Our Missing Hearts (11)
Then one of the policemen produces a box cutter, begins to saw his way through the knitting from top to bottom, and yarn falls away in a waterfall of snippets. Another arrives with a ladder, climbs into the branches, pulls down the first doll and tosses it to the ground. Not dolls, Bird thinks suddenly: children. The big heads and snub limbs and dark hair. They had eyes but no mouths, just two buttons on a blank face, and as the small body tumbles down into the mud below, Bird turns away, stomach roiling. He can’t bear to watch.
* * *
? ? ?
He’d thought Sadie had been an exception. PACT-related re-placements remain extremely rare.
Well, they aren’t, Sadie said.
But how many, he’d asked once. Ten? Twenty? Hundreds?
Sadie eyed him, hands on hips. Bird, she said, with infuriating pity, you don’t understand anything, do you?
* * *
? ? ?
People didn’t like to talk about it, liked to hear about it even less: that the patriotism of PACT was laced with a threat. But some had tried to say what was happening, to explain it to others, and to themselves. Sadie’s mother had been one of them. There is footage of her, on a tidy tree-lined street in Baltimore. It could be any street in America except that it is deserted: no cars, no people walking their dogs or out for a stroll, just Sadie’s mother in a yellow blazer, the black foam bulb of her Channel 5 mic held to her mouth.
Yesterday morning, she says, on this quiet street, Family Services officers arrived at the home of Sonia Lee Chun and took custody of her four-year-old son, David. The reason? A recent post by Sonia on social media, arguing that PACT was being used to target members of the Asian American community.
Behind her a pair of police cars pull up—lights off, ominously silent—and park, blocking the street. You can see them at a distance, the four officers emerging from the barricade of cars and approaching slowly, a push broom relentlessly sweeping the pavement clean. The camera is steady, and so is her voice. We seem to have attracted some police presence. Officer, we are with Channel 5, here is my press badge, we— Muffled cross-talk and then, to the camera, she says, imperturbably calm: They are arresting me. As if she is reporting on things happening to someone else.
The police seize her microphone. Her lips keep moving, but now there is no sound. As one officer pulls her arms back to cuff her, another approaches the camera, hand on holster, his mouth barking silent commands. The unseen cameraman sets his camera on the ground and the horizon tips sideways, a plumb line from sky to earth. As they are led away, the camera—still rolling—catches only their feet, retreating upward, off, then gone.
Bird has seen this video because Sadie kept a copy of it on her phone. Technically it is incriminating evidence—it shows her mother espousing, promoting, or endorsing unpatriotic activity in private or in public—but Sadie had managed to get a copy somehow and doggedly transferred it, over the years, from phone to phone. On the dumbed-down smartphone her foster parents have granted her—my leash, she says, sarcastically: so that they can always reach her, so that they can track her by GPS if need be—she hides it in a folder labeled Games. Sometimes Bird would find her crouched in the corner of the playground, or under the structure in the cubby where the younger kids played house. Over and over on the screen, her mother. Calm in the chaos around her. Slowly walking off into the sky.
It was the first time she’d been arrested, Sadie said, but it had only made her braver. After that she’d gone looking for other families whose children had been taken under PACT, trying to convince them to speak with her on-camera. Trying to trace where the children had been taken. Trying to film a PACT re-placement in action, pulling on her contacts in Family Services, in the mayor’s office, anyone with a lead on who might be next.
Soon after, Sadie’s mother got an email from her boss, Michelle: coffee, that weekend. Just a friendly chat. Unofficial. Off the record. Michelle stopped by, two takeout cups in hand, and they sipped them at the kitchen table. Out in the hallway Sadie lurked, unnoticed. She was eleven.
I’m worried, Erika, Michelle said over a flat white, about repercussions.
A reporter over at WMAR had recently been fined for saying that PACT encouraged discrimination against those of Asian descent; his story, the state insisted, drummed up sympathy for people who might be dangerous to public stability. The station had paid it, almost a quarter of their yearly budget. In Annapolis, another station had had its license revoked. By coincidence, surely, it also had run a number of segments critical of PACT.
I’m a journalist, Sadie’s mother had said. Reporting on these things is my job.
We’re a small station, Michelle said. The bottom line is, with budget cuts we’re basically at bare-bones operation as it is. And if our funders pulled out . . .
She stopped, and Sadie’s mother twisted the sleeve of her paper cup around and around.
Are they threatening to? she asked, and Michelle replied, Two already have. But it’s not just that. It’s the repercussions for you, Erika. For your family.
They’d known each other for years, these two women: one Black, one white. Barbecues and picnics together, holiday gatherings. Michelle had no children, had never married. This station is my baby, she always said. When Sadie was born, Michelle had knitted her a yellow sweater and booties to match; over the years she’d taken Sadie on outings to the zoo and the aquarium and Fort Henry. Auntie Shellie, Sadie called her.