Our Missing Hearts (71)

We’ll find another way to help, she says. Something else. I don’t know what. But something less risky.

Her mind is full of hazy, incoherent plans.

We’ll figure something out, she says. Some way to stay together, somewhere to hide. Maybe Daddy can find a way to join us. Domi could help. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Bird.

She is babbling now; she can hear it. She grabs at his hands with both of hers, as if he is sinking, or she is, and this might keep them afloat. They are still jammed together in the hallway, the tiny space thick and hot with their breath, still speaking in whispers, but it feels to both of them as if they’re shouting. All she wants is to not let him go.

None of this matters anymore, she says.

But even as she says it, she can see his face hardening, small embers in his gaze. How, she reads in his eyes, can you look away now that you know?

So it doesn’t matter, he says, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

And she knows: it is too late to convince him, because she has already told him the truth.

Bird, she says, but the sheer disappointment on his face crumbles her voice into sand.

You’re a hypocrite, he says.

He hesitates for only an instant, then plunges ahead anyway.

You’re a terrible mother.

Margaret flinches, but Bird seems to feel it, too, recoiling as if she’s struck him. In his face she sees a mirror of what must be happening on her own: nostrils tense and trembling, eye rims suddenly hot and red. With a sudden jerk, he pushes her away. Then he is running up the stairs, and she doesn’t follow. She feels as wrung out and emptied as if she has vomited and vomited until nothing is left inside.



* * *



? ? ?

In the dark, Bird falls into a stormy sleep.

He dreams a sharp and jagged tangle. Machines broken and rusted, gears inextricably meshed. Bottles of ink shattering in his hands, dying his fingers a watery blue. Someone has given him a building to hold up, and if he walks away it will collapse. He has caught a snake in a pillowcase, and he stands, bearing the writhing sack, nowhere safe to release it. In the last dream, just before he wakes, he is surrounded by other children, crammed so close he can feel their warmth, hear their breath, smell the sweat on their skin. But none of them speak to him or even look at him. Each time he reaches out they drift away soundlessly, a silent sea parting. Their eyes turning everywhere he is not: down at their dirty palms, over their shoulders, up at the clear and cloudless sky.

He wakes in a panic, burrows into the sleeping bag, tugs it up to his chin. Now he remembers: the bottle caps, the police cruiser, the argument. Everything his mother had told him over the past two days, all the reasons she’d had to leave, and how quickly she’d thrown all that aside. He thinks about the years without her, he and his father all alone, missing her. Once he’d have traded anything, everyone, to have her back.

He can’t see anything, not even a crack of light from the hall. He listens for his mother, but hears nothing. Even the noises from outside—though there must be some—are muffled and muted to nothing more than whispers and faint hums. Somewhere she must be here, but he doesn’t remember the way to her room, and in the unrelenting dark he isn’t even sure he can find his way out. It is as if no one is there at all.

The wail of a siren slices through the window plastic: rising, here, gone. The only sign of life in the world. With a finger he drills into the corner of the plastic, stretching it, until a pinprick hole spreads. He bends down, puts his eye to it.

Outside he expects only more blackness, but instead what he sees is a dizzying array of light. Lights glimmer from window after window in a glittering mosaic. A sea of lights. A tidal wave of lights. Washing down over him in sparkling droplets. Each of those lights is a person, washing dishes or working or reading, completely oblivious to his existence. The thought of so many people dazzles and terrifies him. All those people out there, millions of them, billions, and not one of them knows or cares about him. He claps his hand over the hole, but still he can feel the lights sizzling against his skin like a sunburn. Even curling up inside the sleeping bag, the covers pulled over his head, brings no relief.

Out of him pours a cry so long buried the sound of it is like an earthquake in his throat. A name he hasn’t uttered in years.

Mama, he cries, stumbling out of bed, and the darkness reaches up and tangles around his ankles, tugging him to the ground.

When he opens his eyes again he is curled up tight in a ball and a hand rests warm and heavy on the tender V between his shoulder blades. His mother.

Shh, she says, as he tries to turn over. It’s all right.

She is sitting on the floor beside him. A less-dark shape against the dark.

You know, I felt the same way, she says, the first night I spent on my own.

Her palm warm and soft on the nape of his neck. Smoothing the hairs that bristle there.

Why did you bring me here, he says at last.

I wanted—she begins, and stops.

How to finish? I wanted to make sure you were all right. I wanted to make sure you would be all right. I wanted to see who you were. I wanted to see who you had become. I wanted to see if you were still you. I wanted to see you.

I wanted you, she says simply, and this is the only explanation she can give, but it is what he needs to hear. She had wanted him. She still wanted him. She hadn’t left because she hadn’t cared.