Ten at first, now fifteen. Twenty-five.
She hadn’t known, at first, what to do with the stories she’d collected. The first wisp of an idea had formed when one of the mothers clasped her hand, her voice trembling. Tell everyone what happened to my girl. Tell it to the world. Shout it from the skies if you can. Later it had crystallized, on a sunny morning in LA, when she looked up and saw it: a cell-phone tower, disguised as an unconvincing tree. Swathed in green leaf-print canvas, right-angled arms held mannequin-stiff. The wrong kind of tree for the climate, an evergreen towering over the palms, head and shoulders higher than the real trees, emitting a faint hum. What kind of messages was it beaming through the air? For a moment she’d closed her eyes and imagined it: all those invisible words made audible, a cacophony of voices crisscrossing the city like a net.
She thinks of it again as she watches the monitor, watching the bottle caps answer her call. Seventy, a hundred, two hundred.
Inside each, a tiny receiver tuned to the precise frequency her computer now emits. And also: a tiny speaker. Reception up to ten miles, Domi had promised her, crystal clear, and you’ll hear it from a block away, at least. Her father had made his fortune on this technology, though he’d surely never imagined it put to this use. One by one they wake, the counter ticking upward. Two hundred and fifty. Three hundred. Each a glowing pinprick on the map, spreading northward from the Battery, freckling Chinatown and Koreatown and Hell’s Kitchen, dotting Midtown to the Upper West Side and beyond. Over five hundred now, the counter still climbing. When it reaches nineteen hundred, it pauses, and she does a quick calculation. Nearly ninety-five percent, a solid A. Wouldn’t her parents be proud.
She lifts the microphone, clears her throat, and across the city, block after block, bottle-cap speakers crackle to life. Picking up the signal she is transmitting. A voice emerging from the knotholes of trees, the undersides of trash cans, cracks in front stoops and behind lampposts: everywhere and anywhere she has wedged a bottle cap in the past month. Hiding unnoticed until this moment, when from that little round cap her voice would spring, surprisingly loud, startling those nearby. In unison, this voice speaking—slightly scratched, as if from wear—all over the city. Only one voice, but speaking the words of many.
* * *
? ? ?
It doesn’t have to be live, Domi had said. A recording, maybe. It would be safer. You don’t have to be there. She’d said it gently, as if trying to persuade a stubborn child.
Margaret shook her head. I don’t have to, she said, but I want to.
She couldn’t explain why, but she feels this in her bones: certain things must be done in person. Testifying. Attending the dying. Remembering those who were gone. Some things need to be witnessed. But there was another reason she herself couldn’t quite see, could only sense its presence, the way you sensed a ghost. She had not been there to see her parents die; they had died alone, without her, and she should have been there, to see the man who’d pushed her father and sear his face into her mind; she should have been there by her father’s hospital bed, among the beeping, blinking machines, to kiss him and send him on his way. She should have been there, that next morning, to catch her mother as she fell, perhaps to save her, but at the very least to give her a loving face to focus on as the light in her eyes faded. She could not have articulated this, but she could feel the shape of this wrong inside her, the way she could feel her own heart kettle-drumming in her chest. They had deserved that kind of caretaking and no one had given it to them and she would, in this small way, give that solemn witnessing and hand-holding to each of the stories she was about to tell.
Alone in the darkened brownstone, she opens the first of the notebooks, a library of stories she has gathered and borne on her body for the past three years. The words of those she’s spoken to, faithfully jotted down in microscopic print, entrusted to her to keep and to safeguard and to share. She begins to read the words these families have whispered, letting them speak through her mouth. One by one, child by child, she tells each story.
* * *
? ? ?
The outlines first. Only a first name, nothing that could betray anyone: Emmanuel. Jackie. Tien. Parker. The city they’d lived in: Berkeley. Decatur. Eugene. Detroit. Their age, when they’d been taken: Nine. Six. Seven and a half. Two.
And then, shading in those outlines: the contours and textures of a particular life lived, the details that made each child themselves. The smallest and most human moments, that explained who they were. Keep to the small.