Little Fires Everywhere: Chapters 14–20

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.

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.

She set both of her palms on Mia’s belly, as if offering a benediction, and Mia’s muscles tensed and hardened.

The quickening, Madeline had called it, as she laid her hands on Mia’s skin—such an old-fashioned euphemism, one that made her think of quicksilver, a lithe little fish whipping about within her.

The quickening, Madeline had called it, as she laid her hands on Mia’s skin—such an old-fashioned euphemism, one that made her think of quicksilver, a lithe little fish whipping about within her.

The quickening, Madeline had called it, as she laid her hands on Mia’s skin—such an old-fashioned euphemism, one that made her think of quicksilver, a lithe little fish whipping about within her.

She tried to focus on how much she was helping them, as if this were a charitable deed, purely altruistic: like volunteering at a soup kitchen, or adopting a dog from a shelter.

She would have preferred shouting to this protracted, knife-sharp silence.

There was a whole stack of casseroles in the fridge, a leaning tower of Pyrex baking dishes crimped in foil. As if no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to.

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.

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.

Then she’d reached into the bassinet beside her bed and taken her daughter into her arms.

After that, Mia began to take pictures again, with a fervor that felt almost like relief.

“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?”

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.

So when Lexie had appeared in the doorway, half leaning on Pearl’s arm, Mia took in her wan and grayish face...and understood immediately what had happened.

Back in the main office, a secretary ran the attendance sheets through a machine and a recorded call went out to the parents’ home phone, alerting them about their truant children.

They were together constantly, it seemed; they finished each other’s sentences, they talked in a patois of inside jokes and shared references that sometimes she barely understood.

Her fontanel was sunken in, a telltale sign of dehydration, and her ribs and the small bones of her spine had been visible under her skin, like a string of beads.

But his interest in Bebe had been purely platonic.

They owned their own home in a safe, affluent neighborhood.

He was a tall man, especially for an Asian: six feet, lean and rangy, with the build of a basketball player—and indeed, he had played starting forward for Shaker’s varsity team back in the sixties.

But the truth was—as Mr. Richardson recognized—that an angry Asian man didn’t fit the public’s expectations, and was therefore unnerving. Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan.

It was the first time Trip had been to her house, and to her it seemed momentous to be able to lie down with him in a place of her own choosing, instead of on the old worn-out couch in Tim Michaels’s basement, surrounded by the PlayStation and the air hockey table and Tim’s old soccer trophies, all the paraphernalia of someone else’s life.

“Dude,” Tim said when he’d caught up to Moody. “You know anything about this mystery girl of your brother’s?”
It took Moody a moment to parse this question. “Mystery girl?”

Over the past two months she had wormed into his mind at all hours of the day: in chemistry lab, during practice, at night when he normally would have fallen asleep quickly and dreamed banal dreams.

Because the baby herself was in the care of a sitter and not present—infants being notoriously indisposed to long hearings—Ed Lim had wisely blown up a photograph and placed it on his prep table, and everyone in the court had been staring at it every day.

At eighteen, Elizabeth Manwill was an easy target for mockery: glasses perpetually sliding down her nose, forehead knobby with acne, clothes frumpy and ill fitting.

She had reopened the budget spreadsheet and put the monitor back to sleep, and when Elizabeth sat down again at her desk that afternoon, she would notice nothing amiss.

“Is Lexie still doing theatre?” she asked, and for the rest of the meal they made superficial chitchat about the common denominators of their life: children, traffic, the weather.

“They’re beside themselves with joy. Bebe Chow took it hard, though. Burst out screaming. The bailiff had to escort her outside.” He paused. “Poor woman. I can’t help but feel bad for her.”

The bailiff, who had a daughter about Bebe’s age, took her to an anteroom and pressed a cup of lukewarm coffee into her hands.

Bebe said nothing, just as she had said nothing all this time, and Mia wondered if she should ask what she was thinking, if she should push her to stay, if Bebe would be all right. In her place, she thought, she’d rather not be forced to talk, and tact won out.

On an ordinary day, Mrs. Richardson would have opened the door, told Izzy to turn the volume down, made some disparaging comments about how depressing and angry Izzy’s music always seemed to be.

“Maybe.” Mrs. Richardson looked at Mia closely. “The Ryans are rich. They wanted a baby so desperately. They’d have given her a wonderful life. If Pearl had gotten to choose, do you think she’d have chosen to stay with you? To live like a vagabond?”

Everything else—the gateleg table they’d painted blue, the mismatched chairs, Pearl’s bed and Mia’s mattress and the tussock of pillows they’d called a couch—would be left behind.

“No,” Mia agreed. “It’s not.” Pearl waited for a parental platitude to follow: Life isn’t fair, or Fair doesn’t always mean right.

Even now, Izzy thought, her sister seemed less effervescent, less gregarious, as if a damper had been closed.

Even now, Izzy thought, her sister seemed less effervescent, less gregarious, as if a damper had been closed.

Izzy’s heart went leaden and cold. “Did they happen to say where they were going?” she asked, though she already knew the truth: she had missed them, and they were gone.

Trip and Moody had both gone out: Trip to distract himself with a pickup game at the community center, Moody on his bike to Pearl’s house, where he intended to apologize but instead—to his consternation—found a locked door and no Volkswagen.

It was one of her own articles, Mrs. Richardson was sure, though with all the words gone there was no way to tell which one: the write-up of the Nature Center fund-raiser, the report on the new community colonnade, the progress of the “Citizens on Patrol” project, any one of the pieces she’d dutifully churned out over the years, any one of the stories that had, despite her intentions, built the bulk of her career.

The night before, he and Linda, both exhausted from the verdict, the press conference, the gauntlet of the entire ordeal, had fallen into the kind of sleep they hadn’t had for months: deep, dreamless, and uninterrupted.