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The Johnsons’ house was cozy and tidy but everywhere there were signs of their daughter. Mr. Johnson, lips clamped shut, shook his head at his wife and disappeared up the stairs, but Mrs. Johnson led Margaret into the living room. On the mantel, a framed photograph of Marie in cap and gown, paper scroll in the crook of her arm like a sheaf of flowers. High school graduation, Mrs. Johnson said. Salutatorian. In the corner, a music stand, a flute case, sheet music covered in flurries of impossibly high notes.
She did marching band. But what she really loved was the classical stuff.
Her hand brushed the leatherette, wiping a fleck of dust from the latch.
I wanted her to keep it up in college. But she said she wouldn’t have time. She had so many plans.
Margaret still had not taken off her backpack; she was not sure if she was invited to stay. In this crowded living room she felt like a large and lumbering animal, every movement threatening to knock some part of the past to the floor. She held her breath, as if that might make her smaller and stiller, as if that might help anything.
Mrs. Johnson took a small china elephant from the mantel, turning it over. After a moment she found what she was looking for, held it up so Margaret could see: a thin seam of glue circling the uplifted trunk.
You see this? she said. My friend went on vacation, to India, and brought me back this. Marie was maybe seven, or eight? She loved it. She’d play with it, put it in her pocket, carry it around. One day I came home from work and she’d broken off the trunk. Did I give her hell. I told her she had no respect for other people’s things, didn’t I tell her to be careful, why didn’t she listen to me. No, Mama, she said to me, I wanted to see what was inside. She did it on purpose. I told her she was on punishment for a month. The next day I found it like this.
She tipped her palm where the little elephant stood, letting the light catch its curves.
She’d patched it back together. You can barely see where the break was. Only if you know where to look.
Gently she set the elephant back on the mantel.
That was Marie, she said. No one out there will remember those things. Just me.
The two women stood there in silence. In the shaft of light that sliced through the crack in the curtains, dust motes hovered.
Will you tell me, Margaret asked. She took the older woman’s hands between hers, and Mrs. Johnson did not pull back. A kindness that humbled Margaret, because it was one she had not earned. Will you tell me about her? she said. Who she was. What she was like.
I’ll tell you. But only if you promise to remember. That she was a real person, not a poster. That she was a child. My child.
* * *
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She stayed for two days, listening. Letting Marie’s mother tell her anything and everything that came to mind. Mr. Johnson avoided her, eyeing her with brittle wariness, tucking his glasses into the breast pocket of his shirt before leaving the room.
He doesn’t trust you, Mrs. Johnson said, as her husband passed by in the hall. Not an apology; a simple statement of fact.
But Mrs. Johnson led her into Marie’s bedroom, where they sat together from sunup until darkness fell. Mrs. Johnson roamed the room, speaking softly, touching this and that, reminiscing. Picking up Marie’s hairbrush, her rings, the ocean-smoothed stones she’d kept on the windowsill, each awaking a memory like a talisman. None of the stories were important. A visit to an aunt in North Carolina, a day at Six Flags, Marie’s first trip to New York as a skinny, gawky adolescent: Mama, I want to live here. All the stories were unbearably important. The time, as a toddler, she’d farted in church, right after the minister had said Let us pray. The red shoes she’d loved so much she squashed her feet into them for months, refusing to give them up, insisting they still fit until they split at the seams. How, as a teenager, she’d clipped words she liked out of her magazines, saving them like confetti in a blue envelope—nebulous, muscovado, smithereens. I just like the way they sound, she’d said.
I don’t know what she wanted to do with them, Mrs. Johnson said.
She talked and talked, picking her way from memory to memory, crossing a wide ocean on stepping-stones. Remember this, Marie’s mother said, again and again. Hold on to it. As if memory were a bead that might spring from her fingers, clatter to the floor, roll into a crack and disappear. Which it was. At night, swaddled in her bedroll in the Johnsons’ living room, Margaret jotted down what Marie’s mother had said, each word echoing like a chime. But while Mrs. Johnson talked, Margaret simply listened and listened and listened.
The second night, Marie’s father stepped in from the hallway. He looked at his wife, sitting on their daughter’s flowery bed; at Margaret, cross-legged on the floor.
You know the last thing I said to her, he said.
No greeting, no introduction. As if he’d been waiting a long time to say just this.
She told me, on the phone. How there was this protest planned, protesting PACT, how she planned to go and hold up a sign. I said, Marie, that ain’t about you. You think those PAOs would stick their necks out for you? You think any of them care when we get followed in stores, or shot in traffic stops? Just let it be.
He paused.
She’d been doing research, he went on. Trying to trace our family tree. In high school, she got curious. She was at the library all the time, looking at databases and census records, trying to find her roots. Our roots. What she found was a big blank spot. No records, before Emancipation—except for one. A bill of sale, for my maybe-ancestor. Age eleven. To a Mr. Johnson in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Another pause. He looked down at Margaret, and she looked up at him. Listening.
I didn’t want her to go. But she was set on it. She just said: It’s wrong to take children from their families, Daddy. You know that. And she didn’t want to argue so we just hung up and the next day she went to that march.
He stood there, framed by the doorway, a strong man made fragile by grief. Margaret’s mother had crossed the street when she saw men like him approaching. Out of disdain? Out of fear? She didn’t know and wasn’t sure it mattered. At the factory where her father worked, there were only a handful of Black men, and her father hadn’t socialized with any of them. Not my kind of people, he’d said, and she hadn’t bothered to ask what he meant.
You weren’t wrong, Margaret said at last. You weren’t wrong. But neither was Marie.
A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.
Mr. Johnson settled himself down on the bed next to his wife, who put her arm around him and turned her face to his shoulder, and they sat there quietly, the three of them, in Marie’s room, Margaret a witness to what they’d lost.
After a long, long while, he said: You know what keeps coming back to me? This one night, I came home from work.
The memory seeping out of him, like water filtered through stone.
I don’t even remember how old she was. She might’ve been five, she might’ve been fifteen.
Margaret did not question; she understood this, how slippery and elastic time was in the fact of your child, how it seemed to move not in a line but in endless loops, circling back again and again, overwriting itself.
She was laughing, Marie’s father said. Laughing and laughing and laughing. Laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up. Laughing so hard tears were running down her face. I came in and I saw her there, rolling on the carpet. Just laughing. Marie, I said, what’s so funny? She just kept on laughing. Until I started laughing, too. I couldn’t help it.