She longed for the broad firm comfort of Ethan curled against her back, the calm that enveloped her whenever he was near. So many things she wished she could tell him: the stories she’d heard, the families she’d met, all the things that would be easier to hold, together. Small joys, too: the silver-green dragonfly that had landed on her forearm, stilled its wings, then vanished again; the improbable red of the maple leaves just beginning to fall—things that felt only half real when she could not share them with him. And Bird: he was the hollow to which her mind, like water, inevitably ran. How tall was he—up to her nose? Her brows? Would he be able to look her straight in the eye? Did he still clip his hair short or had he let it grow shaggy, did it hang in his eyes, was it still the same brown as Ethan’s or had it darkened with age to coffee-colored, or even black like her own? Had he lost the last of his baby teeth, and if so, had Ethan plucked them from beneath his pillow and saved them, did Bird even put them beneath his pillow anymore or did he no longer believe in such childish things? What had happened at school today, did he smirk at an inside joke with a friend, was someone unkind to him, was it raining where he was, and if it was, had he remembered his rain jacket or was he soaked to the skin? What was he dreaming, far away, did he still sleep with one arm thrown across his face like a blindfold, were they happy dreams or sad, did she ever appear in them, did he remember her at all, and if he did, was it with love or with hate? She hated herself in these moments, when she tried to picture Bird’s face and knew that what she remembered was growing further and further from the truth, that she had missed so much that could never be retrieved.
Most nights, she got up and roamed the library, not daring to turn on the lights but guiding herself by the maze of shelves, fingertips walking the spines of the books. Eventually she would pull one down, something about its feel catching her attention, and take it to bed, burying herself in whatever it had to say. Programming languages; basic electronics; French cuisine. The evolution of the panda’s paw. One night, she found she had selected a biography of a poet: Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova was so beloved in Russia, it said, that you could buy a porcelain figurine of her, wearing a gray flowered dress and a red shawl. It was said that in 1924 most homes had one, though this was impossible to verify, because many of the figurines were later smashed during the Terror. Akhmatova was forbidden to write, Margaret read, but she did so anyway. She wrote about her friends, arrested and dying in prison camps. She wrote about her former husband, shot for treason. Most of all she wrote about her son, locked in a prison that she visited daily but was never allowed to enter. Finally, agonizingly, she wrote about Stalin—effusive, flowery, goose-stepping praise—hoping that her compliments would persuade him to pardon her son, but they did not. Years later, when her son was released at last, he believed that his mother had not tried to free him, that she cared more for her poetry than for him, and their relationship was never the same.
Margaret told this story to herself over and over, so that she would not forget it.
Once upon a time in Russia, a poet was forbidden from writing her verse. Instead of silence, she chose fire. Each night she wrote her lines on scraps of paper, working them over and over, committing them to memory. At dawn she touched a match to the paper and reduced her words to ash. Over the years her words repeated this cycle—resurrection in the darkness, death at first light—until eventually their lives were inscribed in flame. The poet murmured her poems into the ears of her friends, who memorized them and carried them away tucked under their tongues. Mouth to ear, they passed them on to others, until the whole world whispered with the poet’s lost lines.
The next morning, the librarian found her with head pressed to the page, mirrored letters tattooed on her cheek.
* * *
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As she gathered more and more stories, a curious thing began to happen: some of the families invited her into their homes, asking her to join them at the table, offering a spare bed if they had it, a sofa if they didn’t, a folded blanket on the floor when that was the best they could do. The gentle nighttime noises of a home comforted her: the soft padding of slippered feet shuffling through the dark from bedroom to bathroom and back again; the tangled murmur of adult voices speaking softly, even though the children were not there to wake; the quiet creaks and ticks of a house settling, as if, its occupants sleeping, it could finally loosen its girdle and breathe. But they punished her, too: late at night, the only one awake, nestled in the core of someone else’s life, she missed Bird and Ethan even more, the hurt of it so vicious the room blurred.
One night, curled in her bedroll on the floor of a family’s kitchen, she awoke to a man’s hands on her. She’d startled, every muscle in her body iron-tense, coiled to fight. But no: it was the father, carefully spreading a cover over her. Mohamad, his name was. Earlier that evening, she’d sat beside him and his wife and eaten maqluba and listened to them tell the story of their son. I was a child when the Twin Towers fell, he had said toward the end. Someone spray-painted filthy things on our garage door. Someone broke our front window with a brick. My father hung a huge American flag on our house, for a while.
He’d paused, and his wife took his hand.
None of our neighbors did or said anything to help us, he said.
Now, the night had grown cold, and here he was tucking a blanket around her with such tenderness she might have been his lost child.
When he had gone, Margaret touched it with her hands and felt unimaginable softness, plush and warm, like the shaggy pelt of some luxurious beast, and she fell into a deep sleep. In the morning, she awoke to find it was just a blanket, of course—a large, soft, fluffy one, printed with the bold striped face of a tiger. For the next three nights she slept under the tiger skin, as she thought of it, and when she left that apartment she had embraced the couple and carried the warmth of that tiger blanket inside her like a benediction.
* * *
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Miles and months passed. A year, then two. She marked the time by Bird’s age: now he was ten, now he was eleven, now eleven and a half. The list of things she knew she had missed grew and grew. Learning to swim, learning to dance; new interests and obsessions she could only begin to imagine. A birthday, then another. The days were a blur of buses and trains, of tired tramping across cities, and at night she dreamed of hovering high in in the clouds and seeing herself from above, a small speck crossing the landscape. A fly crawling over an endless map.
What kept her going was this: every few weeks, a news story caught her eye. She’d abandoned her phone when she left home, of course, but she heard snippets of radio as she passed a store, or scavenged newspapers discarded on the sidewalk. Over and over they came, her own words echoing back to her, not on signs or in marches this time but woven into strange happenings, things so odd—half protest, half art—that they caught people’s attention, forcing them to take note; things that unsettled them days and weeks later, knotting a tangle in the chest. Bursts punctuating the static of those endless days, pushing her onward.
In Nashville, statues appeared in the early morning mist, a hundred ghostly children cast from ice. all our missing hearts, read a sign chained around one’s neck. The police arrived with handcuffs at the ready, but whoever had placed them was gone. Just a prank, one officer radioed back to the station, it’s just ice, but— Around them, commuters paused, shaken for once out of their routines. Some snapped photos, but most simply stood mesmerized, even just for a moment, watching in silence as the small faces slowly, slowly dissolved and blurred. One of them reached out and touched what had once been the face of a little girl, melting a thumb-shaped indent in her cheek. The police shooed them away, cordoned off the area, set up a perimeter in case the perpetrators returned. It took most of the morning for the statues to melt, and for hours the officers on duty would glance up at the skyscrapers and see the silhouettes of people in the windows above, staring down at the fading blocks of ice, and later, at the dark damp patches where children had once stood.
In Des Moines one morning, the main street was painted red, block after block after block. From the news helicopters above, it looked like a stream of blood slicing straight through the city. Stenciled on the sidewalk where the source of the river would lie: bring back our missing hearts. Those who discovered it first found that the paint was still wet, and as they walked away they left trails of footprints that grew indistinct, then disappeared. That night, and in the days and weeks to come, people would find streaks of red on the soles of their shoes and the cuffs of their pants and the sleeves of their jackets and pause, thinking blood, their chests seizing, patting themselves for the hurt.