Now and then, though, an extra book would find its way into a crate and arrive in some faraway city, unannounced. A clerical mistake; a simple human error. With no one to meet them at the gates, these stowaways would simply be set aside, to be shipped back home in the next crate. No one would notice, of course, if a librarian idly riffled through it, nor think anything amiss if they found a slip of paper inside. People left things in books all the time, and most libraries had a bulletin board where these mislaid items were thumbtacked: bookmarks, of course, but also sales receipts, travel brochures, business cards, shopping lists, cancelled checks, toothpicks, popsicle sticks, plastic knives, once even a strip of bacon sealed in a plastic sandwich bag. No one paid much attention to these things, and no one would notice if a librarian happened to pluck a note from a stowaway book, or from the bulletin board, and pocket it.
The messages were short. To a casual observer they resembled a list of call numbers, an arbitrary jumble of letters and digits and decimal points. But to those who knew to pull out the stray books, who collected these missives from their far-off colleagues, they said volumes. Encoded in them: the names of children who’d been taken, a brief description. The names and locations of their families. All over the country, a scattered network of librarians would note this information, collating it with the Rolodex in their minds, cross-referencing it with the re-placed children they might have learned about. Some kept a running written list, but most, wary, simply trusted to memory. An imperfect system, but the brain of a librarian was a capacious place. Each of them had reasons of their own for taking this risk, and though most of them would never share these reasons with the others, would never even meet them face-to-face, all of them shared the same desperate hope of making a match, of sending a note back, sandwiched between pages, with a child’s new location. A message to reassure the family that their child still existed, even if far away, to place a bottom on the deep hole of their loss. Librarians, of all people, understood the value of knowing, even if that information could not yet be used.
Such messages were rare, though a handful of children had been found. More often, the notes were memorized or jotted down, then tucked into a new book to be passed forward in the next crate to the next city, the lists of the missing and the re-placed growing like twin prongs of a long sharp fork. There were so many names, and the network was few and patchwork, dependent on memory and luck, two dots aligning just long enough for someone to make the connection and join them with a stroke. Meanwhile, all that could be done was to remember, and to pass the information along: to the next librarian, the next city, and—when she could persuade them—to Margaret.
One by one she searched out the families whose children had been taken, the ones waiting in vain for the holes in their lives to scar closed. She met them on lunch breaks, on park benches, walked round and round the block with them, holding their cigarettes, waiting for them to be ready. If they wanted, sometimes she talked to them about Bird, telling them about him, about what she missed, which was everything. Other times she simply waited with them, as long as it took. Days of visits that passed in silence; three hours sitting wordless in the park. Ten blocks, fifteen, fifty. Until they trusted her. Until they wanted to speak. Until they wanted their stories to be told.
Tell me, she said. What you want to say to them. What you want them to hear. What you still remember. She wrote it all down, just as the words came out.
They are not just Asian American families, she finds: there are white journalists who’d researched the re-placements, Latina activists who’d organized protests. Not all of them want to speak to her. Some don’t trust her, with her Chinese face: You all caused the Crisis and you want us to feel sorry for you? Some Asian Americans don’t trust her either, sure she’s only making things worse. They’ve seen what happened when they spoke up; now, twice shy, they shake their heads and close the door in her face without a word.
Other people are angry: if you hadn’t written that poem, they insist, this would never have happened. Some believe she has deliberately egged on the protests, that she is behind it all. She does not argue or try to explain as their voices chase her down the hallway, out onto the street. Some are afraid: families who have no papers, who live in terror of raids, or worse. And some people chide her for coming too late. One older woman—a Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been taken—looked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth.
You think this is something new? She shook her head.
Margaret listened. She began to learn: there was no new thing under the sun. About the schools where Indigenous children were shorn and stripped, renamed, reeducated, and returned home broken and scarred—or never at all. About children borne across borders in their parents’ arms only to be caged in warehouses, alone and afraid. About foster children pinballed from home to home, their own families sometimes unable to track their path. Things she’d been able to not know, until now. There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same. A most precious ransom, a cudgel over a parent’s head. It was whatever the opposite of an anchor was: an attempt to uproot some otherness, something hated and feared. Some foreignness seen as an invasive weed, something to be eradicated.
But most of the families are hungry to speak, ravenous with story. She wrote down how their children had been taken, what they wanted to say to those children, the most precious things they would never forget, the things they needed said but did not dare to say themselves. Trying to save every one, all the stories hushed and hidden, all the faces and names too precious to be forgotten. She scribbled them down, in a notepad she carried in the left cup of her bra, the writing so small you’d almost need a magnifier to read it. When that notebook was full, she got another, then another, tucking the old ones into the pocket of her jeans, the side of her sock. Bearing them on her body. At night, she leafed through the pages, engraving the names and stories on her heart, Bird and Ethan haunting every word.
In the early days, it was the librarians who took her in. Some had lounges and sofas; a few even had shower stalls for the staff who’d once biked to work but were long gone. At the others, once the librarian had headed home, she wandered until she found a quiet corner, away from windows. In the shelter of a high shelf she would spread out her bedroll, and then, as she tried to settle her mind for sleep, she would allow herself the luxurious pain of thinking about Ethan and Bird. In the day, she sealed them out, but paused here in the night, the rags she’d stuffed into the gaps of her mind worked loose, and they seeped back in, like fog.