It feels important to say this, though whether he’s defending his father or reassuring his mother, he isn’t sure.
His mother smiles, a small sad smile. That was one thing I never worried about, she says. Then: Does he still read the dictionary?
Bird laughs. He does, he says. Every night.
She does remember, he thinks, even that tiny thing. It makes her a little less of a stranger.
He doesn’t like to talk about you, Bird admits. He said—he said to pretend you don’t exist.
He expects this to sadden her even more, but instead she nods.
We agreed that was best.
But why, Bird insists, and his mother sighs.
I’m trying to tell you, Bird. I really am. But you need to hear everything, the whole story, to understand. Tomorrow, okay? The rest of it, tomorrow.
As he heads up the stairs, she calls after him.
Do you want me to call you Noah, now? If that’s what everyone else calls you?
One hand on the creaking bannister, he pauses.
No, he says, cheeks suddenly aglow. You can still call me Bird. If you want to.
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.