Our Missing Hearts (57)

I am so very sorry, she said finally, and turned to go.

What did you come here for, Marie’s father asked. He folded the newspaper in half, not angrily, but calmly. As if he had read enough news to last a lifetime, as if this were the last newspaper he would ever read again. He looked at her directly, without flinching: he was past fear, now. You think we have anything to say to you? he said. Our baby’s dead and you come here, looking for what. Wanting us to feel sorry for what you went through?

His voice was quiet, the kind of voice you’d use to talk in the library, and somehow this froze Margaret more than if he was shouting.

You think you know her? he went on. They all think they know her. Everybody thinks they know her, now. You got people wearing my little girl’s face on their chests, who don’t care about her or who she was. Just using her name to justify doing what they want. She’s nothing but a slogan to them. They don’t know the first thing about her. You don’t know the first thing about her either.

Around them, the ever-present noises of the suburbs—cars ambling by as if they had nowhere urgent to be, a sky-bound crow’s squawk, the inevitable dog bark from some indeterminable distance. Continuing on, as if nothing were amiss.

What is there to say, he finished.

He turned and retreated into the dark interior of the house.

For a moment, Margaret and Marie’s mother stood there on opposite sides of the doorway: Margaret frozen on the front step, the breeze chilly on the back of her neck, where sweat dampened her hair. Marie’s mother with one hand braced against the jamb, as if she were keeping the house from collapse. Eyes half squinted against the sun, her back cast in shadow. Studying Margaret. Margaret wondered what she saw. She thought, belatedly, of the Asian and Black worlds, orbiting each other warily, frozen at a distance in a precarious push-pull. In her childhood: a young Black girl shot, Los Angeles on fire, Korean stores aflame. Her parents had fumed, reading the news, indignant at the damage, the delinquency. And then, years later, a young Black man dead in a stairwell, a Chinese American cop’s finger on the trigger. There’d been outcry on all sides—an accident, police brutality, scapegoating—until the circles separated again into an uneasy truce. More than once, her mother had been shoved on the street by a Black teen, taunting her with ching-chong chants. Yet also: soon after she’d moved to New York, she’d been in Chinatown picking fruit from a cart when a Black man drove by in an SUV, rap blasting from the rolled-down windows so loud the pear in her hand shivered, and the shop owner, a wiry older Chinese man, gritted his teeth. Those thugs, he said, as if it were something they already agreed on, and spat, and she’d been so stunned that—to her shame—she’d simply nodded, paid, and darted away without a word. It weights her, this history, heavy as the pack on her back.

I’m sorry, Margaret said, again. I should go.

You have children? Marie’s mother asked suddenly.

One, Margaret said. I had a son. The past tense, unintended, shocks her. How easily her mind has accepted what her heart cannot. Have, she corrects herself. I have a son. But I won’t ever see him again.

A long pause between them, stretching and swelling until it wrapped around both of them, thick and plush. Then, to Margaret’s surprise, Marie’s mother reached out, touched Margaret’s wrist.

Welcome to the worst club in the world, she said.



* * *



? ? ?

The Johnsons’ house was cozy and tidy but everywhere there were signs of their daughter. Mr. Johnson, lips clamped shut, shook his head at his wife and disappeared up the stairs, but Mrs. Johnson led Margaret into the living room. On the mantel, a framed photograph of Marie in cap and gown, paper scroll in the crook of her arm like a sheaf of flowers. High school graduation, Mrs. Johnson said. Salutatorian. In the corner, a music stand, a flute case, sheet music covered in flurries of impossibly high notes.

She did marching band. But what she really loved was the classical stuff.

Her hand brushed the leatherette, wiping a fleck of dust from the latch.

I wanted her to keep it up in college. But she said she wouldn’t have time. She had so many plans.

Margaret still had not taken off her backpack; she was not sure if she was invited to stay. In this crowded living room she felt like a large and lumbering animal, every movement threatening to knock some part of the past to the floor. She held her breath, as if that might make her smaller and stiller, as if that might help anything.

Mrs. Johnson took a small china elephant from the mantel, turning it over. After a moment she found what she was looking for, held it up so Margaret could see: a thin seam of glue circling the uplifted trunk.

You see this? she said. My friend went on vacation, to India, and brought me back this. Marie was maybe seven, or eight? She loved it. She’d play with it, put it in her pocket, carry it around. One day I came home from work and she’d broken off the trunk. Did I give her hell. I told her she had no respect for other people’s things, didn’t I tell her to be careful, why didn’t she listen to me. No, Mama, she said to me, I wanted to see what was inside. She did it on purpose. I told her she was on punishment for a month. The next day I found it like this.

She tipped her palm where the little elephant stood, letting the light catch its curves.

She’d patched it back together. You can barely see where the break was. Only if you know where to look.