The government had commissioned a study: Children under the age of twelve, once removed from their parents, could not be expected to find their way back home unassisted. Those above twelve were usually sent to a state-run center; younger children could be placed in foster care. Sadie had been eleven when they’d taken her.
They’d moved her from place to place in quick succession—first West Virginia, then Erie, then Boston—farther and farther, as if trying to pull her from orbit. From her first foster home, she called her old number: disconnected. She wrote letter after letter, zip code neatly printed in ink, plastered with stamps stolen from the second. No response, but she’d remained hopeful: maybe when she’d been transferred she’d missed it; maybe behind her, letters from her parents were trailing like the tail of a kite, always a step too late. Then, at her third foster home in Cambridge, a letter came back: unknown.
Come with me, she’d said to Bird, but in the end she’d gone alone.
Two buses and a train ride back to Baltimore, with money filched from her foster father’s wallet, the address still etched in her memory even though her mother’s face had begun to blur. Everything dreamily familiar: the neighbor’s tulips, pink against the green lawn. The ambient buzz of a mower on the summer air. The same picture she’d clung to so staunchly for the last two years.
But when she ran up the steps, the door was locked. The woman who answered was a white woman, a stranger. A kind face, mousy hair pulled back in a bun. Honey, no one like that lives here, she said.
She’d moved in six months ago. No, she didn’t know who lived here before that. Did Sadie need help? Was there someone she could call?
Sadie ran.
She’d slipped onto the first train out of the station, burrowed into a corner seat, awoke in the bustle of Penn Station. Overwhelmed and alone. She struggled out of the low, rat-colored hallways of the terminal, past the one-footed pigeons scrabbling for crumbs, past the homeless men with cardboard signs and jingling cups, past the scum of litter on the curb. Above her rose a canopy of scaffolding, net nearly obscuring the rebuilding the nyc you ? stenciled across it. Above that, needles of glass and concrete jabbed at the clouds.
And then, out of the gloom, she’d spotted the big gray arches, on the far side of a patch of green.
Back in Cambridge, she had loved the peace of the library. Loitering among the shelves, opening and closing the books still left standing there. Many were gone, she knew, but these were survivors; she took them down from the shelves and flipped through them, breathed them in. Imagined how many others had read and handled these books before her.
One day the librarian caught her. Sadie looked up, her nose to the page, to see the librarian at the end of the aisle, bemused. They’d seen each other often, of course—in and out, each day she came in—but they never spoke. Sadie had no library card, never asked for assistance, never caused any trouble. The librarian said nothing, and Sadie slammed the book shut and pushed it back onto the shelf and fled. But a few days later, when she’d dared creep into the library again, the librarian had waved her over to the desk. I’m Carina, she said, what’s your name?
It took Sadie a while to notice: she wasn’t the only one who came in but borrowed nothing. Once or twice people came to the counter, held murmured, intense conversations with the librarian, and left, looking anxious or anguished or hopeful, or all three. Now and then wayward books came down the book return, shuddering their way into the collection bin: tattered paperbacks, old textbooks, sometimes just a magazine. As if someone had made a mistake, dropping the wrong thing down the chute. One day she’d wedged herself through the book return, fished one out. A note between the pages with a name, an age, and a description: a child taken, like her. A family’s plea that the network would encode, and remember, and pass on.
We are filling in the cracks, the librarian admitted, wherever we can.
So when Sadie had ended up in New York, no trace of her parents anymore, she knew where to go. When she spotted the library, it had felt like something out of a fairy tale: a palace guarded by two mighty lions, pale gray, impassive. She climbed the steps and stretched to set her hand on one massive paw, fingers curving between the broad claws, and it came back to her like a scent on the breeze: a story her mother had read her once. A little girl lost and alone, aided by a lion, the king of that land. She looked around. There was the street lamp. And here in front of her was the magical doorway that might take her home. The library was almost empty; it was nearly closing time, and Sadie wandered until she found a quiet corner, an old armchair in the children’s section, where posters that said read still hung over half-emptied bookshelves. She curled up and fell asleep and awoke to a young woman patting her shoulder.
Hello there, she said to Sadie. It looks like you’re lost.
* * *
? ? ?
You’re Bird’s mom, aren’t you? Sadie said.
Margaret touched her hips, her heart, checking for the notebooks that she’d carried so long they felt like part of her flesh.
I was, she said.
He told me about you, Sadie said, and to Margaret it had felt like a sign.
Sadie, young and motherless and fearless. After three months on her own, half wary adult, half child.
I know somewhere she can stay, Margaret said to the librarian.
* * *
? ? ?
It took some time, convincing Domi.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding, M., she’d protested. What do I know about kids.
They were speaking in fierce whispers, while Sadie waited, cross armed and skeptical, at the far end of the living room. Out of the corner of her eye, Domi studied her, and imperiously, unabashedly, Sadie studied her back.
You know as well as I do, Margaret said, that the brownstone isn’t a place for a child. And I can’t keep an eye on her myself anyway. I’ve got too much to do.
What is it exactly, Domi said, that you want me to do?
Keep her safe. Just while I’m finishing up. And after it’s done, we’ll find somewhere better. Maybe we can find her parents. But she needs somewhere now. She’s been shuttled from library to library for weeks and they won’t be able to hide her forever. It’s a miracle they’ve been able to this long.
She paused. Or are you too cramped for space? she added dryly. A glance around the enormous living room, at the ceiling where, overhead, a half dozen bedrooms sat unused.
Domi let out a long slow breath through her nostrils. Still the sign, after all these years, that Margaret had won.
Fine. But she’ll have to take care of herself. I don’t have time to be babysitting.
I only need my diaper changed twice a day, Sadie called from across the room.
Domi laughed.
Hmm, she said. She’s got a sense of humor, at least.
The two of them sized each other up—the tall blond woman in her suit and high heels, the little brown girl in her hoodie and fading jeans—and Margaret had felt it between them then, the crackle of kindred spirits, of like meeting like.
It was Sadie who’d finally told Margaret, some days later: But Bird doesn’t live at that house anymore. Didn’t you know? They live in a dorm now. I can tell you where.
* * *
? ? ?
Why didn’t you tell me, Bird says. Why didn’t she come down when I was there?
We’d told her to stay out of sight, Margaret says. So no one would spot her and start asking questions. You’ll see her soon, I promise. But I needed this time with you. I needed—
She stops, clippers poised.
Someone’s here, she murmurs.