The gas is shut off, she says. So no heat, no real cooking. Just a hot plate. But the water and power are still on. Which is all I need.
What is this place? he asks, but she doesn’t answer. There are other things she needs to explain first. Start at the beginning, she reminds herself. This is why you called him here.
Bird, she says, I want to show you something.
She takes him up another flight of stairs, to the third floor, where all the rooms are empty. Through their half-open doors, the bare hardwood looks like deep water: dark receding into darker. She’d gone into them once, when she first arrived. The dust had piled up in drifts, like snow. Old furniture, missing feet and legs, half-kneeling on the floor; an old record player with the record still on it, too scratched to play. Everywhere there were signs of the outside, creeping in, taking over. In the bathroom, one long arm of ivy had twined its way through a broken pane and was groping for the latch; in a bedroom she’d found a forest of mushrooms sprouting from the rain-soaked carpet beneath a crack in the wall.
Now, at the top of the steps, she reaches up into the shadows, feeling for the cord, and when she finds it and pulls, a trapdoor swings down, a ladder unfolds. Her instinct is to take his hand, to guide him, but she fights it. As she knows he would, too.
This way, she says, climbing up into the thick clouded gloom. Without waiting for him.
Behind her, she hears Bird setting a first hesitant foot on the bottom rung. She forces herself to keep on going, to keep walking away. To trust that he will follow. At the far end of the house, she stops and turns back to look at him for the first time. Her eyes are used to the dark, but his are not, and he follows more by sound than by sight, feeling his way with his hands, guiding himself by the beams that run underfoot like railroad tracks. It is dusty and cold, and small slivers of moonlight pierce their way through chinks in the siding, forming bars of light he ducks his head to avoid as he picks his way along the length of the attic. When he reaches her, she sets her shoulder against the hatch on the ceiling.
Here we are, she says, as the latch gives way with a shriek. Watch your step.
They step onto the flat roof into a pool of night. It is chilly, and the wind scrapes across the top of the city like a knife leveling flour from a cup, but as they emerge Margaret feels herself going soft at the corners. At the beauty of it all.
Around them, the city spreads out like a dropped cloth, all peaks and ridges and hidden folds. Even at this quiet hour, here and there bright ribbons of cars weave along the streets; in the distance a forest of steel trees stretches upward, grasping at the moon. She can just make out the starry glitter of far-off windows, reflecting shattered moonlight in their darkened panes. The roof is bare; all there is up here is the city, and the sky, and them. No railing, just the sharp clean edge giving way to the ground below. Beside her, she hears Bird catch his breath, and for a moment she sees him: her son, as she remembers him. Curious, alert. Eyes aglow. Marveling at how there is so much life, out there.
I didn’t—he begins, and then stops. Slowly he takes a step out onto the flat plain of the roof, then another. Cautiously, as if on rocky terrain. I didn’t know the city was that big, he says. One hand reaches out, as if a fingertip might brush the tip of a downtown skyscraper.
It’s something, Margaret agrees. I only come up at night. Just in case anyone’s watching. It’s amazing, isn’t it, she continues, turning toward the horizon. So much bigger than I imagined, before I got here. The first time I came to the city when I was young, I walked everywhere I could. Just trying to take it all in.
Bird’s head swivels the merest bit in her direction, and she knows she has caught his interest. She pretends not to notice.
Of course, she says, I got to see a lot of it from my job. I learned my way around pretty well.
She pauses, waiting. Wondering if Ethan has told him anything. If Bird knows anything at all. But after a moment, Bird bites.
What job, he says, without turning. As if it doesn’t matter to him at all.
A messenger. I carried letters, and things. Back during the Crisis. I rode a bicycle, she adds, as if as an afterthought.
Bird says nothing, but for a moment the scrim between them effaces. She has never told him anything about her time in New York, anything about her life before him; first he was too young, and then she was gone. As far as he knows, her life before him is a clean blank slate. She watches him adjust to it, this new piece of information. This new image of his mother: whizzing through the city, bearing things.
What kind of things, he says.
Deliveries, mostly. Sometimes papers that needed signing. So many things were closing then, there weren’t as many trucks. We bikers were cheaper and faster and gas was so expensive, too.
She watches his face. Food, sometimes, she goes on. And medicine, when people got sick and couldn’t go out. We’d pick it up at the pharmacy, leave it on their step.
We? Bird says.
There were a lot of us. All trying to scrape by.
She considers whether to say more. Wait, she decides.
Is that how you met my father?
Margaret shakes her head.
He was in a different world. A student. It was an accident that we even met at all.
She pauses.
How is he, she asks. Unsure how to ask what she really wants to know: who is he now, has he changed in all these years apart, after everything that’s happened. He must be worried sick about Bird, she thinks, with a pang of regret. She wishes she could call him, to assure him that Bird is all right. But it’s too dangerous; nothing’s changed. Not yet. He will have to trust—the way she’s trusted him, all this time, to keep their child safe.
Bird shrugs, a single shoulder rising and slumping again. So noncommittal, even his shoulders don’t agree.
He’s fine, he says. I guess.
She waits, holding her breath, but he says nothing more. All this time Bird’s gaze hasn’t left the city below, the dense milling swarm of it. One hand still rests half raised, as if he’s propping himself up on air, or trying to grasp the edge of the skyline. She waits, lets the moment breathe and drift, trusting it to find its own way to land.
Why did you leave, he says at last.
It is easier to ask these things up here, somehow, where everything except them is small and far away.
She spreads her arms wide, as if to dive, tips her head back, closes her eyes. The moonlight catches in her hair, frosting it with silvery glints. For a moment, frozen there, she looks like the figurehead of a ship, sailing boldly forward into strange new waters. Then her hands drop to her sides, and she turns back again.
I’ll tell you, she says. I’ll tell you everything. If you promise to listen.
She begins the story while she works: hunched over the folding table, coils of wire and long lengths of pipe laid out before her. Carefully, she selects a pipe and twists a cutter around it, grinding off segments the length of her thumb, smoothing the edges with a file. Around her a halo of silver dust emerges. Bird sits at the edge of the carpet, waiting. Watching. Outside, beyond the blacked-out windows, morning light slowly tints the grayscale world.
Let me tell you first, his mother says, how I came to the city.
* * *
? ? ?
Her parents’ aspirations carried them across the sea, so for her, an aspirational name: Margaret. A prime minister, a princess, a saint. A name with a pedigree as long as time, a solid trunk growing from rugged roots: in French, la marguerite, the daisy; in Latin, margarita, the pearl. Both of her parents were good Catholics, back in Kowloon, educated by priests and nuns, brought up on Communion wafers and confession and daily Mass. Saint Margaret, defeater of dragons, often depicted half in, half out of a dragon’s mouth.
* * *