What now, he says. But already he knows the answer.
What happens now is a choice: they can go back, all of them, to the lives they’d had before. Bird and his father can go back to Cambridge, back to school and replacing books on their locked-up shelves. They can pretend this never happened; they can still say, no, we don’t know her, we haven’t heard from her in years. We have nothing to do with her, we had nothing to do with it, of course we would never, of course we don’t think like that. As for Sadie: the Duchess assures them she can find somewhere safe, but from the look on Sadie’s face Bird knows what will happen—she’ll run again, she’ll keep running, the way she had before she found Margaret, she’ll keep searching for her own parents, for a way out of all this, and she’ll be gone. So they will all go back to the way they were before, as if none of this has ever occurred, as if it changed nothing, as if it meant nothing.
Or: they can go on. They can keep looking—for Sadie’s parents, for the families who’ve lost children, for the children themselves. For Margaret, perhaps still out there, somewhere, though none of them dare to voice this, even in their minds. They can keep collecting stories, finding ways to share them. Finding ways to pass them on and remember them. They will have to conceal themselves, the way Margaret has all these years, slipping through shadows, moving from kindness to kindness. Listening and gathering. Refusing to let things die. They can let what Margaret has done change them, they can make it change things. They can keep rolling this stone uphill.
Somewhere, maybe, someone is telling someone else: Listen, this crazy thing happened the other night and I can’t stop thinking about it. Days later, weeks even, Margaret’s voice still lodged in the crevices of their brain, the stories they’ve heard a pin completing a circuit, lighting up feelings that have long lain dark. Illuminating corners of themselves they hadn’t known. Listen, I’ve been thinking. Eight million people, all those stories passing from mouth to ear. Would one person be compelled? One out of eight million, a fraction of a fraction. But not nothing. Absorbing that story, passing it on. Listen. Somewhere, out there, saying to others at last: Listen, this isn’t right.
None of them are sure how this will work, where they will go, how they will find their way, but it is not impossible, and right now that feels like enough.
* * *
? ? ?
Before they leave, Domi catches Bird by the hand.
I wish you could’ve heard it, she says. Her face puffed and pink, swollen with the weight of what she carries. I wish you could have heard her.
And someday he will hear: one day, he will meet someone who, on hearing his story, will say slowly, I remember that, I was there, I’ll never forget—who will recite it for him, the very last bit of his mother’s broadcast, the one story she did not read but spoke, directly, in her own words, will recite it nearly word for word, because it has been rooted inside them ever since they heard it, all those years ago, that night when out of nowhere, out of everywhere, a voice began to speak into the darkness, carrying messages of love.
Now Domi says: Her poems.
All those years ago, she says, I went to the bookstore and there was your mother’s book on the table. I knew she’d write one, one day. I bought it on the spot and read it in one sitting. We hadn’t spoken in years. I hated her for a while, you know, I really did. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, until she showed up at my door. But they stuck with me, those poems; I could hear her voice when I read them. I kept thinking about everything we’d lived through. It made me think of who we’d been, back then.
Bird holds his breath. Could it be, he thinks. That she still has it. That she’ll take it from her bag and press it, battered and worn, into his hands.
But Domi shakes her head.
I burned it, she says. When they started to go after her. No one knew I had it and maybe no one would ever have known but I did it anyway. I was a coward. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Bird: I’m sorry. It’s gone.
Tears clot in Bird’s throat. He nods, and begins to turn away. But Domi is still speaking.
There was one poem, she says, speaking softly, almost to herself, as if she is trying to remember an almost-faded dream. One poem that just—
She rubs the spot between her collarbones, as if the punch of the poem still lingers there.
I read it over and over, you know. Because it kept saying something I felt but couldn’t hold on to and the words there made it solid, just for a second, while I was reading. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Bird nods, though he’s not sure he does.
I think, she says, I think I could write it down for you. The poem, I mean. I might get a word or two wrong. But I think—I think—I still know most of it. Would you like that?
And he understands, then, how it’s going to go. How he’ll find her again. What he’s going to do next, alongside everything else his life will bring. Somewhere out there are people who still know her poems, who’ve hidden scraps of them away in the folds of their minds before setting match to the papers in their hands. He will find them, he will ask them what they remember, he will piece together their recollections, fragmentary and incomplete though they may be, mapping the holes of one against the solid patches of another, and in this way, piece by piece, he will set her back down on paper again.
Yes, please, he says. I would like that, very much.
Author’s Note
Bird and Margaret’s world isn’t exactly our world, but it isn’t not ours, either. Most of the events and occurrences in this book do not have direct analogues, but I drew inspiration from many real-life events, both past and current—and in some cases, things I’d imagined had become realities by the time the novel was done. Margaret Atwood once wrote of The Handmaid’s Tale, “If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real,” so what follows is a list of just a few of the real toads—and conversely, the beacons of hope—that shaped my thinking as I wrote.
There is a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control. If this strikes a nerve with you—as I hope it does—please learn more about the many instances, both past and ongoing, in which children have been taken from their families: the separations of enslaved families, government boarding schools for Indigenous children (such as that in Carlisle, PA), the inequities built into the foster care system, the separations of migrant families still occurring at the U.S.’s southern border, and beyond. Much more attention needs to be brought to this subject, but Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror gives an invaluable overview.