—smallest and lightest—revolutionized cell-phone technology. And the caption: Ms. Duchess, at home in her Park Avenue residence.
She remembered that house, that rare single-family, the golden numbers gleaming against the brick, the lantern above the entrance, patinaed to green, held aloft by twin swirls of iron. Snakes, Domi had said, looking up at them, I thought they were snakes, as a kid. They’d been hungry that day; she remembered her stomach growling. Her feet throbbing. The sound their spit made as it hit the sidewalk. Fuck you, Domi had screamed up at the windows, and then, as her father’s face appeared behind the glass, she’d grabbed Margaret’s hand and they’d jumped on their bikes and fled, laughing, pedaling and pedaling until their thighs ached.
So Domi called Daddy after all. Margaret clicked the browser window shut. Well, fuck you, Domi, she thought.
But in the following years Domi appeared again and again, in small sharp flashes. Donations to women’s shelters, to food banks, to union groups. Donations for health-care assistance. Donations to libraries, a string of them, all over New York, here and there all over the country. Margaret watched, holding these acts up to the Domi she’d once known, as if holding a sealed letter to the light. The night before she left, she’d scribbled down that address on Park Avenue—the one person who might help, the only person left besides Ethan who’d ever cared about her—and hidden it in the safest place she could think of, because it was too painful to go without leaving even one bread crumb behind.
And here she was. Life had a strange symmetry, she thought: years ago she’d left Domi to take refuge with Ethan; now it was the other way around. Domi touched Margaret’s arm, and her hands, once red and chapped from the cold as she clutched Margaret’s in the night, were soft and pale, like just-risen dough. Margaret kissed her on the cheek and it, too, was tender, so tender she expected to see the imprint of her lips on Domi’s skin.
It’s good to see you, Domi said.
In the end Domi had decided to hide, too. At the depth of the Crisis, around the time Margaret had left New York, Domi had called her father. Help me, she said, and he’d sent a car within the hour. He’d whisked her out of New York to the safety of the countryside, a summer cabin in Connecticut she hadn’t seen since she was a child, which her father had built when the land had been cheap, before his company took off, before they’d had any real money. When he’d still just been Claude Duchess, a young upstart businessman; when her mother had still been alive. Over the years, as his company had grown, he’d acquired the parcels of land around it, chipping out a larger and larger pocket of wilderness around them; he’d added a powerful generator, a fresh coat of paint—but it still bore the traces of what it had been, just a simple house set away from everything, beside a rocky little ocean inlet. So when he wanted to escape the unrest in the city, what better place than here, in the past, a time when everything was still in the future for him, when the world was nothing but possibility? Here alone, out of all his houses, they did not have to hear protests in the streets or the eerie silences in between; here, there was nothing but the constant whoosh of the ocean’s waves. Here, they could pretend they were not eating cake while everyone else had no bread.
Domi had stepped inside, steel-toed boots clumping against the polished wooden floors, flecks of city grit still ground into her roughened palms. There was her stepmother on the leather sofa, reading a magazine, but her bedroom was exactly as she remembered: the way her own mother had decorated it in her childhood, all pink and lace and pearls. Welcome home, her father had said awkwardly. Elsa had grudgingly left her alone, and that was how they’d weathered the Crisis, the three of them: circling each other at a distance, trapped like flies in the amber of the past. Their fortune vast as a mammoth ship, unswayed by the currents and waves that buffeted smaller, lesser boats. They could order what they needed, afford whatever it took, for as long as it took. All they had to do was wait.
A few months after PACT passed, Domi’s father and Elsa were headed to the Maldives—a weekend vacation, to celebrate the return to normal—when their private plane crashed into the Pacific. Everything had gone to Domi: the houses in Malibu and Provence; the apartment in the 16th arrondissement and the townhouse here on Park; the electronics empire, smaller than before the Crisis, but still ticking out crucial parts for phones and smartwatches, still more than enough to support all this. And all the secrets too: accusations from her father’s factories in Hanoi and Shenzhen, complaints about long hours, hazardous materials, years of ignored reports. The donations to senators who’d passed tax cuts and exemptions for men like him, who’d go on to champion PACT and everything that came after. All hers now, to tabulate and reckon and repay.
I’m finding out, says Domi, some of things he did. For me, or so he thought.
She and Margaret were sitting in the glass-roofed courtyard—the winter garden, Domi called it—glasses of iced tea sweating in their hands. A square pocket of green lined with potted arborvitae, carved into the belly of this vault of a house. Rooms of sturdy furniture and solid brick fortressed them on four sides, filled with all the fine trinkets Domi’s father had collected and kept. Above, thick glass sheltered them from possible rain. They could not be seen or heard from outside; for the first time in weeks, Margaret found she could catch her breath. And yet she felt like an insect sealed in a jar.
So now what, Domi said. What are you going to do? Hole up here, forever, with me? Get a fake passport and flee the country?
There was the faintest whiff of mockery in her voice, and Margaret couldn’t tell if it was aimed at her, or at Domi herself. Of course there were places where a person could hide: Margaret could take a new name, lie low. Keep her head down; start again. She thought again of her parents, how they’d lived their whole lives trying to avoid trouble, and in the end it had ferreted them out anyway. Maybe sometimes, she thought, the bird with its head held high took flight. Maybe sometimes, the nail that stuck up pierced the foot that stomped down.
Not hiding, she said. Something else.
The idea was not fully formed in her mind yet, only a need: the need to make up for years of choosing to look away, of remaining deliberately incurious. For thinking that it didn’t matter as long as it was somebody else’s child. It was just starting to come to her, the seeds of it barely beginning to root: what she would do with these stories, the messages of hope and love and care and longing. She would go out and gather them, like grains of rice gleaned from threshed-out fields. She would find as many as she could.
To Domi, she said: I need your help.
All over the country, zigging and zagging, she traced the flow of information. Emails could be hacked, calls intercepted. But libraries shared books all the time; pooling information was part of their work. Crates of books shuttled between them, crammed with loaned bounty: rare texts on obscure painters, guidebooks on esoteric hobbies. It was the librarians’ job to sort these books, to label each with a slip bearing the requester’s name, to set them on the shelf behind the counter in neat rows, ready to be claimed.
Now and then, though, an extra book would find its way into a crate and arrive in some faraway city, unannounced. A clerical mistake; a simple human error. With no one to meet them at the gates, these stowaways would simply be set aside, to be shipped back home in the next crate. No one would notice, of course, if a librarian idly riffled through it, nor think anything amiss if they found a slip of paper inside. People left things in books all the time, and most libraries had a bulletin board where these mislaid items were thumbtacked: bookmarks, of course, but also sales receipts, travel brochures, business cards, shopping lists, cancelled checks, toothpicks, popsicle sticks, plastic knives, once even a strip of bacon sealed in a plastic sandwich bag. No one paid much attention to these things, and no one would notice if a librarian happened to pluck a note from a stowaway book, or from the bulletin board, and pocket it.
The messages were short. To a casual observer they resembled a list of call numbers, an arbitrary jumble of letters and digits and decimal points. But to those who knew to pull out the stray books, who collected these missives from their far-off colleagues, they said volumes. Encoded in them: the names of children who’d been taken, a brief description. The names and locations of their families. All over the country, a scattered network of librarians would note this information, collating it with the Rolodex in their minds, cross-referencing it with the re-placed children they might have learned about. Some kept a running written list, but most, wary, simply trusted to memory. An imperfect system, but the brain of a librarian was a capacious place. Each of them had reasons of their own for taking this risk, and though most of them would never share these reasons with the others, would never even meet them face-to-face, all of them shared the same desperate hope of making a match, of sending a note back, sandwiched be
