“And what is a wren?” I ask.
“A wren is a bird whose song is greater than its size.” It’s true. I chirp. I chirp now as his fingers touch my seed like a bud that dilates the same as you are doing now in my womb, growing. I chirp, and maybe the sound reaches you, padded in the amniotic fluid. But listen, others are chirping too. He is caressing me and I look through half-open lids to see dozens of nests. Dozens. And in each are three or four little birds (how I wish you could see them) holding their beaks open for food. They chirp. They’re chirping too. They chirp with beaks like orange smiles, and hundreds of mothers appear to fill their little maws. Wings graze my face as he is touching me, my pink mouth behind his neck tenses in a smile full of water, and it rains over the trunk of this warbling tree.
Jim and I spent a few years stumbling around in the fog in our search for Yoro. We were entirely at the mercy of strangers, or if not complete strangers, at least nobody close enough to us to risk sharing confidential information. But one day a package showed up in our mailbox. It was from a friend of Jim’s, the one who suggested we travel to Los Alamos. We opened it to find letters that he had copied, but without their envelopes, and a note explaining that for security reasons, the letters and their envelopes had been separated and filed away in different places to make the sources more difficult to locate should anyone try to find them. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen the postmarks, which would have allowed us to configure a timetable of Yoro’s whereabouts. I don’t doubt this friend’s sincerity, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to think our access to these letters, which he thought he was copying and sending clandestinely, had in fact been planted to placate us, keep us distracted in a never-ending journey that appeased us by the mere fact of keeping us on the move, but that in truth held us captive to a search leading nowhere.
Our friend had searched out the letters that had clues to Yoro’s possible origin, which he ran through a database of foster families tied to military projects during those years. Some of this information proved very useful, but in general, he warned, he couldn’t guarantee that the letters had actually been sent from these places; it was all the result of mere speculation, trying to decipher the cryptic content of a few sentences. The rest of the pages were from a medical chart with multiple-choice boxes—never / rarely / sometimes / often / always—reports sent by Yoro’s different foster families, apparently meant to communicate any changes in the state of her health.
I never understood all the secrecy. But eventually I got used to the nomadic nature of Yoro’s imposed life and even came to accept it as something natural, since Jim never disputed the notion. I supposed the girl couldn’t be adopted because she had a biological mother who must be temporarily unable to care for her, so the only thing left was foster care. But it was a lot trickier to try to reason away all the detailed reports on Yoro’s health. Not only her health, but in the words of our friend, “the progress of her health.” What did they mean by progress? Progress toward where? Could Yoro be sick? A person like me, who has suffered so much, avoids asking for explanations because you know they can be given only when those who can explain are ready and feel a need. In the worst of times for me, I felt that explanations had a will of their own, so when people asked me for a reason and I couldn’t come up with one, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to, or not always, but because the life cycle from infancy to adulthood and the release of what could be explained hadn’t been completed yet. But Jim’s case was different. He hadn’t explained things to me, he said, because he (and this included me) was held back by a threat. When the package arrived, he said he’d been waiting for the letters anxiously, since they’d granted him one right in exchange for keeping it all to himself: to be kept up-to-date regularly on Yoro’s state. But the letters had come all at once and through an unexpected channel, a friend calling in a favor, and without addresses, deciphered solely on the friend’s speculation, together with a note informing us that Yoro had not been relocated this time because apparently she’d disappeared. Jim could have broken his silence that day and explained many things to me, but now I realize there were other reasons at work, personal reasons that went far beyond a soldier’s vow of silence.
Yoro was sixteen at the time she disappeared, lost not only to us and to her other families, but also to those charged with her guardianship, military top brass I imagined, though now I suspect, as I began to at that point, that her custody had fallen to civil servants who treated her life like one more administrative drawer to close with relief at day’s end. If finding her had ever been truly vital for us before, from that moment forward it became vital for her too; she was too young to be left on her own or in bad company.
Jim quickly shuffled through the letters. As I said, many were responses to some kind of medical questionnaire. At first I didn’t understand anything. It looked like the standard multiple-choice form that requires you to check boxes. Next to each of the questions was a space for comments and observations, and another longer space for the same purpose at the end of the document. They’d all been left blank, though. Nobody had offered additional observations. And a quick comparison showed that all the checks, or all the answers, coincided, meaning there’d been zero changes in Yoro’s condition, so she must have grown up healthy. I can’t recall the precise questions anymore, but what I do remember was being struck with a sense of dread when I realized that every single question focused on the side effects of a very specific thing, something with which I was all too well acquainted: radioactivity. So Yoro was another victim of my own disease, radioactive contamination.
THERE WAS NO TIME TO WASTE. I remember how anxious we felt now. If our lives had already been committed to finding Yoro, we now realized that returning to everyday life was impossible until we did; there could be no inner life, no living for each other. Not because our relationship had deteriorated in any way, but because it had transformed into something else; we were no longer merely a couple, we had become a search-and-rescue team. Nothing mattered to us that wasn’t focused on Yoro’s whereabouts. Not even food. No time was wasted talking about food; we just ate whatever occurred to us to put on a plate that day. Our love prevailed, but now it had a focal point beyond individual feelings, and kept our band of two tight. Our lives were governed by the need to conserve, not waste a thing—not the heat of our bed, not a single calorie in superfluous efforts that didn’t sustain this single purpose. And so we prepared for our next journey on our friend’s advice and on what conclusions we had been able to draw.
We arrived on a September evening. It was the first time we had ever stepped foot in Europe. Lyon, France. The airport taxi left us off downtown. Everything was dark, save the intermittent headlights that lit the streets every once in a while. We walked along the bank of one of the city’s two rivers. The streetlamps were out, and the houses were steeped in shadows. We walked in silence along a row of small houses with candles in the windows. These hundreds of flames alone lit up the town—ancient light, medieval, cave-like—the light of my childhood, of the walks through the dark with my grandfather, dogs barking in distant fields, when flames burning the rice were the only source of nocturnal light. We could just make out a hill at the end of this strand of little flames, an even darker mass farther in the distance, crowned by an illumined basilica. The whole structure bathed in yellow. It was the only artificial light. The following day someone in the market explained the reason for that ceremonious darkness. The basilica was Notre-Dame de Fourvière, and every September a pilgrimage takes place, a river of men, women, and children carrying the candles that have lit their windows at home for a week. Four centuries adoring the Virgin who spared them from the epidemic that devastated Europe. Four hundred years of flames in silent thankfulness for saving them from the plague.