Margaret, reading the news on her phone, a milk-stoned Bird dozing at her breast, thought: awful. And: How could those people endanger their child. She tried to imagine carrying Bird into the crush of a mob, flash bombs bursting at their feet, the bite of tear gas setting her nostrils aflame. Her mind slammed its door on the thought. There he was, safe here in her arms: her Bird. Long lashes resting on cheeks softer than anything she’d ever touched. A small furrow rumpling his eyebrows. What troubling dreams could a baby already have? She smoothed the creases with the pad of her thumb until his face went calm again. Beside her, Ethan’s hand squeezed her shoulder, then cupped Bird’s head. She would never do such a thing, she promised Bird silently. None of this would ever apply to them.
The next march protesting anti-Chinese hate, in Queens, was sparsely attended; after that, there was a long stretch with none.
* * *
? ? ?
What she thought was about her poems, her garden, her husband. Bird. She pushed seeds into the soil and watered them until threads of green shoots emerged. She set cutoff milk jugs over seedlings to shield them from the night chill. She knit a blanket for Bird from cream-colored wool. Late at night, she made love to Ethan. In the morning, content, she baked banana scones, licked honey from the spoon.
Ethan’s parents came to visit when they could: for Bird’s birthday, for Halloween bearing candy he could not yet chew, for Christmas laden with gifts heavier than their small recipient. His mother shared feeding tips with Margaret; one afternoon, when Margaret dozed on the sofa, exhausted, with a tantrum-drained Bird on her chest, Ethan’s father spread a blanket over them and then clicked off the light. Margaret and Ethan had said only that her parents had passed, and it warmed both of them to see the eagerness and openness with which Ethan’s parents enfolded Margaret into their lives.
He looks just like her, Ethan’s parents kept saying, and they’d thought this was a compliment at first—and maybe it was, though later both would wonder if it was also a twitch of discomfort, someone else’s face so clearly stamped on a child they felt should have been theirs. Privately, Margaret and Ethan thought Bird simply looked like Bird. Looking down on him late at night, they could pick out small features and trace them to their source—Margaret’s cheekbones, Ethan’s eyelashes—but where they saw resemblance was in the expressions: the two parallel wrinkles that appeared on Bird’s forehead when he was thinking, the dimple in his cheek, like a fingerprint, when he laughed. That was Ethan’s wrinkle on Margaret’s brow, Margaret’s dimple just southeast of Ethan’s mouth. It was a strange and unsettling experience, watching expressions that they knew flit over the face of this small person, part them and part the person they loved most, and they sensed that this would be only the first of many strange and unsettling experiences that parenthood would bring.
Margaret wrote more poems. Publishers were printing again, and when Bird was three, a small, plucky press agreed to publish her book. A split pomegranate on the cover, so close up it resembled an organ, or a wound: you had to look twice to see it for what it was. Our Missing Hearts was praised by a few poetry critics and read by almost no one. Tens of copies sold, she’d said to Ethan drily, who reads poetry anymore? and he’d joked, Who ever read it before?
It didn’t matter. The world was full of poems to her then.
She taught Bird to catch fireflies: hands cupped, lemon-lime light flashing in the cracks of his fingers. And then to let them go, spiraling into the night like a dying spark. She taught him to lie still in the grass and watch the neighborhood rabbits nose in the clover, so close his breath stirred the fine white fluff of their tails. She taught him the names of flowers and bugs and birds, to identify the low coo-coo-coo of the mourning dove and the brash scream of the blue jay and the singsong phoebe of the chickadee, clear and fresh as cold water on a summer day. She taught him to pluck honeysuckle blossoms from the vine and touch the end to his tongue: such sticky sweetness. She pulled the shell of a cicada from a pine tree’s trunk, turned it over to show the neat slit down the belly where, having grown, it had wriggled out of its old self into something new.
And she told him stories. Stories about warriors and princesses, poor brave girls and boys, monsters and magicians. The brother and sister who outwitted the witch and found their way home. The girl who saved her swan-brothers from enchantment. Ancient myths that made sense of the world: why sunflowers nod, why echoes linger, why spiders spin. Stories her mother had told her in childhood, before she stopped speaking of such things: how once there had been nine suns, baking the earth to dust, until a brave archer shot them one by one out of the sky. How the monkey king tricked his way into the heavenly garden to steal the peaches of immortality. How once a year, two lovers, forever separated, crossed a river of stars to meet in midair.