Our Missing Hearts (52)
Margaret wrote more poems. Publishers were printing again, and when Bird was three, a small, plucky press agreed to publish her book. A split pomegranate on the cover, so close up it resembled an organ, or a wound: you had to look twice to see it for what it was. Our Missing Hearts was praised by a few poetry critics and read by almost no one. Tens of copies sold, she’d said to Ethan drily, who reads poetry anymore? and he’d joked, Who ever read it before?
It didn’t matter. The world was full of poems to her then.
She taught Bird to catch fireflies: hands cupped, lemon-lime light flashing in the cracks of his fingers. And then to let them go, spiraling into the night like a dying spark. She taught him to lie still in the grass and watch the neighborhood rabbits nose in the clover, so close his breath stirred the fine white fluff of their tails. She taught him the names of flowers and bugs and birds, to identify the low coo-coo-coo of the mourning dove and the brash scream of the blue jay and the singsong phoebe of the chickadee, clear and fresh as cold water on a summer day. She taught him to pluck honeysuckle blossoms from the vine and touch the end to his tongue: such sticky sweetness. She pulled the shell of a cicada from a pine tree’s trunk, turned it over to show the neat slit down the belly where, having grown, it had wriggled out of its old self into something new.
And she told him stories. Stories about warriors and princesses, poor brave girls and boys, monsters and magicians. The brother and sister who outwitted the witch and found their way home. The girl who saved her swan-brothers from enchantment. Ancient myths that made sense of the world: why sunflowers nod, why echoes linger, why spiders spin. Stories her mother had told her in childhood, before she stopped speaking of such things: how once there had been nine suns, baking the earth to dust, until a brave archer shot them one by one out of the sky. How the monkey king tricked his way into the heavenly garden to steal the peaches of immortality. How once a year, two lovers, forever separated, crossed a river of stars to meet in midair.
Did that really happen? he asked each time, and she smiled and shrugged.
Maybe.
She filled his head with nonsense, with mystery and magic, carving out space for wonder. A haven in their long-ago Eden.
* * *
? ? ?
Enough for today, she says, setting down the pliers.
In part this is selfish. She is drawing out this moment of calm, lingering in the sweet times, before the bitter things she has to confess. But there are things she needs to do before dark, and they will take time.
She lines up the bottle caps she’s completed, tallying them two by two. Fifty-five. Much fewer than on a usual day, but that’s to be expected: wading through the bog of the past slows her hands. Slows everything. Fifty-five little round capsules, brimful with transistors, a watch battery, a small metal disc. And wires, so many wires. Packed down tight into a cap the size of a coin and sealed up tight, simple and primitive and dangerous as a stone. She bundles them all into a plastic shopping bag emblazoned with a yellow smiley face: Thank you for your patronage.
Bird waits while she disappears upstairs into her room, and when she comes back, she has donned a baggy sweatshirt, a folding straw hat with a wide brim. She looks just like the trash-picking women who roam the streets, looking for bottles and cans to salvage.
Stay here, Margaret says. She hesitates, then says: You’ll be fine and I won’t be long.
She says it firmly, trying to convince herself more than him.
Stay inside, she adds, and keep quiet. She loops the bag of bottle caps around her wrist, then lifts a trash bag from the corner. Inside, cans and soda bottles clink as it settles over her shoulder. There’s a sour smell in the air and he can’t tell if it’s the bag, or her clothes, or her.
I’ll be back soon, she says, and heads into the hall.
* * *
? ? ?
After his mother has gone, Bird lifts one of the still-empty caps and twists it between his fingers, his thumbnail tick-ticking along the ridged sides. His mind tick-ticking over what he’s just heard.
It’s difficult to imagine, the world his mother has described. The world of the Crisis, and the world before that. In school, when they’ve studied the Crisis, it has always seemed like a story in a book: something made up to impart a lesson. A cautionary tale. It is different, to hear his mother tell it. To hear how it felt and sounded and smelled, to imagine her in the midst of it. To see the scars etched in her hands from those jagged days.
The mother he remembers coaxed frilly green leaves from the earth and bright globes of vegetables from their vines. She let bees land on her fingers, spread butter on his toast, spun shimmering fairy tales in the darkness. This mother is a different creature entirely, lean and wiry, almost feral, a ravenous look in her eyes. Her hair uncombed and greasy, a harsh animal musk on her skin. It makes it easier to believe the things she’s telling him: the Crisis, her wildness. How she survived. It fills him with apprehension, too, at what she might be doing now. He thinks of his mother, bent over the table, whispering stories to him, the point of the cut wire glinting in her hand. Her mouth set firm and tense in a straight grim line. He thinks of the bottle caps: little time bombs, ready to be detonated at a moment’s notice. Candy-colored bits of shrapnel to perforate the city. She wouldn’t do that, he thinks, but the truth is, he’s not sure. He’s seen the look in his mother’s eyes, a hardness he does not remember from childhood, a razor-edged glint that would slice you if you looked too long.