The police seize her microphone. Her lips keep moving, but now there is no sound. As one officer pulls her arms back to cuff her, another approaches the camera, hand on holster, his mouth barking silent commands. The unseen cameraman sets his camera on the ground and the horizon tips sideways, a plumb line from sky to earth. As they are led away, the camera—still rolling—catches only their feet, retreating upward, off, then gone.
Bird has seen this video because Sadie kept a copy of it on her phone. Technically it is incriminating evidence—it shows her mother espousing, promoting, or endorsing unpatriotic activity in private or in public—but Sadie had managed to get a copy somehow and doggedly transferred it, over the years, from phone to phone. On the dumbed-down smartphone her foster parents have granted her—my leash, she says, sarcastically: so that they can always reach her, so that they can track her by GPS if need be—she hides it in a folder labeled Games. Sometimes Bird would find her crouched in the corner of the playground, or under the structure in the cubby where the younger kids played house. Over and over on the screen, her mother. Calm in the chaos around her. Slowly walking off into the sky.
It was the first time she’d been arrested, Sadie said, but it had only made her braver. After that she’d gone looking for other families whose children had been taken under PACT, trying to convince them to speak with her on-camera. Trying to trace where the children had been taken. Trying to film a PACT re-placement in action, pulling on her contacts in Family Services, in the mayor’s office, anyone with a lead on who might be next.
Soon after, Sadie’s mother got an email from her boss, Michelle: coffee, that weekend. Just a friendly chat. Unofficial. Off the record. Michelle stopped by, two takeout cups in hand, and they sipped them at the kitchen table. Out in the hallway Sadie lurked, unnoticed. She was eleven.
I’m worried, Erika, Michelle said over a flat white, about repercussions.
A reporter over at WMAR had recently been fined for saying that PACT encouraged discrimination against those of Asian descent; his story, the state insisted, drummed up sympathy for people who might be dangerous to public stability. The station had paid it, almost a quarter of their yearly budget. In Annapolis, another station had had its license revoked. By coincidence, surely, it also had run a number of segments critical of PACT.
I’m a journalist, Sadie’s mother had said. Reporting on these things is my job.
We’re a small station, Michelle said. The bottom line is, with budget cuts we’re basically at bare-bones operation as it is. And if our funders pulled out . . .
She stopped, and Sadie’s mother twisted the sleeve of her paper cup around and around.
Are they threatening to? she asked, and Michelle replied, Two already have. But it’s not just that. It’s the repercussions for you, Erika. For your family.
They’d known each other for years, these two women: one Black, one white. Barbecues and picnics together, holiday gatherings. Michelle had no children, had never married. This station is my baby, she always said. When Sadie was born, Michelle had knitted her a yellow sweater and booties to match; over the years she’d taken Sadie on outings to the zoo and the aquarium and Fort Henry. Auntie Shellie, Sadie called her.
I’m hearing things, Michelle said. Really scary things. It’s not just PAOs and protesters who need to worry about PACT, Erika. It might be best if we assigned you a different beat for a while. Something less political.
What beat would be less political, Sadie’s mother asked.
I just don’t want anything to happen to you, if you keep pushing this, Michelle said. Or to Lev. And most of all Sadie.
Sadie’s mother took a long, slow sip. The coffee had gone cold.
What makes you think, she said finally, that any of us will be safe if I don’t?
It was just a few weeks later that they’d come for Sadie.
* * *
? ? ?
They came at night: that’s what Sadie said. After dinnertime. She’d just taken a shower and was swathed in a towel when the doorbell rang. Her mother was combing Sadie’s hair, which was thick and curly and prone to tangles, and downstairs they heard her father, shouting. Then the voices of strangers—a man, two men. Sadie’s mother had lifted a section of hair in one hand and gently worked the comb through it, and this is what Sadie remembered most clearly: a stray drop of water trickling down the back of her neck, her mother’s steady hand as she coaxed out the knots.
She didn’t shake, Sadie said, her voice proud. Not one tiny bit.
Maybe she didn’t know what was happening, Bird said.