Селеста Инг - Little Fires Everywhere

There was a soft knock at the door, and Mia pulled the robe more tightly around herself. Her clothes sat folded neatly on the armchair in the corner. Madeline knocked again, then opened the door.

“Are you ready?” she asked. In her hands was a wooden breakfast tray with a covered teacup and a turkey baster with a bright yellow bulb. She set it down on the bedside table, then—awkwardly—knelt and put her arms around Mia. “Thank you,” she whispered.

When Madeline had gone, Mia took a deep breath. Was she sure? She lifted the turkey baster from the tray: it was warm. Madeline must have rinsed it in hot water to take away the chill, she realized, and this small generous gesture made her eyes fill. She lifted the lid from the cup, loosened the belt on the bathrobe, and lay back on the bed.

A half an hour later—“You must keep your legs elevated for at least twenty minutes,” Madeline had explained to her, “to increase the chances of conception”—Mia emerged from the guest room to find Madeline and Joseph in the living room, holding hands. She had put her own clothes back on, but as they looked up at her in unison—eyes wide, like nervous children—she had the sudden feeling of being naked.

“It’s done,” she said, and patted the waist of her jeans.

Madeline rose from the sofa in one fluid motion and clasped Mia’s hand in hers. “We can’t thank you enough,” she said. “Here’s hoping it takes.” She set both of her palms on Mia’s belly, as if offering a benediction, and Mia’s muscles tensed and hardened.

“I’ll call for the car—Joey can take you home,” Madeline said, and then, “Of course we know it will take a few tries. This is going to take persistence, for all of us. We’ll see you again day after tomorrow?”

Mia thought of the tray still sitting in the guest room, of Madeline rinsing the baster and the cup in the kitchen sink, readying them for their next use. “Of course,” she said. “Of course.” She was quiet all through the ride back to the Village, as Joseph Ryan chattered to her about how he and Madeline had met, where he’d grown up, the things they had planned for their child.

All summer this became the routine. The obstetrician had given her a chart to map out her most fertile periods, and during that week, she would visit the Ryans every other day. Then, the following week, she would wait, scanning her body for a sign. Each time she had backaches, headaches, cramps, and then—of course—no baby.

“It’ll take a while,” Madeline said as July came to a close. For four months now, no luck. “We always knew this. It doesn’t happen right away.” But Mia was worried. According to the contract they’d signed, the Ryans were free to call off the agreement after six months if no pregnancy resulted. She had kept her jobs at the diner and the bar and the art store—and had dodged questions from her fellow students, back from their summers off, buying supplies for the new term, wondering why she wasn’t coming back. “I’m taking a year off to earn money,” she’d said, which was true, and what she had told Pauline and Mal when, tactfully, they’d hinted at offering her a loan she was too proud to accept. But she knew, too, that if no baby arrived, she would get nothing, and she would have dropped the entire year for nothing, and her leave of absence would likely become permanent.

And then, in September, she waited and waited and nothing happened. No blood. No cramps. Just an intense feeling of fatigue, an overwhelming desire to crawl into bed and burrow beneath the comforter like a cat. Madeline nearly danced with delight when, two days later, Mia arrived at her apartment feeling the same way. She bundled Mia into her coat, as if Mia herself were a child, and herded her into the elevator, then into a taxi to a pharmacy on Broadway. From a bewildering array of boxes with confident names—Predictor, Fact, Accu-Test—she selected one and pressed it into Mia’s hands.

The test, it turned out, was complicated. It involved a glass test tube in a special holder, suspended over an angled mirror. Mia was to add several drops of her urine and wait for an hour. If a dark ring formed, she was pregnant. She and Madeline sat in silence for forty-five minutes, side by side on the edge of the bathtub, and then Madeline suddenly took Mia’s hand. “Look,” she whispered, leaning toward the vanity, and Mia saw, in the little mirror, an iron-colored bull’s-eye slowly appearing.

From then on things changed quickly. Mia’s roommates did not notice anything until she began throwing up in the bathroom. “Sweet gig,” one of them said. The other said, “I wouldn’t go through all that, not for a million bucks.” Weeks passed. The Ryans moved her to a little studio apartment they owned, a quiet walk-up just off West End Avenue. “We rent it out but the tenants just left,” Madeline said to Mia. “Quieter for you. More space. Fewer people coming and going. And you’ll be so much closer to us, for when things start happening.” Mia quit her job at the art store—her belly was starting to show—but kept her other jobs, though she allowed the Ryans to linger under the impression that she had stopped working. After every doctor’s appointment, she came by to give them the latest updates, and as her clothes began to tighten the Ryans presented her with new ones. “I saw this dress,” Madeline would say, handing Mia a tissue-lined shopping bag with a flowered maternity dress inside it. “I thought it would look perfect on you.” She was, Mia realized, buying Mia the maternity clothes she would have bought herself, and she smiled and accepted them, and wore the dress on her next visit.

She said nothing to her parents about any of this; she told them only, as Christmas approached, that she would not be coming home. Too expensive, she claimed, knowing they would never ask her about school if she didn’t bring it up, and they didn’t. But at the end of January, she finally told Warren the truth. “You never talk about class anymore,” he said on the phone one evening. She was five months along by then, and though she could have kept it from him—how would he ever know?—she didn’t like the thought of hiding it from him any longer.

“Wren, promise you won’t tell Mom and Dad,” she’d said, taking a deep breath. Afterward, there was a long silence on the phone.

“Mia,” he’d said, and she knew he was serious, because he never used her full name. “I can’t believe you would do something like this.”

“I thought it through.” Mia set one hand on her belly, where she had recently begun to feel faint flutterings. 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. “They’re such good people. Kind people. I’m helping them out, Wren. They want this baby so much. And they’re helping me, too. They’ve done so much for me.”

“But don’t you think it’s going to be hard to give it up?” Warren asked. “I don’t think I could do it.”

“Well, you’re not the one doing it, are you.”

“Don’t get pissy with me,” Warren said. “If you’d asked me, I’d have told you not to.”

“Just don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Mia said again.

“I won’t,” Warren said at last. “But I’ll tell you this. I’m the baby’s uncle, and I don’t like it.” There was an anger in his voice she had never heard before, at least not directed at her.

After that, she and Warren didn’t speak for a while. Every week, when she thought about calling him, she decided not to. Why call and argue again, she reasoned. In a few months the baby would be born, she would go back to her old life, and things would be as they had been. “Don’t get attached,” she said to her belly when the baby nudged her with a foot. It was never clear to her, even then, whether she was speaking to the baby, or to her belly, or to herself.