* * *
? ? ?
She’d suggested they run away, last May.
We’ll go and we’ll find them, she said.
Sadie, he knew, had run away before, though they’d caught her every time. This time, she insisted, she would make it. She had just turned thirteen—basically an adult, she insisted.
Come with me, Bird, she’d said. I’m sure we can find them.
Them was her parents and his mother. Her certainty that they were still out there, findable and maybe even together, was unshakable. A comfortable, beautiful fairy tale.
They’ll catch you, he said.
No, they won’t, Sadie snapped. I’m going to—
But he’d cut her off. Don’t tell me, he said. I don’t want to know. In case they ask me where you’ve gone.
He’d watched her on the next swing, pumping and pumping her legs, hard, harder, until her feet cleared the top bar and the chain went slack and bucked beneath her. Then Sadie let out a whoop and catapulted herself free, leaping into the air, into nothing. When he’d been small, he’d loved leaping from the swings that way, swooping into his mother’s waiting arms. Sadie hadn’t even done anything, Bird thought, she didn’t deserve any of it, and he hated her parents for doing this to her. Why didn’t they stop, that first time, how could they have been so irresponsible? Sadie sat up and looked back at him from where she’d landed in a tumbled heap in the grass. She wasn’t hurt. She was laughing.
Jump, Bird, she cried, but he didn’t, just let the swing slow until the toes of his sneakers dragged in the gravel, leaving grubby gray scratches on the canvas.
* * *
? ? ?
He thinks about her now: Sadie, poised in midair, arms flung wide, slicing across the sky. After she’d disappeared, no one seemed to know where she’d gone; his classmates and even his teachers simply went on as if she’d never existed. As he stands there, he knows the photos from the Common are already beginning to appear online, the trees holding up little figures in their fingers, raising them to the light. A thousand little Sadies silhouetted against the blue.
The next morning, walking to school, he sees the real trees: stripped bare to rough bark again. As if nothing had ever been there at all. Yet there is the sharp bright gash running down each trunk like a scar; there are the broken spots where the web, roughly yanked, has dragged the branches away. There, in the mud, a single strand of red yarn left behind. Something happened here, and he is determined to find out what, and thinking of Sadie, suddenly he has an idea of where to begin.
After school he is supposed to come straight home. Stay in the apartment, his father says. And do your homework. But today he does not follow the path. He turns onto Broadway, follows it out toward the high school, where he’ll have to go in a few years, toward the big public library beside it, where he has never been.
From liber, his father has told him. Books. Which comes from the word meaning the inner bark of trees, which comes from the word for to strip, to peel. Early peoples pulled off the thin strips for writing material, of course.
A fall walk, once. His father’s hands had brushed the flaking birch bark, rising paper-white in curls from the slender trunk.
But I like to think of it as peeling back layers. Revealing layers of meaning.
In the science museum, long ago: a giant slice of tree trunk, taller than his father. Rings of caramel against cream-colored wood. They’d counted the rings, bark to core, then back out again. His father’s finger tracing the grain. This is when the tree was planted, when George Washington was a boy. This is the Civil War, World War I, World War II. This is when his father was born. This is when everything fell apart.
You see? his father said. They carry their histories inside them. Peel back enough layers and they explain everything.
It’s like a castle, Sadie had told him. She’d visited the library daily, a stolen five minutes on the way home from school. Half jogging to get there as fast as she could, sprinting to get home on time after lingering as long as she dared. Sadie, I think you need to start showering more often, her foster mother would say when she arrived home sweaty and rumpled. You’ll get caught, Bird warned, but Sadie was unmoved. Her parents had read to her every night and where stories were grit in Bird’s memories, in Sadie’s they were a rich balm. A castle, she insisted to Bird, her voice swollen with awe. He had rolled his eyes, but now he sees it is more or less true: the library is a huge sandstone building with arches and a turret, though a newer glass wing has been added on, all sharp angles and sparkling panes, and because of this, as he climbs the steps, he feels that he is somehow entering both the past and the future at once.