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.
* * *