Stand there, Margaret murmurs. Behind the screen of Bird’s body, she stoops as if to rummage in the bin, then sticks the bottle cap under the can’s lip, against a handy wad of gum. There, she says. That ought to hold it.
Bird takes a step back from the trash can and eyes it warily. To anyone else it would still look innocuous and ordinary; your eyes would glide right past it. Just another of the city’s uglinesses you’d do your best to ignore. But to him, now, the place is marked—with menace or promise, he isn’t sure which—and he can’t seem to turn away.
What will it do, he asks, though Margaret can see what he’s already imagining: flash, flames, a mushroom of smoke. She doesn’t answer. Already she’s pulled the next cap from her pocket.
Come on, she says. We’ve got to hustle.
For weeks Margaret has done this daily, and her eyes zero in on likely spots: wedged into a sewer grate, buried in a finger-wide crack in a building’s foundation. She pokes one cap neatly into the belly of a squirrel half crushed by a truck.
I don’t know, she says, wiping blood from her fingertips as she rises from the curb. They might come sweep it away.
She surveys the purpling mash of fur and flesh, the crust of flies beginning to gather.
But probably not, she says. I don’t think they’ll bother. Not by tomorrow, anyway.
They tuck them everywhere, these little capsules, and soon Bird begins to help, eyes adjusting to see hiding places everywhere, the way your sight adjusts to the dark. Some of the spots Margaret dismisses as too obvious, too neat. Somewhere messy, she says. Somewhere no one will want to touch. Bird runs a half step ahead, then two, then three, finding places for them all. Inside dumpsters reeking sweetly of rotting fruit; in corners where homeless men took their morning piss. At the feet of trees, nestled between bullets of dog shit. He forgets to question, for a moment, what they are for. It is a reverse treasure hunt, a game he and his mother are playing. Bottle cap by bottle cap, the bag on Margaret’s arm lightens, and Bird feels a swirl of glee at the clever places they’ve found, a sense of power and awe when he thinks how many of these caps are hiding out there. He calculates: a hundred a day, for a whole month.
Is that all of them? Bird asks, when she’s placed the last one. In a rusted crevice in a lamppost, just outside the entrance to the park.
That’s everything, Margaret says shortly, and lets out a sigh—of satisfaction? Of sadness? It isn’t clear.
With the last bottle cap planted, she abandons the trash bag she’s carried as camouflage all these weeks, adding it to a nearby heap. It is garbage day in this neighborhood and everywhere lopsided piles dot the curb, threatening to tip. Here and there, something has gnawed through the plastic, spilling a plume of trash across the sidewalk. She wipes her hands on the thighs of her pants, looks at him. Her Bird: wide-eyed and impressionable, trusting, eager for the future though he has no idea what it will hold. Half grown, but only half.
What can she teach him, what can she do for him, what can she give him to make up for what’s been lost? She wants to buy him pretzels and ice cream and lemonade from a cart, to let him dance through the park, licking the salt and drips from his fingers. To watch him play silly games, rules changing as he goes: leapfrogging broken squares on the sidewalk, jumping high to slap stop signs as they pass. No: she wants to play those games with him. She wants to be just his mother for one day. As if she can correct all these years without her, with one golden afternoon.
A police car approaches slowly, on the prowl. The silhouettes of the officers inside: foggy blurs through the tinted glass.
In an instant Margaret catches Bird by the elbow, yanking him behind a nearby stoop. Crouched behind a pyramid of garbage bags, her arms cinch him tight, so close they can feel each other’s hearts beating.
The car glides closer, suspicious. Scans the area. Then moves on.
Something thick and bitter coats the roof of Margaret’s mouth. In her grip, Bird’s shoulders are still a boy’s: unmuscled and bony, terrifyingly breakable. She can’t give him the beautiful afternoon he deserves, not yet. It isn’t fair, she thinks. The reek of the garbage rises around them in a fug, curdled and clinging. The police car is long gone, but still she cradles him, eyes shut, face pressed into the impossible warmth of his hair. When she finally loosens her arms and looks down at him, his gaze is startled, but trusting. Searching her face for a cue.
It’s okay, she whispers. Don’t be scared.
I’m not scared, he says. I knew we’d be okay.
With a shaky smile Margaret gives him a final squeeze, rises to her feet.
Let’s get home, she says.
They ride the subway back to Brooklyn, Bird at one end of the car, Margaret at the other, so no one will suspect they’re together. From afar she studies him: a small fidgety dark-haired figure, crossing one leg over the other, picking at the tape-mended tears in the seat. Behind his sunglasses she can’t quite see his eyes, but when she looks closely she spots his furtive glances in her direction, the nearly imperceptible relaxing of his shoulders each time he finds her, leaning against a pole, keeping surreptitious watch from afar. This is the past three years, she thinks, condensed into an instant: orbiting at a distance, guessing but never sure what he is seeing, hoping that the idea of her is reassuring. No, she corrects herself. Not the past three years. This is simply having a child.
Planting the bottle caps, returning home—usually this is a well-rehearsed dance she can do without flinching. But today is different. Today she cannot stay still; every time the train stops, she jumps, warily scanning the other passengers as they doze or idly scroll on their phones. Her gaze darts again and again to the boy at the end of the car, now settled calmly, breaking from his daydream only to catch her eye once and give her the faintest conspiratorial smile. She tries and fails to smile back. Another train rushes by, headed elsewhere, and in the blurred shapes through the window she remembers the shadows of the officers in their cruiser, Bird’s face against her shoulder, Bird’s body thin and warm and vulnerable even in the cage of her arms. She hates herself for putting him there. When she holds her breath she can still smell the garbage, sour and suffocating all around. The train pulses beneath them, palpitating, the thumps of the wheels and roar of the engine and the sway of the car coalescing into a single word that throbs faster and faster inside her. By the time they reach the brownstone—walking a ways apart, slipping one at a time through the gate into the back garden—it churns in the base of her throat, and the moment they are safely back inside, it erupts out of her, leaving her breathless.
No, she says. No. I’m not doing it.
Bird turns back to look at her, frozen with her back against the door, as if barring the way out. For a moment she looks older, drawn; in the darkened hallway, lit only by the single bare bulb in the living room, her hair silvers, her face turns gray. A woman turned to stone.
It’s not worth the risk, she says. In her own ears her voice is leathery, coarse and cracked.
But the bottle caps, Bird says. All the ones we just hid. And those ones you already hid.
It doesn’t matter. We’ll leave them.
But it’s important. Bird shakes his head, as if she is trying to fool him. Isn’t it? Whatever you’re doing, I know it’s going to help.
It doesn’t matter, Margaret says again. Forget it. Forget the whole thing,
She rushes to him, clutching him close, cradling his face in her palms, because it is unbearable to remember him in danger, to imagine him ever being in danger again, let alone putting him there herself. Whatever it takes, she and Ethan had promised each other all those years ago, and she still means it. She will do whatever it takes to keep their child safe.
Except. In her arms, Bird stiffens, then pulls away.