Margaret sat up straighter. In all these years she hadn’t spoken to a single re-placed child. They were well concealed: new cities, new families, new names. All that was left was the trail of grief in their absence, the snagged holes they’d left behind. The few they’d tracked down were inaccessible, fortressed in their new homes and new lives. Those who were taken young enough sometimes didn’t remember their old lives, their old families, at all.
She wandered into the main branch a couple months ago, the librarian said. A runaway. From Baltimore, originally. Bold little thing, she added, half chuckling. Marched in there like a policeman. Said: I need you to help me find my parents. Hands on her hips, like she was giving them a dressing-down. Said she ran away from a foster family in Cambridge, up near Harvard.
A tingle cinched the back of Margaret’s neck. Cambridge, she said. How old is she?
Thirteen. We’re trying to find out more. They moved her around a lot at first, and no one’s at the address she remembers anymore.
Can I talk to her? Margaret said, pulse thumping. Where is she?
The librarian studied her warily. The moment Margaret knew so well: when they decided if she could be trusted, and if so, how far. How much rope she was to be given, how far the door was to be pushed ajar.
The scale tipped.
She’s at one of the branches, the librarian said. I can get you the address. We’ve been moving her around, trying to find a long-term place for her.
And there she was: a girl, cross-legged on a makeshift pallet. Big brown eyes like two blazing stars.
Margaret, she repeated, when Margaret introduced herself, are you Margaret Miu?
And in the stunned silence that followed, Sadie smiled.
I know your poems, she said. And then: I know Bird, too.
* * *
? ? ?
The government had commissioned a study: Children under the age of twelve, once removed from their parents, could not be expected to find their way back home unassisted. Those above twelve were usually sent to a state-run center; younger children could be placed in foster care. Sadie had been eleven when they’d taken her.
They’d moved her from place to place in quick succession—first West Virginia, then Erie, then Boston—farther and farther, as if trying to pull her from orbit. From her first foster home, she called her old number: disconnected. She wrote letter after letter, zip code neatly printed in ink, plastered with stamps stolen from the second. No response, but she’d remained hopeful: maybe when she’d been transferred she’d missed it; maybe behind her, letters from her parents were trailing like the tail of a kite, always a step too late. Then, at her third foster home in Cambridge, a letter came back: unknown.
Come with me, she’d said to Bird, but in the end she’d gone alone.
Two buses and a train ride back to Baltimore, with money filched from her foster father’s wallet, the address still etched in her memory even though her mother’s face had begun to blur. Everything dreamily familiar: the neighbor’s tulips, pink against the green lawn. The ambient buzz of a mower on the summer air. The same picture she’d clung to so staunchly for the last two years.
But when she ran up the steps, the door was locked. The woman who answered was a white woman, a stranger. A kind face, mousy hair pulled back in a bun. Honey, no one like that lives here, she said.
She’d moved in six months ago. No, she didn’t know who lived here before that. Did Sadie need help? Was there someone she could call?
Sadie ran.
She’d slipped onto the first train out of the station, burrowed into a corner seat, awoke in the bustle of Penn Station. Overwhelmed and alone. She struggled out of the low, rat-colored hallways of the terminal, past the one-footed pigeons scrabbling for crumbs, past the homeless men with cardboard signs and jingling cups, past the scum of litter on the curb. Above her rose a canopy of scaffolding, net nearly obscuring the rebuilding the nyc you ? stenciled across it. Above that, needles of glass and concrete jabbed at the clouds.
And then, out of the gloom, she’d spotted the big gray arches, on the far side of a patch of green.
Back in Cambridge, she had loved the peace of the library. Loitering among the shelves, opening and closing the books still left standing there. Many were gone, she knew, but these were survivors; she took them down from the shelves and flipped through them, breathed them in. Imagined how many others had read and handled these books before her.
One day the librarian caught her. Sadie looked up, her nose to the page, to see the librarian at the end of the aisle, bemused. They’d seen each other often, of course—in and out, each day she came in—but they never spoke. Sadie had no library card, never asked for assistance, never caused any trouble. The librarian said nothing, and Sadie slammed the book shut and pushed it back onto the shelf and fled. But a few days later, when she’d dared creep into the library again, the librarian had waved her over to the desk. I’m Carina, she said, what’s your name?