Our Missing Hearts (6)
But Bird had already read the words at the top: all our missing hearts.
A phrase he’d never heard before but that sprang up elsewhere in the months, then years, after his mother had gone. Graffitied in the bike tunnel, on the wall of the basketball court, on the plywood around a long-stalled construction site. don’t forget our missing hearts. Scrawled across the neighborhood-watch posters with a fat-bladed brush: where are our missing hearts? And on pamphlets, appearing overnight one memorable morning: pinned under the wipers of parked cars, scattered on the sidewalk, caught against the concrete feet of lampposts. Palm-sized, xeroxed handbills reading simply this: all our missing hearts.
The next day, the graffiti was painted over, the posters replaced, the pamphlets swept away like dead leaves. Everything so clean he might have imagined it all.
It didn’t mean anything to him then.
It’s an anti-PACT slogan, his father said curtly, when Bird asked. From people who want to overturn PACT. Crazy people, he’d added. Real lunatics.
You’d have to be a lunatic, Bird had agreed, to overturn PACT. PACT had helped end the Crisis; PACT kept things peaceful and safe. Even kindergarteners knew that. PACT was common sense, really: If you acted unpatriotic, there would be consequences. If you didn’t, then what were you worried about? And if you saw or heard of something unpatriotic, it was your duty to let the authorities know. He has never known a world without PACT; it is as axiomatic as gravity, or Thou shalt not kill. He didn’t understand why anyone would oppose it, what any of this had to do with hearts, how a heart could be missing. How could you survive without your heart beating inside you?
It made no sense until he met Sadie. Who’d been removed from her home and replaced, because her parents had protested PACT.
Didn’t you know? she’d said. What the consequences were? Bird. Come on.
She tapped the worksheet they’d been given as homework: The Three Pillars of PACT. Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society. And there, beneath Sadie’s finger: Protects children from environments espousing harmful views.
Even then, he hadn’t wanted to believe it. Maybe there were a few PACT removals, but they couldn’t happen much—or why did no one talk about it? Sure, every now and then, you heard of a case like Sadie, but surely those were exceptions. If it happened, you really must have done something dangerous, your kid needed to be protected—from you, and whatever you were doing or saying. What’s next, some people said, you think molesters and child-beaters deserve to keep their kids, too?
He’d said this to Sadie, without thinking, and she went silent. Then she wadded up her sandwich in a ball of tuna and mayonnaise and smashed it into his face. By the time he wiped his eyes clear, she was gone, and all afternoon, the stink of fish clung to his hair and skin.
A few days later Sadie had pulled something from her backpack.
Look, she’d said. The first words she’d spoken to him since. Bird, look what I found.
A newspaper, corners tattered, ink smudged to gray. Almost two years old already. And there, just below the fold, a headline: local poet tied to insurrections. His mother’s photo, a dimple hovering at the edge of her smile. Around him, the world went hazy and gray.
Where did you get this, he asked, and Sadie shrugged.
At the library.
It’s become the rallying cry at anti-PACT riots across the nation, but its roots are here—terrifyingly close to home. The phrase increasingly being used to attack the widely supported national security law is the brainchild of local woman Margaret Miu, pulled from her book of poems Our Missing Hearts. Miu, who is the child of Chinese immigrants and has a young son—
The words wobbled out of focus then.
You know what this means, Bird, Sadie said. She raised herself onto her toes, the way she always did when excited. Your mom—
He did know, then. Why she’d left them. Why they never spoke about her.
She’s one of them, Sadie said. She’s out there somewhere. Organizing protests. Fighting PACT. Working to overturn it and bring kids home. Just like my parents.
Her eyes darkened and took on a far-off gleam. As if she were gazing right through Bird to something revelatory just beyond.
Maybe they’re together, out there, she said.
Bird had thought it was just one of Sadie’s wishful fantasies. His mother, the ringleader of all this? Improbable, if not impossible. Yet there were her words, emblazoned on all those signs and banners to overthrow PACT, all over the country.
What the news calls people who protest PACT: Seditious subversives. Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society. Words he’d had to look up in his father’s dictionary, back then, alongside excise and eradicate.
Every time they spotted his mother’s words—in news reports, on someone’s phone—Sadie elbowed Bird as if they’d sighted a celebrity. Evidence of his mother, out there, elsewhere, so worried about somebody else’s children though she’d left her own behind. The irony of it leached into his veins.
Now it is no longer elsewhere. Here are his mother’s words, streaked across his street in blood-red. Her letter upstairs, in his pillow. The same splash of red heart from the Brooklyn Bridge, there on the pavement at his feet. He glances over his shoulder, scanning the dark corners of the courtyard, not sure if the coldness in his throat is hope or dread, if he wants to run into her arms or drag her from her hiding place into the light. But there is no one there, and his father tugs his arm, and he follows his father inside and up the stairs.