Little Fires Everywhere Page 12

  “We felt it was more appropriate to give her a new name to celebrate the start of her new life,” she said. “Mirabelle means ‘wonderful beauty.’ Isn’t that lovely?” Indeed, staring down that night at the baby’s long lashes, the little rosebud mouth half open in deep and contented slumber, she and her husband had felt nothing could be more appropriate.

  “When we got our cat from the shelter, we kept her name,” said Izzy. She turned to her mother. “Remember? Miss Purrty? Lexie said it was lame but you said we couldn’t change it, it would be too confusing to her.”

  “Izzy,” Mrs. Richardson said. “Behave yourself.” She turned to Mrs. McCullough. “Mirabelle has grown so much over the past few months. I wouldn’t recognize her. So skinny before, and now look at her, she’s chubby and glowing. Oh, Lexie, look at those little cheeks.”

  “Can I hold her?” Lexie asked. With Mrs. McCullough’s help, she settled the baby against her shoulder. “Oh, look at her skin. Just like café au lait.” Mirabelle reached out and laced her fingers into Lexie’s long hair, and Izzy drifted sullenly away.

  “I do not get the obsession,” Moody murmured to Trip, in the corner behind the kitchen island, where they had retreated with paper plates of quiche and pastries. “They eat. They sleep. They poop. They cry. I’d rather have a dog.”

  “But girls love them,” said Trip. “I bet if Pearl were here she’d be all over that baby.”

  Moody could not tell whether Trip was mocking him or simply thinking about Pearl himself. He wasn’t sure which possibility bothered him more.

  “You were listening in health class when they talked about precautions, right?” he asked. “Otherwise there are going to be dozens of girls running around with baby Trips. Horrific thought.”

  “Ha ha.” Trip forked a piece of egg into his mouth. “You just worry about yourself. Oh wait, in order to knock someone up, someone has to actually sleep with you.” He tossed his empty plate into the garbage can and went off in search of a drink, leaving Moody alone with the last few bites of his quiche, now gone cold.

  At Lexie’s request, Mrs. McCullough took her for a tour of Mirabelle’s room: decorated in pink and pale green, with a hand-stitched banner above the crib spelling out her name. “She loves this rug,” Mrs. McCullough said, patting the sheepskin on the floor. “We put her down after her bath and she rolls around and just laughs and laughs.” Then there was Mirabelle’s playroom, a whole enormous bedroom devoted to her toys: wooden blocks in all colors of the rainbow, a rocking elephant made from velvet, an entire shelf of dolls. “The room at the front of the house is bigger,” explained Mrs. McCullough. “But this room gets the best sun—all morning and most of the afternoon. So we made the other into the guest room and kept this one as a place for Mirabelle to play.”

  When they returned downstairs, even more guests had arrived, and Lexie reluctantly relinquished Mirabelle to the newcomers. By cake-cutting time, the birthday girl, worn out from all the socializing, had to be whisked away for a bottle and put down for a nap, and to Lexie’s great disappointment she was still asleep at the end of the party, when the Richardsons headed home.

  “I wanted to hold her again,” she complained as they made their way back to their cars.

  “She’s a baby, not a toy, Lex,” Moody put in.

  “I’m sure Mrs. McCullough would love it if you’d offer to babysit,” Mrs. Richardson said. “Drive carefully, Lexie. We’ll see you at home.” She nudged Izzy toward the other car by one shoulder. “And you need to be less rude next time we go to a party, or you can just stay home. Linda McCullough babysat you when you were little, you know. She changed your diapers and took you to the park. You think about that the next time you see her.”

  “I will,” said Izzy, and slammed her car door.

  Lexie could talk of nothing else but Mirabelle McCullough for the next few days. “Baby fever,” Trip said, and nudged Brian. “Watch out, dude.” Brian laughed uneasily. Trip was right, though: Lexie was suddenly, furiously interested in all things baby, even going to Dillard’s to buy a frilly and thoroughly impractical lavender dress as a present for Mirabelle.

  “My god, Lexie, I don’t remember you being so excited about babies when Moody and Izzy were little,” her mother said. “Or dolls for that matter. In fact—” Mrs. Richardson cast her mind back. “Once you actually shut Moody in the pots and pans cupboard.”

  Lexie rolled her eyes. “I was three,” she said. She was still talking about the baby on Monday, and when Mia arrived in the kitchen that afternoon, Lexie was delighted to have a fresh audience.

  “Her hair is so gorgeous,” she gushed. “I’ve never seen so much hair on a little baby. So silky. And she has the biggest eyes—they just take everything in. She’s so alert. They found her at a fire station, can you believe that? Someone literally just left her there.”

  Across the room, Mia, who had been wiping the countertops, froze.

  “A fire station?” she said. “A fire station where?”

  Lexie waved a hand. “I don’t know. Somewhere in East Cleveland, I think.” The details had been less important to her than the tragic romance of it all.

  “And when did this happen?”

  “January. Something like that. Mrs. McCullough said that one of the firemen came out for a smoke and found her there in a cardboard box.” Lexie shook her head. “Like she was a puppy someone didn’t want.”

  “And now the McCulloughs plan to keep her?”

  “I think so.” Lexie opened the cupboard and helped herself to a Nutri-Grain bar. “They’ve wanted a baby forever and then Mirabelle appeared. Like a miracle. And they’ve been trying to adopt for so long. They’ll be such devoted parents.” She peeled the wrapper from the granola bar and popped it into the garbage can and went upstairs, leaving Mia deep in thought.

  Mia’s arrangement with Mrs. Richardson paid for their rent, but she and Pearl still needed money for groceries and the power bill and gas, so she had kept a few shifts per week at Lucky Palace, which between wages and leftover food was just enough to keep them supplied. Lucky Palace had a cook, a prep cook, a busboy, and one full-time waitress, Bebe, who had started a few months before Mia. Bebe had come over from Canton two years earlier, and although her English was rather choppy, she liked to talk with Mia, finding her a sympathetic listener who never corrected her grammar or seemed to have trouble understanding her. While they rolled plastic silverware in napkins for the dinner takeout orders, Bebe had told Mia quite a lot about her life. Mia shared very little in return, but she’d learned over the years that people seldom noticed this, if you were a good listener—which meant you kept the other person talking about herself. Over the course of the past six months she’d learned nearly all of Bebe’s life story, and it was because of this that Lexie’s account of the party had caught her attention.

  For Bebe, a year earlier, had had a baby. “I so scared then,” she told Mia, fingers working the soft paper of the napkin. “I have nobody to help me. I cannot go to work. I cannot sleep. All day long I just hold the baby and cry.”

  “Where was the baby’s father?” Mia had asked, and Bebe had said, gone. “I tell him I having a baby, two weeks later he disappear. Somebody told me he move back to Guangdong. I move here for him, you know that? Before that we living in San Francisco, I am work in dentist’s office as a receptionist, I get good money, really nice boss. He get a job here in the car plant, he say, Cleveland is nice, Cleveland is cheap, San Francisco so expensive, we move to Cleveland, we can buy a house, have a yard. So I follow him here and then—”

  She was silent for a moment, then dropped a neat rolled-up napkin onto the pile, chopsticks, fork, and knife all swaddled together inside. “Here nobody speak Chinese,” she said. “I interview for receptionist, they tell me my English not good enough. Nowhere I can find work. Nobody to watch the baby.” She had probably had postpartum depression at the very least, Mia r
ealized, perhaps even a postpartum psychotic break. The baby wouldn’t nurse, and her milk had dried up. She had lost her job—a minimum-wage post packing Styrofoam cups into cartons—when she’d gone into the hospital to have the baby, and had no money for formula. At last—and this was the part that Mia felt could not be a coincidence—she had, in desperation, gone to a fire station and left her baby on the doorstep.

  Two policemen had found Bebe several days later, lying under a park bench, unconscious from dehydration and hunger. They’d brought her to a shelter, where she’d been showered, fed, prescribed antidepressants, and released three weeks later. But by then no one could tell her what had happened to her baby. A fire station, she had insisted, she’d left the baby at a fire station. No, she couldn’t remember which. She had walked with the baby in her arms, round and round the city, trying to figure out what to do, and at last she’d passed a station, the windows glowing warm against the dark night, and she’d made up her mind. How many fire stations could there be? But no one would help her. When you left her, you terminated your rights, the police told her. Sorry. We can’t give you any more information.

  Bebe, Mia knew, was desperate to find her daughter again, had been searching for her for many months now, ever since she’d gotten herself back together. She had a job now, a steady if low-paying one; she’d found a new apartment; her mood had stabilized. But she hadn’t been able to find out where her baby had gone. It was as if her child had simply disappeared. “Sometimes,” she told Mia, “I wonder if I am dreaming. But which one is the dream?” She dabbed her eyes with the back of her cuff. “That I can’t find my baby? Or that I have the baby at all?”

  In all her years of itinerant living, Mia had developed one rule: Don’t get attached. To any place, to any apartment, to anything. To anyone. Since Pearl had been born they’d lived, by Mia’s count, in forty-six different towns, keeping their possessions to what would fit in a Volkswagen—in other words, to a bare minimum. They seldom stayed long enough to make friends anywhere, and in the few cases where they had, they’d moved on with no forwarding address and lost contact. At each move, they discarded everything they could leave behind, and sent off Mia’s art to Anita to be sold, which meant they’d never see it again.

  So Mia had always avoided getting involved in the affairs of others. It made everything simpler; it made it easier when their lease was up or she’d grown tired of the town or she’d felt, uneasily, that she wanted to be elsewhere. But this, with Bebe—this was different. The idea that someone might take a mother’s child away: it horrified her. It was as if someone had slid a blade into her and with one quick twist hollowed her out, leaving nothing inside but a cold rush of air. At that moment Pearl came into the kitchen in search of a drink and Mia wrapped her arms around her daughter quickly, as if she were on the edge of a precipice, and held her so long and so tightly that Pearl finally said, “Mom. Are you okay?”

  These McCulloughs, Mia was sure, were good people. But that wasn’t the point. She thought suddenly of those moments at the restaurant, after the dinner rush had ended and things were quiet, when Bebe sometimes rested her elbows on the counter and drifted away. Mia understood exactly where she drifted to. To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.

  Early, early on, the very first night she and Pearl had begun their travels, Mia had curled up on their makeshift bed in the backseat of the Rabbit, with baby Pearl snuggled in the curve of her belly, and watched her daughter sleep. There, so close that she could feel Pearl’s warm, milky breath on her cheek, she had marveled at this little creature. Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she had thought. Her mother had made her go to Sunday school every week until she was thirteen, and as if the words were a spell she suddenly saw hints of her mother’s face in Pearl’s: the set of the jaw, the faint wrinkle between the eyebrows that appeared as Pearl drifted into a puzzling dream. She had not thought about her mother in some time, and a sharp bolt of longing flashed through her chest. As if it had disturbed her, Pearl yawned and stretched and Mia had cuddled her closer, stroked her hair, pressed her lips to that unbelievably soft cheek. Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she had thought again as Pearl’s eyes fluttered closed once more, and she was certain that no one could ever love this child as she did.

  “I’m fine,” she said to Pearl now, and with a wrenching effort she let her daughter go. “All finished here. Let’s go home, okay?”

  Even then Mia had a sense of what she was starting; a hot smell pricked her nostrils, like the first wisp of smoke from a far-off blaze. She did not know if Bebe would get her baby back. All she knew was that the thought of someone else claiming her child was unbearable. How could these people, she thought, how could these people take a child from its mother? She told herself this all night and into the next morning, as she dialed, as she waited for the phone to ring. It wasn’t right. A mother should never have to give up her child.

  “Bebe,” she said, when a voice picked up on the other end. “It’s Mia, from work. There’s something I think you should know.”

  10

  This was why, while Pearl and Mia were eating dinner Tuesday evening, the doorbell rang followed by a frantic knocking. Mia ran down to the side door, and Pearl heard a murmur of voices and crying, and then her mother came into the kitchen followed by a young Chinese woman, who was sobbing.

  “I knock and knock,” Bebe was saying. “I ring the doorbell and they don’t answer so I knock and knock. I can see that woman inside. Peeking out from behind the curtain to check if I go away.”

  Mia guided her to a chair—her own, with a plate of half-finished noodles still in front of it. “Pearl, get Bebe some water. And maybe make some tea.” She sat down in the other chair and leaned across the table to take Bebe’s hand. “You shouldn’t have just gone over there like that. You couldn’t expect them to just let you come right in.”

  “I call her first!” Bebe wiped her face on the back of her hand, and Mia took a napkin from the table and nudged it toward her. It was actually an old flowered handkerchief from the thrift store, and Bebe scrubbed at her eyes. “I look them up in the phone book and call them, right after I hang up with you. Nobody answer. I just get the machine. What kind of message I am going to leave? So I try them again, and again, all morning, until finally somebody answer at two o’clock. She answer.”

  Across the kitchen, Pearl set the kettle on the stove and clicked on the burner. She had never met Bebe before, though her mother had mentioned her once or twice. Her mother hadn’t said how pretty Bebe was—big eyes, high cheekbones, thick black hair swept up into a ponytail—or how young. To Pearl, anyone over about twenty seemed impossibly adult, but she guessed that Bebe might be twenty-five or so. Definitely younger than her mother, but there was something almost childish in the way she spoke, in the way she sat with her feet primly together and her hands clasped, in the way she glanced up at Mia helplessly, as if she were Mia’s daughter, too, that made her think of Bebe as if she were another teenager. Pearl did not realize, nor would she for a while yet, how unusually self-possessed her mother was for someone her age, how savvy and seasoned.

  “I tell her who I am,” Bebe was saying. “I say, ‘This is Linda McCullough?’ And she say yes, and I tell her, ‘My name is Bebe Chow, I am May Ling’s mother.’ Just like that, she hang up on me.” Mia shook her head.

  “I call her back and she pick up the phone
and hang it up again. And then I call her again and I get just a busy signal.” Bebe wiped her nose with the napkin and crumpled it into a ball. “So I go over there. Two buses and I have to ask the driver where to change, and then I walk another mile to their house. Those huge houses—everybody over there drive, no one wants take a bus to work. I ring the front doorbell, and nobody answer, but she watching from upstairs, just looking down at me. I ring the bell again and again and I calling, ‘Mrs. McCullough, it’s me, Bebe, I just want to talk to you,’ and then the curtain closed. But she still in there, just waiting for me to go away. Like I am going to go away when my baby is in there.

  “So I keep on knocking and ringing. Sooner or later she have to come out and then I can talk to her.” She glanced at Mia. “I just want to see my baby again. I think, I can talk with these McCulloughs and get them to understand. But she will not come out.”

  Bebe fell silent for a long time and looked down at her hands, and Pearl saw the skin, reddened and raw, along the sides of her fists. She must have been banging on the door for a long, long time, she realized, and she thought simultaneously of how much pain Bebe must have been in, must still be in, and how terrified Mrs. McCullough, locked inside the house, must have felt.

  The rest of the story poured out haltingly, as if Bebe were only now piecing the scene together herself. Sometime later a Lexus had pulled up, with a police car right behind it, and Mr. McCullough had emerged. He had told Bebe to leave the property, two police officers flanking him like bodyguards. Bebe had tried to tell them she only wanted to see her baby, but wasn’t sure now what she had said, if she had argued or threatened or raged or begged. All she could remember was the line Mr. McCullough kept repeating—“You have no right to be here. You have no right to be here”—and finally one of the officers took her by the arm and pulled her away. Go, they had said, or they would take her down to the station and charge her with trespassing. This she recalled clearly: as the policemen pulled her away from the house, she could hear her child crying from behind the locked front door.