One night, curled in her bedroll on the floor of a family’s kitchen, she awoke to a man’s hands on her. She’d startled, every muscle in her body iron-tense, coiled to fight. But no: it was the father, carefully spreading a cover over her. Mohamad, his name was. Earlier that evening, she’d sat beside him and his wife and eaten maqluba and listened to them tell the story of their son. I was a child when the Twin Towers fell, he had said toward the end. Someone spray-painted filthy things on our garage door. Someone broke our front window with a brick. My father hung a huge American flag on our house, for a while.
He’d paused, and his wife took his hand.
None of our neighbors did or said anything to help us, he said.
Now, the night had grown cold, and here he was tucking a blanket around her with such tenderness she might have been his lost child.
When he had gone, Margaret touched it with her hands and felt unimaginable softness, plush and warm, like the shaggy pelt of some luxurious beast, and she fell into a deep sleep. In the morning, she awoke to find it was just a blanket, of course—a large, soft, fluffy one, printed with the bold striped face of a tiger. For the next three nights she slept under the tiger skin, as she thought of it, and when she left that apartment she had embraced the couple and carried the warmth of that tiger blanket inside her like a benediction.
* * *
? ? ?
Miles and months passed. A year, then two. She marked the time by Bird’s age: now he was ten, now he was eleven, now eleven and a half. The list of things she knew she had missed grew and grew. Learning to swim, learning to dance; new interests and obsessions she could only begin to imagine. A birthday, then another. The days were a blur of buses and trains, of tired tramping across cities, and at night she dreamed of hovering high in in the clouds and seeing herself from above, a small speck crossing the landscape. A fly crawling over an endless map.
What kept her going was this: every few weeks, a news story caught her eye. She’d abandoned her phone when she left home, of course, but she heard snippets of radio as she passed a store, or scavenged newspapers discarded on the sidewalk. Over and over they came, her own words echoing back to her, not on signs or in marches this time but woven into strange happenings, things so odd—half protest, half art—that they caught people’s attention, forcing them to take note; things that unsettled them days and weeks later, knotting a tangle in the chest. Bursts punctuating the static of those endless days, pushing her onward.
In Nashville, statues appeared in the early morning mist, a hundred ghostly children cast from ice. all our missing hearts, read a sign chained around one’s neck. The police arrived with handcuffs at the ready, but whoever had placed them was gone. Just a prank, one officer radioed back to the station, it’s just ice, but— Around them, commuters paused, shaken for once out of their routines. Some snapped photos, but most simply stood mesmerized, even just for a moment, watching in silence as the small faces slowly, slowly dissolved and blurred. One of them reached out and touched what had once been the face of a little girl, melting a thumb-shaped indent in her cheek. The police shooed them away, cordoned off the area, set up a perimeter in case the perpetrators returned. It took most of the morning for the statues to melt, and for hours the officers on duty would glance up at the skyscrapers and see the silhouettes of people in the windows above, staring down at the fading blocks of ice, and later, at the dark damp patches where children had once stood.
In Des Moines one morning, the main street was painted red, block after block after block. From the news helicopters above, it looked like a stream of blood slicing straight through the city. Stenciled on the sidewalk where the source of the river would lie: bring back our missing hearts. Those who discovered it first found that the paint was still wet, and as they walked away they left trails of footprints that grew indistinct, then disappeared. That night, and in the days and weeks to come, people would find streaks of red on the soles of their shoes and the cuffs of their pants and the sleeves of their jackets and pause, thinking blood, their chests seizing, patting themselves for the hurt.
In Austin, outside the governor’s mansion: a giant concrete cube with a crack running down the center, a crowbar by its side. Etched into the cube, four chiseled letters: P A C T. Etched into the crowbar: our missing hearts. One by one, passersby picked up the bar and hefted it, but no one dared swing, and when the police arrived they’d confiscated it as a dangerous weapon. The cube they loaded onto a flatbed and hauled away.
The authorities made no official statements, hoping to avoid publicity, but these happenings were so bizarre, so eye-catching, that they attracted attention. In the days after each happened, photos of them splashed across social media, going viral each time; eyewitness accounts and videos circulated from those who’d been there and seen it. Newspapers who might have ignored a march or a protest sent photographers and reporters to the scene. Pranks, some authorities insisted, when pressed. Just meaningless pranks. Others took a harsher tone: Subversion. A threat to civil society. Des Moines had spent a hundred thousand dollars painting the streets black again.