Селеста Инг - Little Fires Everywhere

The press conference ran longer than expected—nearly every news outfit had questions for the McCulloughs, and the McCulloughs, dazzled by their good fortune, stayed to answer them all. Were they relieved to have the ordeal over? Yes, of course they were. What were their plans for the next few days? They would take some time to themselves, now that Mirabelle was home to stay. They were looking forward to their life together as a family. What were they going to make for Mirabelle’s first meal back home? Mrs. McCullough answered: macaroni and cheese, her favorite. When would the adoption process be finalized? Very soon, they hoped.

A reporter from Channel 19, at the back of the crowd, raised her hand. Did they feel any sympathy for Bebe Chow, who would never get to see her daughter again?

Mrs. McCullough stiffened. “Let’s remember,” she said sharply, “that Bebe Chow wasn’t able to care for Mirabelle, that she abandoned her, that she walked away from her responsibilities as a mother. Of course it saddens me that anyone would have to go through such a thing. But the important thing to remember is that the court decided Mark and I are the most appropriate parents for Mirabelle, and that now Mirabelle will have a stable, permanent home. I think that speaks volumes, don’t you?”

By the time the conference had wound down, and the McCulloughs had taken Mirabelle home for good, it was almost five thirty. Mrs. Richardson, due to her husband’s involvement in the case, could not write the Sun Press ’s story on the decision, so Sam Levi had been assigned the story instead. In his place, Mrs. Richardson was to cover Sam’s usual beat—city politics. It was nearly nine o’clock when Mrs. Richardson finally filed her stories and arrived home. Her children had scattered to their own devices. Lexie’s and Trip’s cars were gone, and on the counter Mrs. Richardson found a note: Mom, went to Serena’s, back ~11 L. No note from Trip, but that was typical: Trip never remembered to leave notes. Ordinarily this was a source of annoyance, but this time Mrs. Richardson found herself relieved: with so many people in the Richardson house, there was usually an audience, and tonight she did not want an audience.

Upstairs, she found Izzy’s door shut, music wailing from inside. She had gone upstairs even before the pizza had arrived and had been in her room since, thinking about Bebe, how utterly shattered she had seemed. Part of her wanted to scream, so she slid a Tori Amos CD into the player, turned up the volume, and let it do the screaming for her. And part of her had wanted to cry—though she never cried, hadn’t cried in years. She lay in the center of her bed and dug her fingernails into her palms so hard they left a row of half-moons, to keep tears from falling. By the time her mother came past her doorway and down the hall, toward Moody’s room, she had listened to the album four times and was just beginning on the fifth.

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. Today, however, she had more important things on her mind. Instead, she went down the hallway to Moody’s room and rapped on the door.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

Moody was sprawled on his bed, guitar beside him, scribbling in a notebook. “What,” he said without looking up. He didn’t bother to sit up as his mother entered, which irritated her further. She shut the door and marched to the bed and yanked the notebook out of his hands.

“You look at me when I’m talking to you,” she said. “I found out, you know. Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Moody stared. “Found out what?”

“Did you think I was blind? Did you think I wouldn’t even notice?” Mrs. Richardson slammed the notebook shut. “The two of you sneaking around all the time. I’m not stupid, Moody. Of course I knew what you were up to. I just thought you’d be a little more responsible.”

In Izzy’s room, the music clicked off, but neither Moody nor his mother noticed.

Moody slowly pushed himself up to a sitting position. “ What are you talking about?”

“I know,” Mrs. Richardson said. “About Pearl. About the baby.” The shock on Moody’s face, his stunned silence, told her everything. He hadn’t known, she realized. “She didn’t tell you?” Moody’s gaze had unfocused slowly from her face, like a boat adrift. “She didn’t tell you,” Mrs. Richardson said, sinking down on the bed beside him. “Pearl had an abortion.” She felt a pang of guilt. Would things have been different, she wondered, if he had known? When Moody still said nothing, Mrs. Richardson leaned over to take his hand. “I thought you knew,” she said. “I assumed you’d talked it over and decided to end it.”

Moody slowly, coldly, pulled his hand away. “I think you have the wrong son,” he said. It was Mrs. Richardson’s turn to be taken aback. “There’s nothing between Pearl and me. It wasn’t mine.” He laughed, a tight, bitter cough. “Why don’t you go ask Trip? He’s the one screwing her.”

With one hand he took the notebook from his mother’s lap and opened it again, focusing on his own handwriting on the page to keep tears from escaping. It was true for him now, in a way it hadn’t been before. She had been with Trip, he had made love to her and she had let him and this had happened. Mrs. Richardson, however, didn’t notice. She rose, in a daze, and headed down the hall to her own room to think things over. Trip? she thought. Could that be? Neither she nor Moody was aware of the sudden quiet from Izzy’s room, that Izzy’s door was now open a crack, that Izzy, too, was sitting in stunned silence, absorbing what she’d heard.

Mrs. Richardson went to work early on Friday morning, leaving a half hour early to avoid facing any of her children. The night before, Lexie had come home close to midnight, Trip even later, and though normally she’d have scolded them for being out late on a school night, she had instead stayed in her room, ignoring their attempts to be stealthy on the stairs. She was trying to make sense of it all. Due to the extra stress she had allowed herself a second glass of wine, which had gone warm. Trip and Pearl? She understood, of course, why Pearl would fall for Trip—girls generally did—but what Trip might see in Pearl was another matter. She fell asleep puzzling over it, and woke no more illuminated. He was not, she reflected as she backed out of the garage, the kind of boy who usually fell for serious, intellectual girls like Pearl. She could admit this, even as his mother, even as she adored him. He had always been about surface, her beautiful, sunny, shallow boy, and on the surface she couldn’t see what would draw him to Pearl. So did Pearl have hidden depths, or did Trip? This thought preoccupied her all the way into her office.

All morning she thought about what to do. Confront Trip? Confront Pearl? Confront them both together? She and her husband did not speak to the children about their love lives—she’d had a talk with Lexie and Izzy, when their periods had started, about their responsibilities. (“Vulnerabilities,” Izzy had corrected her, and left the room.) But in general she preferred to assume that her children were smart enough to make their own decisions, that the school had armed them well with knowledge. If they were up to things —as she euphemistically thought of it—she didn’t need, or want, to know. To stand in front of Trip and that girl and say to them, I know what you’ve been doing—it seemed as mortifying as stripping them both naked.