Is that all of them? Bird asks, when she’s placed the last one. In a rusted crevice in a lamppost, just outside the entrance to the park.
That’s everything, Margaret says shortly, and lets out a sigh—of satisfaction? Of sadness? It isn’t clear.
With the last bottle cap planted, she abandons the trash bag she’s carried as camouflage all these weeks, adding it to a nearby heap. It is garbage day in this neighborhood and everywhere lopsided piles dot the curb, threatening to tip. Here and there, something has gnawed through the plastic, spilling a plume of trash across the sidewalk. She wipes her hands on the thighs of her pants, looks at him. Her Bird: wide-eyed and impressionable, trusting, eager for the future though he has no idea what it will hold. Half grown, but only half.
What can she teach him, what can she do for him, what can she give him to make up for what’s been lost? She wants to buy him pretzels and ice cream and lemonade from a cart, to let him dance through the park, licking the salt and drips from his fingers. To watch him play silly games, rules changing as he goes: leapfrogging broken squares on the sidewalk, jumping high to slap stop signs as they pass. No: she wants to play those games with him. She wants to be just his mother for one day. As if she can correct all these years without her, with one golden afternoon.
A police car approaches slowly, on the prowl. The silhouettes of the officers inside: foggy blurs through the tinted glass.
In an instant Margaret catches Bird by the elbow, yanking him behind a nearby stoop. Crouched behind a pyramid of garbage bags, her arms cinch him tight, so close they can feel each other’s hearts beating.
The car glides closer, suspicious. Scans the area. Then moves on.
Something thick and bitter coats the roof of Margaret’s mouth. In her grip, Bird’s shoulders are still a boy’s: unmuscled and bony, terrifyingly breakable. She can’t give him the beautiful afternoon he deserves, not yet. It isn’t fair, she thinks. The reek of the garbage rises around them in a fug, curdled and clinging. The police car is long gone, but still she cradles him, eyes shut, face pressed into the impossible warmth of his hair. When she finally loosens her arms and looks down at him, his gaze is startled, but trusting. Searching her face for a cue.
It’s okay, she whispers. Don’t be scared.
I’m not scared, he says. I knew we’d be okay.
With a shaky smile Margaret gives him a final squeeze, rises to her feet.
Let’s get home, she says.
They ride the subway back to Brooklyn, Bird at one end of the car, Margaret at the other, so no one will suspect they’re together. From afar she studies him: a small fidgety dark-haired figure, crossing one leg over the other, picking at the tape-mended tears in the seat. Behind his sunglasses she can’t quite see his eyes, but when she looks closely she spots his furtive glances in her direction, the nearly imperceptible relaxing of his shoulders each time he finds her, leaning against a pole, keeping surreptitious watch from afar. This is the past three years, she thinks, condensed into an instant: orbiting at a distance, guessing but never sure what he is seeing, hoping that the idea of her is reassuring. No, she corrects herself. Not the past three years. This is simply having a child.
Planting the bottle caps, returning home—usually this is a well-rehearsed dance she can do without flinching. But today is different. Today she cannot stay still; every time the train stops, she jumps, warily scanning the other passengers as they doze or idly scroll on their phones. Her gaze darts again and again to the boy at the end of the car, now settled calmly, breaking from his daydream only to catch her eye once and give her the faintest conspiratorial smile. She tries and fails to smile back. Another train rushes by, headed elsewhere, and in the blurred shapes through the window she remembers the shadows of the officers in their cruiser, Bird’s face against her shoulder, Bird’s body thin and warm and vulnerable even in the cage of her arms. She hates herself for putting him there. When she holds her breath she can still smell the garbage, sour and suffocating all around. The train pulses beneath them, palpitating, the thumps of the wheels and roar of the engine and the sway of the car coalescing into a single word that throbs faster and faster inside her. By the time they reach the brownstone—walking a ways apart, slipping one at a time through the gate into the back garden—it churns in the base of her throat, and the moment they are safely back inside, it erupts out of her, leaving her breathless.
No, she says. No. I’m not doing it.
Bird turns back to look at her, frozen with her back against the door, as if barring the way out. For a moment she looks older, drawn; in the darkened hallway, lit only by the single bare bulb in the living room, her hair silvers, her face turns gray. A woman turned to stone.