Our Missing Hearts (20)
Bird passes shelf after shelf, slotting his fingers into the spaces where removed books once stood. There are fewer missing here than at the public library, where some shelves had been more gap than books. But still nearly every shelf is missing one, sometimes more. He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom. He wonders if it is his father.
At the correct shelf he slows, then pauses, tracing the call numbers along the neatly squared spines as they count down, fraction by fraction. And then: there it is. Slim and yellow. Hardly a book at all, barely bigger than a magazine. He’d nearly missed it.
With one finger he tips it from the shelf. The Boy Who Drew Cats: A Japanese Folktale. He’s never seen this particular book before, but as soon as he sees the cover he knows it’s the same story. A Japanese folktale, but his Chinese mother had heard it or read it somewhere, had remembered it and told it to him. On the front is a watercolor drawing of a boy, a Japanese boy, holding a brush. Painting a huge cat on a wall. The boy looks a bit like Bird, even: dark hair grown shaggy over his forehead, the same dark eyes and slightly rounded nose. It’s coming back to him, the way his mother told it, a story buried in Styrofoam packing long ago that he’s digging out, pulling back into the light. A boy, wandering alone and far from home. A lonely building, in the darkness. Cat after cat after cat springing from the bristles of his brush. His fingers shake, struggling to peel the cover from the cloth-soft pages beneath. Yes, he thinks. It’s almost there, like something edging out of the shadows, just starting to take its shape; as soon as he reads it, he’ll remember it, remember what happens, this story from his mother, in a moment he’ll understand everything.
It is at this point that someone sets a hand on his shoulder, and he whirls around to find his father.
They let me come to find you, his father says, instead of security.
* * *
? ? ?
He should have known: of course the library has security cameras, of course they would have noticed that someone swiped in with his father’s card just hours after his father—responsible and rule following as ever—had reported his card was lost.
Dad, Bird begins, I just needed to—
His father turns around without responding, and Bird follows his straight, angry back all the way through the stacks and up the stairs to the staff room with its endless rows and rows of carts, where two security guards are waiting. In the instant before the guards turn around, he shoves the book into the back waistband of his jeans, beneath his T-shirt.
It’s okay, Bird’s father says, before the guards can speak. Just my son, like we thought. I left my card in his bookbag by mistake, and he came in trying to find me to give it back.
Bird studies the linoleum floor, holding his breath. His father has not asked him a single question about what he’s doing there, and to him this story sounds implausible. Why would he search for his father in the stacks, how could he possibly expect to find one man in that labyrinth of shelves? The security guards hesitate, teetering on the edge of belief. One of them leans closer, squinting at Bird’s face. Bird blinks, trying to look innocent, and inside his balled-up fists, his fingernails bite into his palm.
His father lets out a chuckle, a loud, insincere whinny that gallops around the room and then vanishes. Just trying to be responsible, right, Noah? he says. But don’t worry. He understands now.
He claps Bird on the shoulder, and grudgingly, the security guards nod.
Next time, one of them says to Bird, just stop at the front desk, okay, son? They’ll call your dad down for you.
Bird’s legs go quivery in relief. He nods, and swallows, and squeaks out Yes, sir, because from his father’s taut grip on his shoulder, he understands this is what he needs to do.
When the security guards have gone, Bird reaches to the small of his back, plucks the book from beneath his T-shirt.
Dad, he whispers. His voice quivering. Dad, can I—
His father barely glances at the book. In fact, he doesn’t look at Bird at all.
Put that on the cart, he says quietly. Someone will reshelve it. Let’s go.
* * *
? ? ?
Only once has Bird ever been in trouble. Mostly, he listens to his father’s advice: Don’t attract attention. Keep your head down. And: If you see any trouble, you go the other way, understand?
It had driven Sadie crazy. Sadie, at the first scent of trouble, would follow it like a bloodhound to its source.
Bird, she’d said. Don’t be such a pussy.
It was the posters that caught her eye that time, the ones that hung and still hang all around town, in grocery-store windows and on community bulletin boards and sometimes even in the windows of houses, reminding everyone to be patriotic, to watch over each other, to report the merest sign of trouble. Each designed by a famous artist to be eye-catching and collectible. A red-white-and-blue dam over a huge yellow-brown river, with a hairline fracture: Even small cracks widen. A blond woman peeking through curtains, cell phone at her ear: Better safe than sorry. Two houses, side by side, a pie passing hand to hand over a white picket fence: Watch over your neighbor. At the bottom of each, four bold capitals: PACT.
That afternoon, Sadie had paused by a row of posters pasted to a bus shelter, ran her fingers over the glue. It flaked away under her fingers like chalk.