Except, she thought—and this she could not bring herself to say aloud, would never manage to utter—except that some of those stone people were crying. She held on to this fact, even when the authorities came and searched out the speakers and smashed them under boot heels, even when they ordered the crowds to disperse, even when there was nothing left to see from the window but an empty sidewalk and a few strands of wire and plastic shards on the concrete. Those vanished people had wiped their tears and retreated back into their lives, but those tears had been there all the same, even for a moment, and she told herself that this meant something, that this mattered.
He’s a good kid, she said instead. Bird. He’s a sweet boy.
After a pause, she added, He looks so much like her. Like both of you.
He does, Ethan said, and then they both fell silent again, and outside the road scrolled by, luminous in the reflected shine of their headlights.
* * *
? ? ?
It was like Pompeii, one person would say later. Everyone just frozen exactly where they were. You just stood there and let it wash over you. Destroying and preserving you all at once.
Another would carry that moment through her life, and years later, in the Natural History Museum with her daughter, she would glance at the dioramas, the animals so lifelike you could imagine they’d only paused, like burglars caught in a searchlight, that as soon as you turned your back, they would reanimate and scamper off on their way. She would look at that diorama—a lion crouched beside a herd of grazing antelope, the painted savannah air wavering behind them in a honeyed sheen, jackals prowling in the shadows, all of them, predator and prey, transfixed by some invisible force—and she would suddenly remember that evening, as the light dimmed, the voice speaking to all of them, that feeling of being surrounded by strangers who were somehow experiencing the same thing. She would remember the man on the park bench opposite—grizzled and hard, wearing fatigues that didn’t fit, slashes of gray sock in the gaps between shoe top and sole—the way his eyes and hers had met, the unspoken affirmation that had passed between them: Yes, I hear it, too. She would never see that man again, but standing there in the museum she would remember him, remember that feeling that somehow he was important to her, that they were connected and they’d found each other, that feeling of being conjoined by this surreal moment in time, and she would be frozen again, captivated, staring past the lion and antelope and into the past until her daughter tugged at her hand and asked why she was crying.
* * *
? ? ?
I just don’t understand, Domi keeps saying. Scrubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand, yesterday’s eyeliner smudged to angry dark rings. Sadie’s head cradled against her shoulder. Why she cut it so close. We talked about it. She promised. I thought she meant it.
You know Margaret, Ethan says. Now and then, she got carried away. A wild thing.
He and Domi share a pained laugh, everything they found exasperating about her become precious.
They are speaking about her in the past tense, Bird thinks, and he almost smiles at how childish and shortsighted this is. They are so certain that she is gone, but he’s not. I promise I’ll come back, she had said, but he realizes now: she hadn’t said when. Only that she would. And he believes this, still. She will come back. Someday, somehow. In some form. He’ll find her, if he looks hard enough. Strange things happened. She might be there, somewhere, in some other form, the way it happened in stories: disguised as a bird, a flower, a tree. If they look closely enough, they’ll find her. And as he thinks this, he thinks he might see her: in the birch tree showering its leaves ever so gently down upon them, in the hawk that sails into the sky, releasing its piercing and melancholy and beautiful cry. In the sun that has begun to needle its way through the trees, tinting everything with a faint golden glow.
What now, he says. But already he knows the answer.
What happens now is a choice: they can go back, all of them, to the lives they’d had before. Bird and his father can go back to Cambridge, back to school and replacing books on their locked-up shelves. They can pretend this never happened; they can still say, no, we don’t know her, we haven’t heard from her in years. We have nothing to do with her, we had nothing to do with it, of course we would never, of course we don’t think like that. As for Sadie: the Duchess assures them she can find somewhere safe, but from the look on Sadie’s face Bird knows what will happen—she’ll run again, she’ll keep running, the way she had before she found Margaret, she’ll keep searching for her own parents, for a way out of all this, and she’ll be gone. So they will all go back to the way they were before, as if none of this has ever occurred, as if it changed nothing, as if it meant nothing.