I couldn’t find out where her parents had gone, she says. Nobody could find out anything, except that they weren’t home anymore. And then all of a sudden, Sadie was gone, too.
A moment of silence, in which the librarian’s eyes on him are gentle and kind. It feels good, surprisingly good, to talk about Sadie with someone who knew her. To remember her.
Listen, the librarian says. I can’t take you to New York. I don’t know anyone who can. But I can do something.
She leads him back out of the office and through the shelves to a thick maroon binder. Inside: pages and pages of timetables, printed in pale blue columns.
Train schedules and routes, she says. This binder here, this one is buses. At the station, you can go to the counter, but there are also machines that sell tickets. In case you wanted to avoid— questions.
Thank you, Bird manages to say.
She smiles. I told you, she says, that’s my job. Information. Passing it on. Helping people find what they need.
She sets the opened binder atop the shelf and slides it across to him.
What you do with this information, she says, is your own business only.
Monday morning, his father is already waiting, work satchel in hand, when Bird emerges from the bedroom. He has hidden his schoolbooks under the blanket on his bed; in their place, the bag on his back holds a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and all the money he has. All the dropped bills he’s found and saved over the years, all the lunch money kept from all the days when, rather than eat in the cafeteria, he would sit alone with his thoughts outside. Just enough, according to the timetables in the library, for a one-way ticket to Manhattan. The bus he’s selected departs at ten o’clock. Plenty of time.
Though the elevator has been repaired at last, it groans and fumbles as it shudders its slow way downward. Between the mirrored walls, an infinite chain of Bird and his father accordions into the distance.
Bird waits until the numbers tick down from six to five before he speaks.
I forgot my lunch, he announces.
Noah, his father says, how many times do I have to tell you.
The elevator grinds to a halt and opens onto the dorm lobby. Sunlight pours through the plate-glass windows, so bright he feels like an insect on a light table. Surely his father will look at his face and know that he’s lying. But his father just sighs and checks his watch.
Staff meeting at nine today, he says. I can’t wait for you. Run back up and get it and hurry to school. Don’t dawdle, okay?
Bird nods and hits the elevator button again, and his father turns to go. At the sight of his back—so familiar, in his old brown coat—Bird’s throat tightens.
Dad, he calls, and his father turns around, gives a soft oof as Bird throws his arms around him.
What’s this? his father says. I thought you were too old for hugs.
But he’s teasing, and he squeezes Bird tight, and Bird snuggles into the comfortable dusty wool of his father’s overcoat. He suddenly wants to tell him everything. To say, come with me. We’ll find her together. But he knows his father will never let him go, let alone come with him. If he wants to go, he will have to go alone.
Bye, Dad, he says, and his father gives him a wave and is gone.
Upstairs, Bird lets himself back into the apartment and rushes to the window. He ducks behind the curtains and peeks down at the small grassy square of courtyard below. There he is: the dark speck of his father, nearly at the gate.
He’s watched his father cross this courtyard before, on snow days when Bird’s school closed but his father’s work did not. He used to stand by the window, waiting until his father emerged far below, watch him head down the path and out of sight. In the winter, the small dots of footprints that appeared in his father’s wake were like magic. Up close, Bird knew, they were jagged holes crushed into the ice. But from where he stood—ten stories up, pinned against and behind glass—they were dainty and precise. Beautiful. Purposeful. Thin stitching on a snow-white quilt; a trail of stones placed to mark the path home, or to show someone the way. How comforting, to know that he could go downstairs, follow the marks his father’s feet have made, all the way to wherever he’s gone.
Now, as he watches, the lone figure in the brown coat hugs that coat tighter around himself against the chilly fall breeze and steps through the gate. There is no snow, yet, to hold footprints, and in a moment, as his father disappears from sight, it is as if he never passed that way at all. Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To have no one remember you’d been there. He wants to run down all ten flights of stairs and place his feet into the invisible footsteps his father has left behind. He presses his fingertips to the cool glass, as if—if he tried hard enough—he could push the entire window aside and step through into the air above all of this.
* * *
? ? ?
He hadn’t looked up when she’d said goodbye.
Birdie, she’d said, I have to go out.
Was that it? Or had she said: I have to go? He can’t remember. He’d been playing with Legos, building something. He doesn’t even remember what anymore.
Bird, she called again. She’d hovered just behind him, and he’d bristled with irritation. Whatever he was building wouldn’t hold together; it kept tipping and falling in a shower of bricks, breaking itself apart again and again. He took two bricks, jammed them together as hard as he could, so hard that the knobs left divots in his skin.
Birdie, she said. I’m—I’m going now.
She was waiting for him, waiting for him to come and kiss her, like he usually did, and he attached one more brick and the whole thing collapsed again with a clatter, and he blamed her, for calling him when he was busy with something else.
Okay, he said. He picked up the bricks again, piecing the thing together once more, and by the time he turned around at last, to see if she was still there, she was gone.
* * *
? ? ?
It is nearly nine o’clock: time to go. When his father comes back for dinner, the apartment will be empty, and Bird will be in New York. He’s thought about this all weekend, how to tell his father where he’s gone. Any mention of his mother is too big a risk, so his note is short and obscure: Dad, I’ll be back in a few days. Don’t worry. Beside it, he places the cat letter in its envelope on the table. Then he rips the paper from the cubby in two: the Park Avenue address he tucks back into his pocket; the last line—New York, NY—he sets beside the letter and his note. And last of all, a box of matches. He hopes his father will understand—where he’s gone, and why, and most of all, what to do with this information.
He has never traveled out of Cambridge; all night he’d fretted about the dangers that might lie ahead. Taking the wrong train or turning down the wrong street or boarding the wrong bus, ending up who knows where. A ticket agent demanding: where are your parents? Policemen stopping him, loading him into the back of a patrol car, carting him back to his father—or worse, somewhere else. Strangers, so many of them, scrutinizing him. Measuring him with their eyes, gauging whether he is a threat or to be threatened.