Little Fires Everywhere Read online

  The regular doorman was off duty that night, and with Mia’s coat nestled around her, the night doorman didn’t seem to notice her belly. He accepted the parcel for the Ryans without once glancing at her face, and Mia headed back to the Rabbit, parked several blocks away. In her belly, the baby kicked once, then turned over, as if settling into sleep.

  She drove all night, through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, miles of highway whipping by in the dark. As the sun began to rise, she turned off the highway just outside Erie and drove until she found a quiet rural road. Once she’d parked well off the roadside, she locked all the doors, climbed into the backseat, and wrapped herself in her old quilt. She’d expected it to smell like detergent, like home, and she braced herself for a whirl of nostalgia. But the quilt, having lain on her bed untouched for the past year, smelled like nothing—not clean, not dusty, no smell at all—and pulling it over her head to shield her eyes from the sun, Mia fell asleep.

  All week she drove this way, as if in a fever: driving until exhaustion forced her to stop, sleeping until she was rested enough to drive again, ignoring the clock, the light and dark of each day. She stopped now and then, when she passed a town, to buy bread, peanut butter, apples, to refill the gallon jug in the passenger seat with water at a fountain. Throughout her belongings she had hidden two thousand dollars, saved up from her tips and wages since she’d come to New York: in the box of negatives, in the glove compartment, in the right cup of her bra. Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska. Nevada. And then, suddenly, the teeming swirl of San Francisco, the Pacific churning blue-gray and white before her, and she could go no further.

  What else was there to know? Mia found an apartment, a room for rent in the Sunset in a house whose plaster was the color of sea salt, with a stern and elderly landlady who eyed her stomach and asked only, “There going to be an angry husband knocking on my door in a week?” For the last three months of her pregnancy, Mia walked the city, circling the lagoon in Golden Gate Park, climbing Coit Tower, one day crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in a fog so dense she could hear, but not see, the traffic rushing alongside her. The fog mirrored her state of mind so perfectly she felt as if she were walking through her own brain: a haze of formless, pervasive emotion, nothing she could grasp, but full of looming thoughts that appeared from nowhere, startling her, then receded into whiteness again before she was even sure what she had seen. Mrs. Delaney, her landlady, never smiled at her when they passed each other in the hallway, or when they happened to meet in the kitchen, but as the weeks went on, Mia would often come home to find a plate in the oven, a note on the counter that read Had leftovers. Don’t want to waste them.

  When Pearl was born—on an unseasonably warm May afternoon, at the hospital, after fourteen hours of labor—Mia took the birth record card from the nurse. She had been thinking for months now about what to name this child, mentally combing through all the people she’d known, the books she’d read in high school. Nothing had seemed right until she remembered The Scarlet Letter, and the right name came to her at once: Pearl. Round, simple, whole as the peal of a bell. And, of course, born into complicated circumstances. Beside it, on the line for “Mother’s name,” she wrote, in neat letters, MIA WARREN. Then she’d reached into the bassinet beside her bed and taken her daughter into her arms.

  The first night back in the rented room, Pearl had cried and cried until Mia herself had begun to cry. She wondered if, in New York City, the Ryans would still be awake in their gleaming apartment, what they would say if she lifted the phone and said to them, I lied. The baby is here. Come and get her. They would take the next flight and arrive at her door, she knew, ready to spirit Pearl away. She could not tell if the thought was terrible or tempting or both, and she and Pearl both wailed. Then there was a soft knock at the door, and stern Mrs. Delaney appeared and held out her arms. “Give her here,” she said, with such authority that Mia handed the soft bundle over without thinking. “Now you lie down and get some rest,” Mrs. Delaney said, shutting the door behind her, and in the abrupt silence Mia flopped down on the bed and fell instantly asleep.

  When she woke, she came bleary-eyed into the kitchen, then into the living room, where Mrs. Delaney sat in a pool of lamplight rocking a sleeping Pearl.

  “Did you rest?” she asked Mia, and when Mia nodded, she said, “Good,” and set the baby back into Mia’s arms. “She’s yours,” Mrs. Delaney said. “You take care of her.”

  She spent the next few weeks in the same haze, but something had begun to shift. Mrs. Delaney never again came to take the baby away, no matter how hard Pearl cried, but in the evenings she would rap on the door with a bowl of soup, a cheese sandwich, a piece of meat loaf. Leftovers, she always claimed, but Mia understood the gift for what it was, and understood, too, when Mrs. Delaney followed these offerings with a gruff “Rent’s due Thursday” or “Don’t track mud into the hall,” what she was trying to say.

  Pearl was three weeks old—still old-mannish, squash-faced—and the fog was just beginning to lift, when Mal’s phone call arrived.

  Mia had sent Pauline and Mal a letter once she’d settled, with her new address and phone number. “I’m fine,” she told them, “but I won’t be coming back to New York. Here’s where you can reach me if you need to.” And now, Mal had needed to reach her. A few weeks ago, Pauline, it seemed, had started having headaches. Strange symptoms. “Auras,” said Mal. “She said I looked like an angel, with a halo all around me.” A scan had found a lump the size of a golf ball in her brain.

  “I think,” Mal said, after a long pause, “if you want to see her maybe you should come right away.”

  That evening, Mia booked a plane ticket, the second she’d ever bought. It took most of her savings, but a bus across the country would take days. Too long. She arrived at Pauline and Mal’s apartment with a knapsack slung over her shoulder and Pearl in her arms. Pauline, twenty pounds thinner, looked like a more concentrated version of herself: whittled down, somehow, pared down to her essence.

  They spent the afternoon together, Mal and Pauline cooing over the baby, and Mia spending the night, for the first and last time, in their guest room with Pearl beside her. In the morning she woke early to nurse Pearl on the couch in the living room and Pauline came in.

  “Stay,” Pauline said. Her eyes were almost feverishly bright, and Mia wanted to rise and fold Pauline into her arms. But Pauline waved her to sit and held up her camera. “Please,” she said. “I want to take both of you.”

  She took a whole roll, one exposure after another, and then Mal came out with a pot of tea and a shawl for Pauline’s shoulders, and Pauline put the camera away. By the time Mia boarded the plane back to San Francisco that evening, Pearl in her arms, she had forgotten all about it. “Do what it takes,” Pauline had said to her as she had hugged her good-bye. For the first time, she had kissed Mia on the cheek. “I’m expecting great things from you.” Her use of the present tense—as if this were just an ordinary good-bye, as if she, Pauline, had every expectation of watching Mia’s career unfurl before her over decades—penned Mia’s voice in her throat. She had pulled Pauline close and breathed her in, her particular scent of lavender and eucalyptus, and turned away again before Pauline could see her cry.

  A week and a half later, Mal had called again, the call Mia had known was coming. Eleven days, she thought. She had known it would happen fast, but could not quite believe that eleven days ago Pauline had been alive. It was still warm, still June. The page on the calendar hadn’t even changed. And then, a few weeks later, a package arrived in the mail. “She picked these to send to you,” read the note, in Mal’s angular handwriting. Inside were ten prints, eight by ten, black and white, each glowing as if lit from behind in that peculiar way of all of Pauline’s work. Mia cradling Pearl in her arms. Mia lifting Pearl high above her head. Mia nursing Pearl, the fold of her blouse just concealing the pale globe of her breast. On the back of each, Pauline’s unmistakable signature. And a n
ote, clipped to a business card: Anita will sell these for you when you need money. Send her your work, when you’re ready. I’ve told her to expect you. P.

  After that, Mia began to take pictures again, with a fervor that felt almost like relief. She walked the city again, for hours at a time, Pearl strapped to her back in a sling she’d fashioned from an old silk blouse. Most of her savings were gone by now, and every roll of film was precious, so she worked carefully, framing the image again and again in her mind before she took it. With each shutter click she thought of Pauline. By the time summer came, she had seven shots that she thought might have something, as Pauline had always put it.

  Anita did not wholly agree. Promising, she wrote in response to the prints Mia sent. But not yet. Take more risks. In response Mia sent her the first of Pauline’s photographs. Then I need more time, she wrote. Get me as much time for this as you can. Don’t give anyone my name. Anita, after a heated auction, got Mia two years’ worth of time, even after the fifty-percent commission. (She would make it count; it would be fifteen years before, faced with Pearl’s hospital bill for pneumonia, she sold another.) Within a year, Mia had sent Anita another set of prints—each chronicling something’s slow decay: a dead cottonwood, a condemned house, a rusting car—that she was ready to take on.

  “Congratulations,” she said to Mia, when she called her a month later. “I’ve sold one of them, the one with the car. Four hundred dollars. Not a lot, but a start.”

  Mia took it as a sign. For a while now she had been dreaming of deserts, of cactus and wide, red skies. New images were starting to form in her mind. “I’ll call you in a week or two,” she said, “and tell you where to wire the money.”

  Mrs. Delaney watched from the living room window as Mia packed the trunk of the Rabbit, set Pearl’s bassinet snugly in the footwell of the front seat. To Mia’s astonishment, when she pried the house key loose from the key ring and handed it back, Mrs. Delaney pulled her into an uncharacteristic hug.

  “I never told you about my daughter, did I,” she said, her voice thick, and then before Mia could speak, she took the key and hurried back up the front steps, the metal gate clanging shut behind her.

  Mia thought about this all through the long drive, until outside of Provo, where she decided to stop—the first of the many stops she and Pearl would make over the years. All the long way, Pearl cooed from her bassinet beside her, as if she were sure, even at this early age, that they were headed for great and important things, as if she could somehow see all the way across the country and through time to everything that was coming their way.

  15

  Mrs. Richardson, of course, could not know all of this. She could know only the basics of the story the Wrights had told her: that Mia had shown up, belly bulging, claiming to be a surrogate for some family named Ryan—the Wrights couldn’t remember their first names. “Jamie, Johnny, something like that,” Mr. Wright had said. “Someone on Wall Street, she said. Someone with a lot of money.”

  “I wasn’t sure it was true,” Mrs. Wright admitted. “I thought maybe she was just in trouble, that she was lying to us. But then that lawyer called.” A few weeks after Mia had left, a lawyer had phoned the Wrights, asking if they had a way to get in touch with her. “He sent us a card,” Mrs. Wright remembered. “In case she ever sent us her address. But we never heard from her again.” She dabbed at the corner of her eye again with a tissue.

  After some rummaging, Mrs. Wright found the lawyer’s card and Mrs. Richardson copied down the address. Thomas Riley, Riley & Schwartz, Partners at Law. A 212 area code, an address on 53rd Street. She thanked the Wrights, and when Mrs. Wright pressed some extra cookies on her, she declined, embarrassed. The Wrights offered to lend her photos of Warren in his football uniform, too—maybe the paper would want to run them with the story, they’d suggested. “As long as we get them back,” Mrs. Wright added. “They’re the only copies we’ve got.” Guilt clawed at the back of Mrs. Richardson’s neck like a spider. They seemed like nice people, these Wrights—nice people who had been through a lot, nice people who could have been her neighbors in Shaker Heights. “If the paper wants photos, I’ll get back in touch,” she said. This, she told herself, was at least the truth.

  “I’m so sorry about everything you’ve been through,” she said at the door, and meant it. Then she hesitated. “If you ever managed to find out where your daughter is, would you want to get in touch with her again?”

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Wright said. “We’ve thought of hiring a detective to look for her, you know, see if we could get any leads. But it seems to us that if she wanted to be found, she’d have gotten in touch. She knows where we live. Our phone number’s the same as it’s been her whole life. She must think we’re still angry at her.”

  “Are you?” Mrs. Richardson asked, on impulse, and neither Mr. Wright nor Mrs. Wright answered.

  The number of the law firm was sixteen years old, but Mrs. Richardson decided it was worth a try. Back at her hotel, she dialed and, to her immense relief, a secretary picked up almost immediately.

  “Riley, Schwartz, and Henderson,” the woman said.

  “Hello,” Mrs. Richardson began. “I’m calling regarding a case Mr. Riley was working on quite some time ago.” She paused, thinking quickly. “I have some information that my client thinks may be relevant. But before I pass along any information, I wanted to be sure Mr. Riley is still representing the Ryans. As you can imagine, this information is rather sensitive.”

  The secretary paused. “Which case did you say you were involved with?”

  “The Ryans. The information I have regards a Mia Wright.”

  There was the sound of a drawer opening and a rustling of files. Mrs. Richardson held her breath. “Here we are. Joseph and Madeline Ryan. Yes, Mr. Riley is still on retainer for them, though”—she paused—“this file hasn’t been active in quite some time. But Mr. Riley is in the office currently and I’d be happy to put you through to him. What did you say your name was?”

  Mrs. Richardson hung up. Her heart was pounding. Then, after several minutes of careful thought, she flipped open her address book and dialed her friend Michael, who worked at the New York Times. They’d met in college, working on the Denisonian, and though Michael had jumped from there to the Stamford Advocate and then quickly to the news desk at the Times, while she had returned home and gone local, they had stayed in touch. He had once, she was quite sure, been in love with her, though he’d never said anything about it, and they’d both been married for years now. Recently he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer, though he’d lost out to someone from the AP reporting on the killings in Rwanda.

  “Michael,” she said. “Can you do me a favor?”

  A week later, Michael would call back and confirm what she had already suspected: through journalistic sleight of hand known only to himself, he had managed to find hospital bills for a Mia Wright in 1981, at St. Elizabeth’s in midtown Manhattan. They had been paid for by a Joseph Ryan, and they had stopped in February 1982, when Mia would have been six months pregnant, and if Mrs. Richardson had had any doubts about where Pearl had come from, they would vanish. She would have to think about what—if anything—to do with this information. The poor Ryans: wanting a baby so badly that they’d take such steps to get one. Yes, she knew something about that, she thought, thinking of Linda and Mark McCullough. But she felt a twinge of sympathy for Mia, too, one she hadn’t felt before and had never expected to feel: how excruciating it must have been to think about giving her child away.

  What would she have done if she’d been in that situation? Mrs. Richardson would ask herself this question over and over, before Michael’s call and for weeks—and months—after. Each time, faced with this impossible choice, she came to the same conclusion. I would never have let myself get into that situation, she told herself. I would have made better choices along the way.

  For now, Mrs. Richardson stacked her n
otes in her folder, which she had discreetly labeled M.W. Tomorrow she would drive back home.

  On the way out of the clinic, Lexie was having trouble processing what was happening to her, what had just happened to her. Her legs and her body trotted confidently ahead while her head drifted along behind like a dawdling balloon. She had been pregnant and now she was not. There had been something alive inside her and now there was not. Deep in her belly she felt a vague cramping and a warm damp trickle into the thick sanitary pad the nurse had given her. The rest of the package was in her bag, along with a bottle of Advil. “You’ll want this later on, when the anesthetic wears off,” the nurse had told her.

  Pearl took her arm. “You okay?”

  Lexie nodded and the parking lot spun around and landed on its side. Pearl caught her as she began to tip. “Okay. Come on. Almost there.”

  The original plan had been to drive Lexie home. Her mother wasn’t due back until tomorrow afternoon, and by then, Lexie had assumed, she would be back to normal, ready to pretend nothing had happened. But it was clear to Pearl, as she guided Lexie into the front seat of the Explorer, that Lexie was in no condition to go home. She was woozy from the anesthesia, and in the end, Pearl had to buckle the seat belt around her.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll go to my house.”

  “What about your mom?” Lexie asked, and when Pearl said, “She can keep a secret,” this seemed like the saddest thing Lexie had ever heard, and she burst into tears.

  It was just past noon when they entered the house on Winslow, and Mia—cutting a maple tree out of a magazine ad with an X-Acto knife—looked up in alarm as they entered the kitchen. At the sight of the scalpel in Mia’s hands, Lexie—who had calmed down by the end of the drive—began to cry again. To everyone’s surprise, even her own, Mia pulled Lexie into her arms.