Our Missing Hearts (66)
Now and then she tried again, each postcard gaining another cat, or two, or five, smaller and smaller, until the entire card was full, the cabinet shrunk to the size of a stamp, then the size of a penny, then the size of a fingernail. There was never any reply. On Bird’s twelfth birthday, she took a risk, hunted down one of the few remaining pay phones, and dialed their old number. Disconnected. By this time Bird had lived a quarter of his life without her; perhaps he didn’t even remember she existed. Perhaps it was better that way.
It was then that she decided on a date: October 23. Three years to the day since she’d gone away. She would do it then. In September she sent a note to Domi. It’s time, she said. Can you find me a place to stay. Domi, of course, had offered her house, but Margaret had refused.
Somewhere faraway, she said, somewhere no one will look. Somewhere I won’t take you down, if I’m caught.
A week later she’d arrived in New York, made her way to Brooklyn and the darkened brownstone. The next day she went out into the city, cap pulled low over her face, in search of bottle caps.
* * *
? ? ?
I have someone, the librarian said.
Astoria: a small branch library. Margaret had been in New York for two weeks already, camped out in the darkened brownstone, making final preparations, filling her bottle caps. Two weeks left to go. She should stop collecting stories; already she had more than she could use. But she did not want to stop. What she wanted was to find every one of them, though she knew this was impossible, because there would always be more.
The librarian lowered her voice, even though there was no one else in the room, no one else in the building, nothing around them but half-empty shelves. Not a family, she went on. A child.
Margaret sat up straighter. In all these years she hadn’t spoken to a single re-placed child. They were well concealed: new cities, new families, new names. All that was left was the trail of grief in their absence, the snagged holes they’d left behind. The few they’d tracked down were inaccessible, fortressed in their new homes and new lives. Those who were taken young enough sometimes didn’t remember their old lives, their old families, at all.
She wandered into the main branch a couple months ago, the librarian said. A runaway. From Baltimore, originally. Bold little thing, she added, half chuckling. Marched in there like a policeman. Said: I need you to help me find my parents. Hands on her hips, like she was giving them a dressing-down. Said she ran away from a foster family in Cambridge, up near Harvard.
A tingle cinched the back of Margaret’s neck. Cambridge, she said. How old is she?
Thirteen. We’re trying to find out more. They moved her around a lot at first, and no one’s at the address she remembers anymore.
Can I talk to her? Margaret said, pulse thumping. Where is she?
The librarian studied her warily. The moment Margaret knew so well: when they decided if she could be trusted, and if so, how far. How much rope she was to be given, how far the door was to be pushed ajar.
The scale tipped.
She’s at one of the branches, the librarian said. I can get you the address. We’ve been moving her around, trying to find a long-term place for her.
And there she was: a girl, cross-legged on a makeshift pallet. Big brown eyes like two blazing stars.
Margaret, she repeated, when Margaret introduced herself, are you Margaret Miu?
And in the stunned silence that followed, Sadie smiled.
I know your poems, she said. And then: I know Bird, too.
* * *
? ? ?
The government had commissioned a study: Children under the age of twelve, once removed from their parents, could not be expected to find their way back home unassisted. Those above twelve were usually sent to a state-run center; younger children could be placed in foster care. Sadie had been eleven when they’d taken her.
They’d moved her from place to place in quick succession—first West Virginia, then Erie, then Boston—farther and farther, as if trying to pull her from orbit. From her first foster home, she called her old number: disconnected. She wrote letter after letter, zip code neatly printed in ink, plastered with stamps stolen from the second. No response, but she’d remained hopeful: maybe when she’d been transferred she’d missed it; maybe behind her, letters from her parents were trailing like the tail of a kite, always a step too late. Then, at her third foster home in Cambridge, a letter came back: unknown.
Come with me, she’d said to Bird, but in the end she’d gone alone.
Two buses and a train ride back to Baltimore, with money filched from her foster father’s wallet, the address still etched in her memory even though her mother’s face had begun to blur. Everything dreamily familiar: the neighbor’s tulips, pink against the green lawn. The ambient buzz of a mower on the summer air. The same picture she’d clung to so staunchly for the last two years.
But when she ran up the steps, the door was locked. The woman who answered was a white woman, a stranger. A kind face, mousy hair pulled back in a bun. Honey, no one like that lives here, she said.
She’d moved in six months ago. No, she didn’t know who lived here before that. Did Sadie need help? Was there someone she could call?
Sadie ran.
She’d slipped onto the first train out of the station, burrowed into a corner seat, awoke in the bustle of Penn Station. Overwhelmed and alone. She struggled out of the low, rat-colored hallways of the terminal, past the one-footed pigeons scrabbling for crumbs, past the homeless men with cardboard signs and jingling cups, past the scum of litter on the curb. Above her rose a canopy of scaffolding, net nearly obscuring the rebuilding the nyc you ? stenciled across it. Above that, needles of glass and concrete jabbed at the clouds.