Little Fires Everywhere Read online

  At first she thought she had lost him. The train pulled away and she settled herself onto a grimy bench to await the next one and then, as the handful of passengers cleared the station, she saw him again: briefcase in hand now, scanning the platform. Looking for her, she was sure. Before he spotted her she turned and made for the staircase at the far end of the platform and followed the tunnel, walking as briskly as she could without attracting attention, to the platform for the C. She would be late for work now, but it didn’t matter. She would get off in a stop or two and walk over to Broadway and catch the right train, once she had gotten away, even if it meant paying another fare.

  When the C came, Mia stepped onto a middle car and scanned the seats. The car was half full, enough people that she could call for help if she needed, but not so full that the crowd would hide anything untoward. She settled herself into an empty seat in the center. At 72nd Street there was no sign of him. But at 81st, just as Mia rose to leave, the door at the end of the car opened and in came the man with the briefcase. He was slightly disheveled now, a few locks of his hair falling into his face, as if he had been hurrying through the cars looking for her. Her eyes met his and there was no way to pretend she hadn’t seen him. Mia’s roommate had been mugged twice walking home late at night, and her classmate Becca had told her a man had pulled her into an alley off Christopher Street by her ponytail—she’d managed to fight him off, but he had pulled out a hank of her hair. Mia had seen the bald spot. Whatever was going to happen would happen now, whether she stayed on the train or off.

  She stepped off the train and he followed her, and when the doors closed they stood frozen on the platform for a moment. There was no conductor or policeman in sight, only an old lady with a walker slowly trudging toward the stairs and, at the far end of the platform, a sleeping bum in tattered sneakers. If she ran, she thought, perhaps she could make it to the stairs before he caught her.

  “Wait,” the man called as the train began to pull away. “I just want to talk to you. Please.” He stopped and held up his hands. Now she could see that he was younger than she’d thought, perhaps only in his thirties, and thinner, too. His suit, she could see, was expensive, fine silver thread running through the wool, and his shoes were, too: cordovan with tassels and smooth leather soles. Not the shoes of a man who ran.

  “Please,” the man went on. “I’m sorry I followed you. I’m sorry I was staring at you. You must have thought—” He shook his head. “I don’t like my wife riding the subway because I worry she’ll get followed by someone just like that.”

  “What do you want?” Mia croaked. She had not realized how dry her throat was. Behind her back, she tightened her grip on her keys, points out. It doesn’t look like much, but it’ll hurt, Becca had told her.

  “Let me explain,” the man said. “I’ll stand right here. I won’t come any closer. I just needed to talk to you.” He put his briefcase down at his feet, between them, and Mia relaxed an infinitesimal amount. If he tried to lunge at her now, it would trip him.

  His name was Joseph Ryan—“Joey,” he’d corrected himself—and he worked, as she’d guessed, on Wall Street: he’d rattled off a string of names that she recognized as one of the big trading firms. He and his wife lived over on Riverside Drive; he was headed home now; they’d been married for nine years; they’d met as high school sweethearts; they didn’t have any children. “We can’t,” Joseph Ryan explained. “She can’t have children. And—” He stopped and looked at Mia beseechingly, ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath, with the air of a man who knows he is about to utter something preposterous. “We’ve been looking for someone to carry a baby for us. The right person.” And then: “We would pay her. Generously.”

  Mia’s head spun. She dug the points of her keys into the heel of her hand—not for protection now, but to convince her that what she was hearing was real. “You want—” she managed at last. “Why me?”

  Joseph Ryan fumbled in his pocket and produced a business card, and after a brief hesitation, Mia took a single step forward and stretched her arm to take it. “Please. Will you just come and talk with us? Tomorrow? At lunch? Our treat, of course.”

  Mia shook her head. “I have to work,” she said. “I can’t—”

  “Dinner, then. My wife and I can explain everything to you. Look—the Four Seasons. Seven o’clock? At the very least, I promise you’ll get a good meal.” He bobbed his head like a shy schoolboy and picked up his briefcase. “If you don’t show up, I’ll understand,” he said. “I can’t imagine—having someone suggest this to you. On a subway platform.” He shook his head. “But please—just think about it. You would help us so much. You would change our lives.” And then he turned away and went up the staircase, leaving Mia standing on the platform, holding the card in her fingertips.

  For the rest of her life Mia would wonder what her life would have been like if she had not gone to the restaurant that day. At the time it seemed like a lark: just a way to satisfy her curiosity, and get a nice meal in the bargain. Later, of course, she would realize it had changed everything forever.

  That evening she stepped from 52nd Street into the lobby of the Four Seasons, in the only nice dress she owned: one she’d worn to her cousin Debbie’s wedding the year before. She’d grown since then, so the dress was a bit too short and a bit too tight, and even if it had fit it would have been worlds of style away from this plush lobby, with its huge chandelier and its dense carpet and its jungle of potted plants. Even the air seemed lush and thick here, like velvet, swallowing up the click-click of ladies’ heels and the chatter of men in suits, so that they passed as silently as gliding ships. Joseph Ryan had not told her where to meet them, so she stood awkwardly to one side, pretending to admire the painting that covered one of the lobby’s enormous walls, trying to avoid the attention of the maître d’, who floated around the entrance of the dining room like a solicitous specter.

  Five minutes, she thought, and if they didn’t come, she would go home. She had forgotten to wear a watch, so she began to count slowly, as she and Warren had as children playing hide-and-seek. She would count to three hundred, and then she would go home and forget this crazy thing had ever happened. And then, just as she reached a hundred and ninety-eight, Joseph Ryan appeared at her elbow, like a waiter.

  “Picasso,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The tapestry.” Here in the lobby he seemed almost bashful, and she had almost forgotten the menace she’d felt the day before. “Well, not a tapestry per se, I guess. He painted it on a curtain. They asked him for a painting, but he didn’t have time to make one, so he gave them this instead. I’ve always admired it.”

  “I thought you were bringing your wife,” Mia said.

  “She’s at the table.” He made as if to take her arm, then thought better of it and put his hands into his jacket pockets instead. It was almost comical, his gentlemanliness, she thought as she followed him down the hallway.

  A huge white room with—she blinked—a jade-green pool in the center. Trees inside, studded with pink blossoms and starred with lights. Like a fairy forest hidden in the center of a New York office building. All around the soft hum of conversation. A scrim of fine chains lacing the window, rippling like waves though there was no breeze. And then the strange thing happened. As they came into the dining room and Joseph Ryan approached the table in the corner, Mia saw herself somehow already sitting at the table, in a neat navy dress, a cocktail in her hand. For a moment Mia thought she was approaching a mirror, and she paused, confused. And then the woman at the table stood up and reached across to take Mia’s hand.

  “I’m Madeline,” she said, and Mia had the uncanny sensation, as their hands met, of touching her reflection in a pool.

  The rest of the evening unfolded as if some kind of dream. Every time she looked at Madeline Ryan she saw herself; they shared not just the curly dark hair and similar features but
some of the same mannerisms: the same tendency to bite their bottom lips, the same absent habit of pulling one curl down, like a spring, to their earlobes and letting it bounce back up. They were not identical—Madeline’s chin was a bit more pointed, her nose a little thinner, her voice deeper, richer, almost throaty—but they looked so similar they could have been mistaken for sisters. Late that night, long after the taxi the Ryans had summoned had dropped her back at home, Mia sat awake, thinking over all she’d heard.

  How Madeline, at seventeen, had still not gotten her period, and how the doctor had then examined her and discovered that she had no uterus. One in five thousand women, Madeline had explained—there was a long German name for it, Mayer-something syndrome, which Mia had not fully caught. How the only way for them to have a child was a surrogate. This was 1981, and three years before headlines had trumpeted the arrival of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, but the odds of such a birth were still poor, and most people still viewed brewing babies in petri dishes as suspicious. “Not for us,” Madeline had said, twisting the stem of the wineglass between her elegant fingers. “No Frankenbabies, no thank you.” Instead, the Ryans had decided to take a more old-fashioned route: as old, Joseph pointed out, as the Bible. Sperm from the father, egg from—and carried by—a woman who seemed a suitable match. They had been advertising for months—discreetly, Madeline added—for a surrogate with the right characteristics, and had found no one. And then Joseph Ryan, riding the subway from a lunch meeting, had spotted an eerily familiar face at the other end of the car, and it had felt like fate.

  “We see it,” he said, “as an opportunity for us to do each other some mutual good.” He and Madeline glanced at each other, and Madeline gave him the merest nod of the head, and they both sat up a little straighter and turned to Mia, who set her fork down.

  “Don’t think that we’re entering into this lightly,” Madeline said. “We’ve been thinking about this for a long time. And we’ve been looking for just the right woman.” She tipped the carafe of water and refilled Mia’s glass. “We think that woman is you.”

  In her room now, Mia did calculations. Ten thousand dollars, they had offered, to carry a healthy baby for them. They had said this to her as if outlining the terms of a job offer, laying out the benefits package in the most attractive way. “And of course we’d pay for all your medical expenses,” Joseph had added.

  At the end of dinner, Joseph had slid a folded sheet of paper across the table. “Our home number,” he said. “Think it over. We’ll draw up a contract for you to look over. We hope you’ll call us.” He had already paid the bill, which Mia had not seen but knew must be appallingly high: they’d had oysters and wine; a tuxedoed man had prepared steak tartare at their table, deftly folding the golden yolk into the ruby-red meat. Joseph hailed Mia a taxi. “We hope you’ll call,” he said again. Behind him, behind the glass window of the lobby, Madeline buttoned the fur collar of her coat. Only after he had shut the door, and the taxi was on its way back downtown to Mia’s cramped apartment, did she unfold the paper to see that astonishing figure again: $10,000. And below it, a single word: please.

  The next morning, she’d thought it was a bizarre dream until she saw that creased note still lying on her dresser. Insane, she thought. Her womb was not an apartment for rent. She could barely imagine having a baby, let alone giving one away. In the gray and steely morning light, the evening before now looked like a childish fantasy. She shook her head, dropped the note into her dresser drawer, pulled out her uniform for work.

  And then, a few weeks later, Mia learned her scholarship would not be renewed. Pauline and Mal opened the door and without speaking she handed them a letter, slit jaggedly open by a finger.

  Dear Miss Wright: We trust that you have been benefiting from your first year at the New York School of Fine Arts. However, we are sorry to inform you that due to funding restrictions, we are unable to continue your financial aid for the 1981–1982 academic year. We of course hope that you will nevertheless continue your studies with us next year and—

  “They’re idiots,” Pauline said, tossing the letter onto the coffee table. “They have no idea what they’re losing out on.”

  “It’s the state,” Mal said. She retrieved the letter and slid it back into its envelope. “They cut funding so the school has to cover more, and scholarships suffer.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Mia said. “I’ll get another job. I’ll save up over the summer.”

  As she rode the elevator back downstairs that evening, however, she rested her head against the mirrored wall and bit back tears. She could not take on more hours than she was already working or she would have no time for her classes, and as it was she was barely making ends meet. If she worked full time all summer . . . She ran her mental calculations again. Unless she found a job that paid twice as much, she could not afford to stay.

  “Are you all right, miss?” The elevator doors had opened and there she was, back in the lobby, the kindly doorman peering down at her through his glasses. Behind him a wine-colored carpet rolled all the way to the thick glass doors that sealed out Fifth Avenue. The lobby was hushed as a library, but beyond those doors, she knew, were the cracked concrete sidewalks and the rush and clamor and ruthlessness of the city.

  “Fine,” she said. They knew each other a bit now, as people in New York often do: his name was Martin and he grew up in Queens and rooted for the Mets—not the Yankees, he’d told her, never the Yankees—and had a dachshund at home named Rosie. For his part, Martin knew Mia’s name and that she was the protégée of the Lady Artists upstairs—as he fondly referred to Pauline and Mal—and though Mia had told him little else about her life, his seasoned eye could divine quite a bit from the secondhand camera slung around her neck, the black-and-white uniform she sometimes still wore when she arrived, the containers of food she often carried home at Mal’s insistence. He resisted the urge to pat her on the shoulder and pushed the front door open with one gloved hand.

  “Have a good night,” he said, and Mia stepped out onto Fifth Avenue and let the city swallow her up.

  14

  Mia did not consult her parents, or her roommates, or even Pauline and Mal. Looking back, she would realize this was proof that she had already made up her mind. The day after receiving the letter from the college, Mia broached the prospect of a raise with the manager of the diner. “Wish I could, honey,” he told her, “but I can’t pay you girls more without raising prices and losing customers.” The manager of the Dick Blick said the same, and after that she didn’t even bother to ask the bar owner. For a week, she dodged Pauline’s repeated invitations to come for dinner; Mal, and probably Pauline as well, would sense her preoccupation right away. She sent a note to their apartment in lieu of her usual Sunday visit, claiming she had the stomach flu and had to stay home. For a week she thought only about her tuition—and the Ryans. She ruined an entire roll of film by pulling it out of the canister with the light on, something she’d never done before. She dropped a plate of eggs at the diner, sliced her finger on the jagged edge, watched a trickle of blood ooze onto the white china. Over and over during the day she passed her hand across the flat plain of her belly, as if inside she might feel something that could give her clarity.

  One afternoon, on a break from work, she pulled Joseph Ryan’s business card—the one he’d given her that first day—from her pocket and headed to the subway. Perhaps he was a con man. How did she know these Ryans would pay what they promised, that they were even named Ryan? But indeed, the address on the card brought her to the gleaming glass building of Dykman, Strauss & Tanner on Wall Street. Mia hesitated outside the glass lobby for a few minutes, watching the reflections of the people on the sidewalk glide over, and past, the shadows of the people within. Then she pushed through the revolving door and to the row of phone booths that lined the lobby. She fed a dime into the slot and dialed the phone number on the card. In a moment a female vo
ice came on the line.

  “Dykman, Strauss, and Tanner,” the woman said. “Joseph Ryan’s office. May I help you?”

  Mia hung up and hoisted the phone book onto her lap. There were six Joseph Ryans listed in Manhattan, but none on Riverside Drive. She let the phone book swing back on its chain and fished in her pocket for another dime. This time she called directory assistance, which provided her with an address. It was almost time for her shift at the bar to begin, but she took the train uptown anyway, and found herself outside a redbrick prewar building with a black awning and a doorman. Whoever lived here could certainly pay ten thousand dollars for a child.

  The next afternoon, when Madeline Ryan came out of the building, Mia followed her. For an hour she trailed her: all the way down 86th Street and around the neighborhood and back home. She saw how on the way out of the building, Madeline Ryan nodded to the doorman as he swept the door open for her, how she paused on the sidewalk, turning back to say something that made the doorman smile, patting him gently on the forearm before heading on her way. How Madeline slowed when she passed women pushing strollers, how she smiled at the babies in those strollers, whether they were cheerful or fretful or sleeping, how she smiled and said hello to the women, asked how they were, commented on the weather, even though—Mia could see it—there was a deep hunger in her eyes. She rushed to open doors for these women, even the nannies pushing fair-skinned children obviously not their own, holding the door open until woman and child were well into the bodega or the café or the bakery before letting it swing slowly shut after them with a wistful, almost mournful look. When a mother—harried, in heels—clip-clopped past her, Madeline Ryan scooped up a pacifier thrown out of the stroller and raced after them to hand it over. Mia had never noticed before how many babies there were: they were everywhere, the city was simply crawling with them, the streets swarming with unabashed fecundity, and she felt a deep pang of pity for Madeline Ryan. Madeline Ryan stopped at a flower stall, bought a bundle of peonies wrapped in green tissue, the buds still balled in tight hard fists. She headed toward home, and Mia let her go.