Селеста Инг - Little Fires Everywhere

“Mrs. McCullough!” Barbra cried, as if they’d run into each other at a party and it was all a delightful coincidence. Behind her loomed a burly cameraman in a parka, though all Mrs. McCullough registered was the barrel of a lens and a blinking red light like one glowing eye. Mirabelle began to cry. “We understand that you’re in the process of adopting a little girl. Are you aware her mother is fighting to regain custody?”

Mrs. McCullough slammed the door shut, but the news crew had gotten what they’d come for. Only two and a half seconds of footage, but it was enough: the slender white woman at the door of her imposing brick Shaker house, looking angry and afraid, clutching the screaming Asian baby in her arms.

With a vague sense of foreboding, Mrs. McCullough checked the clock. Her husband was en route to work downtown and would not be there for another thirty-five minutes at least. She called one friend after another, but none of them had seen the news story the night before either, and they could offer only moral support, not enlightenment. “Don’t worry,” each said in turn. “It’ll be okay. Just Barbra Pierce stirring up trouble.”

Mr. McCullough, meanwhile, arrived at work and took the elevator up to the seventh floor, where Rayburn Financial Services had their offices. He had just extricated one arm from his overcoat when Ted Rayburn appeared in his doorway.

“Listen, Mark,” he said. “I don’t know if you saw the news last night on Channel Three, but there’s something you should know about.” He shut the door behind him, and Mr. McCullough listened, still clutching his overcoat against himself, as if it were a towel. Ted Rayburn, in the same measured, slightly concerned tones he used with clients, described the news segment: the outside shot of the McCulloughs’ house, shaded in the evening light, but still familiar to him from their years of hosting cocktail parties, brunches, summer barbecues. The anchor’s lead-in: Adoptions are about giving new homes to children who don’t have families. But what if the child already has a family? And the interview with the mother—Bee-something, Ted hadn’t caught the full name—who had begged for her baby on camera. “I make a mistake,” she said, every syllable carefully enunciated. “Now I have a good job. I have my life together now. I want my baby back. These McCulloughs have no right adopt a baby when her own mother wants her. A child belong with her mother.”

Ted Rayburn had nearly finished when the phone on the desk rang, and Mr. McCullough, seeing the number, knew that it was his wife, and what was happening, and what he would now have to explain to her. He picked up the receiver.

“I’m coming home,” he said, and set it down again and picked up his keys.

Mia, who did not own a television, had not seen the news segment either. But Wednesday afternoon, just before it aired, Bebe dropped by to tell her how the interview had gone. “They think this is a good story,” she said. She was wearing her black pants and a white shirt with a faded soy-sauce stain on the cuff, and from this Mia knew she was headed in to work. “They talk to me for almost an hour. They have very many questions for me.”

She broke off at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. It was Izzy, just arrived from school, and both of them fell silent at the sight of a stranger. “I better go,” Bebe said after a moment. “The bus coming soon.” On the way out the door, she leaned close to Mia. “They say people really going to get behind me,” she whispered.

“Who was that?” Izzy asked, when Bebe had gone.

“Just a friend,” Mia had answered. “A friend from work.”

The producers at Channel 3, as it turned out, had good instincts. In the hours after the segment aired, the station had been flooded with calls about the story—enough to warrant a follow-up, and enough for Channel 9, ever competitive, to deploy Barbra Pierce first thing the next morning.

“Barbra Pierce,” Linda McCullough said to Mrs. Richardson Thursday evening. “Barbra Pierce with her stilettos and her Dolly Parton hair. Showed up on my doorstep and shoved a microphone in my face.” The two women had just watched Barbra Pierce’s segment, each on her own couch in front of the television holding the cordless phone to her ear, and Mrs. Richardson had the sudden eerie feeling that they were fourteen again, Princess phones in their laps, watching Green Acres in tandem so that they could hear each other laugh.

“That’s what Barbra Pierce does,” Mrs. Richardson said. “Ms. Sensational Action News in a skirt suit. She’s a bully with a cameraman.”

“The lawyer says we’re on solid footing,” Mrs. McCullough said. “He says that by leaving the baby, she gave up custody to the state and the state gave it to us, so her grievance is really with the state and not us. He says the process is eighty percent complete and it’ll only take another month or two for Mirabelle to be ours permanently, and then this woman will have no claim on her at all.”

They had tried so long, she and her husband, for a baby. After their wedding, she’d gotten pregnant right away. And then, a few weeks later, she’d begun bleeding, and she knew even before they consulted the doctor that the baby was gone. “Very common,” the doctor had reassured her. “Half of all pregnancies end in the first few weeks. Most women don’t even know they’d conceived.” But Mrs. McCullough had known, and three months later, when it happened again, and again four months after that, and again five months after that , she had been painfully aware each time that something alive had sparked in her, and that somehow that little spark had gone out.

The doctors prescribed patience, vitamins, iron supplements. Another pregnancy came; this time it was nearly ten weeks before the bleeding began. Mrs. McCullough cried at night, and after she fell asleep, her husband cried beside her. After three years of trying, she had been pregnant five times, and there was still no baby. Wait six months, the obstetrician recommended; let your body recover. When the waiting period was up, they tried again. Two months later she was pregnant; a month later, she was not. Each time she told no one, hoping that if she sealed the knowledge tight inside her, it would stay and grow. Nothing changed. By then her old friend Elena had a girl and a boy and was pregnant with a third, and though Elena called often, though she would happily have taken Linda into her arms and let her cry—as they’d done so often for each other growing up, over big things and small—Mrs. McCullough found this was something she could not share. She never told Elena when she was pregnant, so how could she tell her the pregnancy had ended? She did not even know how to begin. I lost another one. It happened again. Whenever they had lunch, Mrs. McCullough could not keep herself from staring at Mrs. Richardson’s rounding belly. She felt like a pervert, she so badly wanted to touch it, to stroke it, to caress it. In the background, Lexie and Trip babbled and tottered, and it became easier, after a while, to simply avoid it all. Mrs. Richardson, for her part, noticed that her dear friend Linda called her less, that when she herself called, she often got the machine—Mrs. McCullough’s cheery voice singing, “Leave a message for Linda and Mark, and we’ll call you back!” But no one ever did.

The year after Izzy was born, Mrs. McCullough became pregnant again. By then it was exhausting: the plotting of her cycle, the waiting, the calls to the doctor. Even the sex—carefully scheduled for her most fertile days—had begun to feel like a chore. Who’d ever have believed it, she thought, remembering high school, when she and Mark had fumbled frantically against each other in the backseat of his car. The doctors put her on strict bed rest: no more than forty minutes a day on her feet, including trips to the bathroom; no exertions. She made it to almost five months before she woke at two A.M. with a terrible stillness in her belly, like the silence after a bell has stopped ringing. At the hospital, while she lay in a drugged fog, the doctors coaxed the baby from her womb. “Do you want to see her?” one asked when it was over, and a nurse held out the baby, swaddled in a white cloth, in her cupped palms. To Mrs. McCullough, she looked impossibly tiny, impossibly rose colored, impossibly glossy and smooth, like something blown from pink glass. Impossibly still. She nodded vaguely, shut her eyes again, spread her legs to let the doctors stitch her up.