Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

That was his mother: formidable and ferocious when her child was in need.

If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.

Bird’s eyes go again to the three big trees that just days before had been red, to the jagged scars running down their lengths. A wound like that, his father had once told him, will never fully heal. The bark will grow over, but it’ll stay there, under the skin, and when they cut the tree down, you’ll see it there, a dark mark slicing through the rings of the wood.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility.

If there’s anything I can help with. He’s not sure if she can, but if there’s one thing he remembers from stories, it’s that people who offer help along your way—whether directing you to treasure or warning you of danger—should not be ignored.

Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To have no one remember you’d been there.

It was an intangible promise that lured her: that in the city, there was more than one way to be. Then the grit of the city scoured away the enamel of her to reveal something molten and pulsing inside.

How to explain this to someone who has never seen it? How to explain fear to someone who has never been afraid? Imagine, Margaret wants to tell him. Imagine if everything you think is solid turns out to be smoke. Imagine that all the rules no longer apply.

All the traces of people trying to explain the world to themselves, trying to explain themselves to each other. Testify had its roots in the word for three: two sides and a third person, standing by, witnessing. Author originally meant one who grows: someone who nurtured an idea to fruition, harvesting poems, stories, books. Poet, if you traced back far enough, came from the word for to pile up—the earliest, most basic, form of making.

PACT, its proponents insisted, would strengthen and unify the nation. Left unsaid was that unity required a common enemy. One box in which to collect all their anger; one straw man to wear the hats of everything they feared.

How many trees might spring from that one hard globe? This was its job, she understood suddenly: to create all these seeds, and then to explode. From within, Bird kicked at her, gently this time. As if playing a game. Did the pomegranate know, she thought, did it ever wonder where they went, how they turned out. If they’d ever managed to grow. All those bits of its missing heart.

A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.

she had been there, too, when Marie had reached the hole in the records where the rest of her lineage had been erased. Her own grandparents had fled Munich in the 1930s, but the rest of the family had stayed, and though it wasn’t the same, she knew the pain of fault lines in family history that you could not see across.

The calculation everyone made before parting their lips, before setting fingers to keys: how important was it to say?

Here alone, out of all his houses, they did not have to hear protests in the streets or the eerie silences in between; here, there was nothing but the constant whoosh of the ocean’s waves. Here, they could pretend they were not eating cake while everyone else had no bread.

There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same. A most precious ransom, a cudgel over a parent’s head. It was whatever the opposite of an anchor was: an attempt to uproot some otherness, something hated and feared. Some foreignness seen as an invasive weed, something to be eradicated.

I think, Sadie says finally, that anyone could hurt someone, if there was a really good reason.

Bird. Why did I tell you so many stories? Because I wanted the world to make sense to you. I wanted to make sense of the world, for you. I wanted the world to make sense.

They can let what Margaret has done change them, they can make it change things. They can keep rolling this stone uphill.