Our Missing Hearts (7)

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? ? ?

Back in the dorm, sweaty and tired from their climb, his father peels off his coat and hangs it on its peg. Bird settles down to finish his homework, but his mind buzzes, unruly. He glances at the window toward the courtyard below, but all he can see is their own shabby apartment reflected in the glass. In front of him, his half-finished essay trails into blank white space.

Dad, he says.

Across the room, his father looks up from his book. He is reading a dictionary, leafing idly from page to page: an old habit Bird finds both peculiar and endearing. Long ago his parents would spend evenings like this, on the couch with their books, and sometimes Bird would drape himself over his father’s shoulder, then his mother’s, sounding out the longest words he could find. These days, the dictionaries are the only books in the apartment, the only books they’d kept when they moved. From his father’s eyes Bird can see he was centuries away, wandering the zigzagging past of some archaic word. He regrets having to call him back from that peaceful golden place. But he has to know.

You haven’t—he clears his throat—you haven’t heard from her, have you?

For a moment his father’s face goes very still. Though Bird hasn’t spoken her name, he doesn’t need to: both of them know who he means. There is only one her, for them. Then his father shuts the dictionary with a thump.

Of course not, he says, and comes to stand at Bird’s elbow. Looming over him. He sets a hand on Bird’s shoulder.

She is not a part of your life anymore. As far as we’re concerned, she doesn’t exist. Do you understand, Noah? Tell me you understand.

Bird knows exactly what he should say—Of course, I understand—but the words clog in his throat. But she is, he wants to say. She does, I don’t, she has something to say, she has something to tell me, this is a loose end that needs to be tied off—or unraveled. In this moment of hesitation his father glances over Bird’s shoulder at the unfinished essay on the table.

Let me see, he says.

His father hasn’t been a professor for years but he can’t stop himself from trying to teach. His brain is like a big dog penned in his skull, restless and pacing, aching for a run. Already he’s leaning over Bird’s homework, tugging the paper from the crook of Bird’s arm.

I’m not done yet, Bird protests, and bites the eraser end of his pencil. Graphite and rubber flake onto his tongue. His father shakes his head.

This needs to be much clearer, he says. Look—here, where you say PACT is very important for national security. You need to be much more specific, much more forceful: PACT is a crucial part of keeping America safe from being undermined by foreign influences.

With one finger he traces a line, smudging Bird’s cursive.

Or here. You need to show your teacher you really get this—there should be absolutely no question you understand. PACT protects innocent children from being indoctrinated with false, subversive, un-American ideas by unfit and unpatriotic parents.

He taps the paper.

Go on, he says, jabbing at the loose-leaf. Write that down.

Bird stares back at his father with set jaw and angry, liquid eyes. They have never been like this before: two flinty stones striking off sparks.

Do it, his father says, and Bird does, and his father lets out a deep breath and retreats into the bedroom, dictionary in hand.



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? ? ?

After he’s finished his homework and brushed his teeth, Bird turns out the lights in the apartment and slips behind the curtains. From here he can see across the street to the dining hall, closed now, lit only by the faint red glow of the exit signs inside. As he watches, a truck pulls to the curb and flicks off its headlights. The shadowy figure of a man gets out, carries something to the center of the road, begins to work. It takes Bird a minute to understand what’s happening: the something is a bucket of paint and a large roller brush. He is painting over the heart, and by morning it will be gone.

Noah, his father says from the doorway. Time for bed.



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? ? ?

That night, while his father snores faintly beneath him, Bird worms a hand into his pillowcase, feeling for the faint edges of the envelope. Carefully he slips out the letter, flattens it out. He keeps a penlight in the top bunk so he can read while his father is sleeping, and he clicks it on.

In the watery light the cats are a tangle of angles and curves. A secret message? A code? Letters in their stripes, perhaps, in the points of their ears or the bends of their tails? He turns the letter this way and that, traces the ballpoint lines with the beam. On a tabby he thinks he spots an M; the arched leg of a black cat looks like an S, or maybe an N. But he can’t be certain.

He’s about to tuck the letter away when he sees it, the little circle of light bringing it into crisp focus like a magnifying glass. Down in the corner, where a page number would be: a rectangle, the size of his pinky fingernail. Inside it another rectangle, a bit smaller. The cats, of course, ignore it; unless you looked closely, you would miss it between them. But it catches Bird’s attention. What is it? A framed picture of nothing, perhaps. An old-fashioned television set, screen blank. A window with a flat plane of glass.

He studies it. A dot on one side, two tiny hinges on the other. A door. A door on a box, a cabinet shut up tight. A faint breeze flutters a page in the back corner of his brain, then settles again. A story his mother told him, long ago. She’d always been telling him stories—fairy tales, fables, legends, myths: a rainbow of different, beautiful lies. But now, seeing the picture, it’s familiar. Cats, and a cabinet, and a boy. He can’t quite remember it, but he knows it is there. How did it go?