Our Missing Hearts (83)

He was still thinking this over as he walked home in the darkness. Whatever the meaning, it was not in the words themselves but somewhere else, and it was then that Domi had stepped out of her car and called his name.



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In the small hours, they drove back toward Connecticut, the traffic evaporated, everyone home with blinds drawn. In some places the streetlights were already winking out, but in Domi’s car, they sped along the highway, frictionless. For long stretches theirs was the only car in sight, and they glided through the darkness in the small bubble of light cast by their headlights. As if there were nothing and no one else left in the world. For a long while Ethan didn’t speak at all, and Domi, as if to fill the silence, chattered away. She had told him the most urgent things already, of course: what had happened to Bird, about the townhouse, the plan. Where they were headed. With these most pressing things covered, though, she found herself coming back to the smallest of details. How Margaret had looked when they’d first seen each other again. I could tell, Domi said, I could tell she’d been happy with you. In the life she’d had. Because she was so sad to lose it. You could see it in her eyes.

She described it all for Ethan, as best she could: Margaret’s notebooks, her journeys from one family to the next, until he could almost see it, her tracks like fine lines of stitching crisscrossing the map, trying to suture something torn asunder.

You should’ve heard it, Domi said, you should’ve seen it, her voice just—

She waved a hand in the air, and the car wavered over the yellow line and back again.

Just coming out of the air. Everywhere. And people standing there, listening. I looked out the window and I saw them, just standing. Like statues. It was like she’d turned everyone to stone.

Except, she thought—and this she could not bring herself to say aloud, would never manage to utter—except that some of those stone people were crying. She held on to this fact, even when the authorities came and searched out the speakers and smashed them under boot heels, even when they ordered the crowds to disperse, even when there was nothing left to see from the window but an empty sidewalk and a few strands of wire and plastic shards on the concrete. Those vanished people had wiped their tears and retreated back into their lives, but those tears had been there all the same, even for a moment, and she told herself that this meant something, that this mattered.

He’s a good kid, she said instead. Bird. He’s a sweet boy.

After a pause, she added, He looks so much like her. Like both of you.

He does, Ethan said, and then they both fell silent again, and outside the road scrolled by, luminous in the reflected shine of their headlights.



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It was like Pompeii, one person would say later. Everyone just frozen exactly where they were. You just stood there and let it wash over you. Destroying and preserving you all at once.

Another would carry that moment through her life, and years later, in the Natural History Museum with her daughter, she would glance at the dioramas, the animals so lifelike you could imagine they’d only paused, like burglars caught in a searchlight, that as soon as you turned your back, they would reanimate and scamper off on their way. She would look at that diorama—a lion crouched beside a herd of grazing antelope, the painted savannah air wavering behind them in a honeyed sheen, jackals prowling in the shadows, all of them, predator and prey, transfixed by some invisible force—and she would suddenly remember that evening, as the light dimmed, the voice speaking to all of them, that feeling of being surrounded by strangers who were somehow experiencing the same thing. She would remember the man on the park bench opposite—grizzled and hard, wearing fatigues that didn’t fit, slashes of gray sock in the gaps between shoe top and sole—the way his eyes and hers had met, the unspoken affirmation that had passed between them: Yes, I hear it, too. She would never see that man again, but standing there in the museum she would remember him, remember that feeling that somehow he was important to her, that they were connected and they’d found each other, that feeling of being conjoined by this surreal moment in time, and she would be frozen again, captivated, staring past the lion and antelope and into the past until her daughter tugged at her hand and asked why she was crying.



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I just don’t understand, Domi keeps saying. Scrubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand, yesterday’s eyeliner smudged to angry dark rings. Sadie’s head cradled against her shoulder. Why she cut it so close. We talked about it. She promised. I thought she meant it.

You know Margaret, Ethan says. Now and then, she got carried away. A wild thing.

He and Domi share a pained laugh, everything they found exasperating about her become precious.

They are speaking about her in the past tense, Bird thinks, and he almost smiles at how childish and shortsighted this is. They are so certain that she is gone, but he’s not. I promise I’ll come back, she had said, but he realizes now: she hadn’t said when. Only that she would. And he believes this, still. She will come back. Someday, somehow. In some form. He’ll find her, if he looks hard enough. Strange things happened. She might be there, somewhere, in some other form, the way it happened in stories: disguised as a bird, a flower, a tree. If they look closely enough, they’ll find her. And as he thinks this, he thinks he might see her: in the birch tree showering its leaves ever so gently down upon them, in the hawk that sails into the sky, releasing its piercing and melancholy and beautiful cry. In the sun that has begun to needle its way through the trees, tinting everything with a faint golden glow.