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It is painful to admit: back then, she had believed that PACT was progress, that they had moved past something. That they were on their way to something better. That if she behaved, none of it would apply to her. Now and then, on the news, there were still reports of unrest: neighborhood patrols discovering radicals who threatened public order; investigations of suspicious activities. But that was elsewhere, abstract and nebulous. Isolated incidents. What was concrete was here: the private roiling of Bird inside her, like a ship rolling on the sea; her husband, warm and solid in their bed. The long nights they spent reading side by side on the couch, her feet in his lap, sharing favorite passages so often that afterward, she felt she’d read his book, and he hers. She knitted small socks. Ethan painted the nursery. When Bird tapped his feet within her, she tapped back. She bought an apron. She roasted a chicken. She arranged dishes on a shelf.
She had never been so happy.
As she tells him this, she coils the wires neatly round her fingertip and tucks the bundle into the bottle cap. A twiddle of the screwdriver and the little capsule is sealed, a fat plastic pill.
Bird can’t stop himself. What is it, he asks.
Resistance, his mother says, and sets the bottle cap on the tabletop with all the others.
* * *
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Rumors started. Of nighttime knocks at the door, of children ushered into black sedans and whisked away. A clause buried in the folds of the new law, allowing federal agencies to remove children from homes deemed un-American. A few journalists had pointed it out, before PACT had been passed; one congresswoman had questioned whether it might lead to misuse, whether it was truly necessary. But the consensus—on Capitol Hill and among the public—was that the perfect was the enemy of the good, that too much was better than nothing at all. That all tools should be used to safeguard national security, that nothing should be off the table. Of course no one had an interest in splitting up families. Only for the most dire cases.
A few of these cases made the news. In Orange County, a march protesting anti-Chinese bias spiraled into a clash with bystanders hurling epithets, ending with riot police, tasers, a Chinese American three-year-old struck by a tear-gas canister. For the officer, paid leave; for the protester, a full investigation into the family. Cable-news anchors pointed out this was not the first march the child had been taken to; on social media, photos showed her as a toddler perched on her father’s shoulders, an infant strapped to her mother’s chest like a bomber’s pack. Never mind that the parents were second-and third-generation Americans, that their grandparents had been Angelenos before Union Station erased Chinatown. Instead, the parents’ booking photos flashed on-screen, their faces dark-haired and glaring and so obviously foreign. Not one of us. From the hospital, the child was whisked away. The best possible outcome, headlines agreed. Protecting a child from learning such harmful views.
Margaret, reading the news on her phone, a milk-stoned Bird dozing at her breast, thought: awful. And: How could those people endanger their child. She tried to imagine carrying Bird into the crush of a mob, flash bombs bursting at their feet, the bite of tear gas setting her nostrils aflame. Her mind slammed its door on the thought. There he was, safe here in her arms: her Bird. Long lashes resting on cheeks softer than anything she’d ever touched. A small furrow rumpling his eyebrows. What troubling dreams could a baby already have? She smoothed the creases with the pad of her thumb until his face went calm again. Beside her, Ethan’s hand squeezed her shoulder, then cupped Bird’s head. She would never do such a thing, she promised Bird silently. None of this would ever apply to them.
The next march protesting anti-Chinese hate, in Queens, was sparsely attended; after that, there was a long stretch with none.
* * *
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What she thought was about her poems, her garden, her husband. Bird. She pushed seeds into the soil and watered them until threads of green shoots emerged. She set cutoff milk jugs over seedlings to shield them from the night chill. She knit a blanket for Bird from cream-colored wool. Late at night, she made love to Ethan. In the morning, content, she baked banana scones, licked honey from the spoon.
Ethan’s parents came to visit when they could: for Bird’s birthday, for Halloween bearing candy he could not yet chew, for Christmas laden with gifts heavier than their small recipient. His mother shared feeding tips with Margaret; one afternoon, when Margaret dozed on the sofa, exhausted, with a tantrum-drained Bird on her chest, Ethan’s father spread a blanket over them and then clicked off the light. Margaret and Ethan had said only that her parents had passed, and it warmed both of them to see the eagerness and openness with which Ethan’s parents enfolded Margaret into their lives.
He looks just like her, Ethan’s parents kept saying, and they’d thought this was a compliment at first—and maybe it was, though later both would wonder if it was also a twitch of discomfort, someone else’s face so clearly stamped on a child they felt should have been theirs. Privately, Margaret and Ethan thought Bird simply looked like Bird. Looking down on him late at night, they could pick out small features and trace them to their source—Margaret’s cheekbones, Ethan’s eyelashes—but where they saw resemblance was in the expressions: the two parallel wrinkles that appeared on Bird’s forehead when he was thinking, the dimple in his cheek, like a fingerprint, when he laughed. That was Ethan’s wrinkle on Margaret’s brow, Margaret’s dimple just southeast of Ethan’s mouth. It was a strange and unsettling experience, watching expressions that they knew flit over the face of this small person, part them and part the person they loved most, and they sensed that this would be only the first of many strange and unsettling experiences that parenthood would bring.
Margaret wrote more poems. Publishers were printing again, and when Bird was three, a small, plucky press agreed to publish her book. A split pomegranate on the cover, so close up it resembled an organ, or a wound: you had to look twice to see it for what it was. Our Missing Hearts was praised by a few poetry critics and read by almost no one. Tens of copies sold, she’d said to Ethan drily, who reads poetry anymore? and he’d joked, Who ever read it before?
It didn’t matter. The world was full of poems to her then.