Селеста Инг - Little Fires Everywhere

Serena’s house was on Shaker Boulevard, by the middle school, nearly two miles away. Forty minutes later, Serena answered the doorbell to find Izzy, breathless, on the front steps.

“What are you doing here, freak?” Lexie said, coming down the stairs behind Serena.

“I need to ask you something,” Izzy said.

“Ever heard of the telephone?”

“Shut up. It’s important.” Izzy pulled her sister by the arm into the living room and Serena, familiar with Richardson family dynamics, retreated to the kitchen to give them some privacy.

“What,” Lexie said when they were alone.

“Did you have an abortion?” Izzy said.

“What?” Lexie’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“When Mom was out of town. Did you?”

“It’s none of your fucking business.” Lexie turned to go, but Izzy barreled ahead.

“You did, didn’t you. That time you said you slept over at Pearl’s.”

“It’s not a crime, Izzy. Tons of people do it.”

“Did Pearl go with you?”

Lexie sighed. “She drove me. And before you start getting all moralistic and self-righteous—”

“I don’t care about your morals, Lex.” Izzy flicked her hair out of her face impatiently. “Mom thinks Pearl’s the one who had it.”

“Pearl?” Lexie laughed. “Sorry, that’s just funny. Virginal, innocent little Pearl.”

“She must think that for a reason.”

“I made the appointment under Pearl’s name,” Lexie said. “Whatever. She didn’t mind.” She turned to go, then wheeled around again. “Don’t you dare tell anyone about this. Not Moody, not Mom, not anyone. Got it?”

“You are so fucking selfish,” Izzy said. Without saying good-bye, she pushed past Lexie into the front hallway, where she nearly knocked Serena over on her way out the door.

It took her another forty minutes on foot to reach the little house on Winslow, and by the time she got there she knew something was wrong. All the lights upstairs were off and there was no sign of the Rabbit in the driveway. She hesitated for a moment on the front walk, poking at the peach tree, where the blossoms were shriveling and turning brown. Then she went around to the side of the house and rang the doorbell until Mr. Yang answered.

“Is Mia here?” she said. “Or Pearl?”

Mr. Yang shook his head. “They leave maybe five, ten minutes ago.”

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.

Mr. Yang shook his head again. “They don’t tell me.” He had peeked out from behind the curtains just in time to see Mia and Pearl backing carefully out of the driveway, the Rabbit piled high with bags and boxes, and driving off into the growing darkness. They had been good people, he thought sadly, and he wished them a safe journey, wherever they were headed.

A note, Izzy thought wildly; there must be a note. Mia would not have left without a good-bye. “Can I go up and check their apartment for something?” she said. “I promise, I won’t bother anything.”

“You have a key?” Mr. Yang opened the door and let Izzy clomp up the stairs. “Maybe the door locked?” It was, in fact, and Izzy knocked several times and rattled the doorknob before giving up and coming back down.

“I don’t have key,” Mr. Yang said. He held the storm door open as Izzy rushed outside. “You ask your mommy, she have the key.”

It took Izzy twenty-five minutes to walk home, where—although she would never know it—Mia and Pearl had dropped off their keys just a short time earlier. It took her another half an hour to find her mother’s spare keys to the Winslow house in the catchall drawer in the kitchen. She was quiet, ignoring the half-eaten carton of lo mein and orange chicken left on the counter for her, careful not to disturb her brothers or her parents, who by then had dispersed to their various corners of the house. By the time she returned to Winslow Road, it was nine thirty, and Mr. Yang—who on weekdays rose at 4:15 in order to drive his school bus route, and liked to keep a regular schedule—had already gone to bed. So no one heard Izzy come in through the side door, unlock the door to Mia and Pearl’s apartment, and step inside at last, knowing deep down that she was too late, that they were gone for good.

By nine the next morning, the Richardson house was nearly empty as well. Mr. Richardson had gone in to the office to catch up, as he often did on Saturday mornings; the recent developments in the McCullough case had set him behind in everything else. Lexie was asleep across town in Serena’s queen-size bed. 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. And on Saturday mornings, Izzy knew, Mrs. Richardson always went to the rec center pool to swim laps. Her mother was such a creature of habit that Izzy didn’t even bother to peek into her bedroom. She was certain she had the house to herself.

It was unfair, all of it, deeply unfair: that was the one thought that had pulsed through Izzy’s mind all night. That Mia and Pearl had had to leave, that they’d finally made a home and now they had been driven away. The kindest people she knew, the most caring, the most sincere, and they’d been chased away by her family. In her mind she cataloged the many betrayals. Lexie had lied; she’d used Pearl. Trip had taken advantage of her. Moody had betrayed her, on purpose. Her father was a baby stealer. And her mother: well, her mother had been at the root of it all.

She thought of Mia’s house, glowing golden and warm. All her life she’d felt hard and angry; her mother always criticizing her, Lexie and Trip always mocking her. Mia hadn’t been like that. With Mia she’d been different, in a way she hadn’t known she could be: in Mia’s accepting presence she’d become curious and kind and open, as if under a magic spell. She had felt, finally, as if she could speak without immediately bumping into the hard shell of her sheltered life, as if she suddenly saw that the solid walls penning her in were actually bars, with spaces between them wide enough to slip through. Now Izzy tried to imagine going back to life as it had been before: life in their beautiful, perfectly ordered, abundantly furnished house, where the grass was always cut and the leaves were always raked and there was never, ever any garbage in sight; in their beautiful, perfectly ordered neighborhood where every lawn had a tree and the streets curved so that no one went too fast and every house harmonized with the next; in their beautiful, perfectly ordered city, where everyone got along and everyone followed the rules and everything had to be beautiful and perfect on the outside, no matter what mess lay within. She could not pretend that nothing had happened. Mia had opened a door in her that could not be shut again.

And then she thought about the first day she’d met Mia, what Mia had asked her: What are you going to do about it? It was the first time Izzy had ever felt there was something she could do about anything. Now she remembered what Mia had said to her the last time they’d seen each other, the words that had been echoing through her head ever since: how sometimes you needed to start over from scratch. Scorched earth, she had said, and at that moment Izzy decided what she was going to do.

She had spent the night planning and now that it was time, she hardly thought at all. It was as if she were standing outside herself, watching someone else do these things. Their father always kept a can of gasoline in the garage, to fill the snow blower, and to power the generator if the power went out during a storm. With the jerry can Izzy made a neat circle on her sister’s bed, then her brothers’. The gasoline made a dark, oily blotch on Lexie’s flowered comforter, on Trip’s pillow, on Moody’s plaid sheets. By the time she’d finished in Moody’s room the can was empty, so she contented herself with setting it outside the closed door of her parents’ bedroom. Then she replaced the keys to the Winslow house in the catchall drawer and removed the box of matches.