Little Fires Everywhere (13 page)

So Mia had always avoided getting involved in the affairs of others. It made everything simpler; it made it easier when their lease was up or she'd grown tired of the town or she'd felt, uneasily, that she wanted to be elsewhere. But this, with Bebe—this was different. The idea that someone might take a mother's child away: it horrified her. It was as if someone had slid a blade into her and with one quick twist hollowed her out, leaving nothing inside but a cold rush of air. At that moment Pearl came into the kitchen in search of a drink and Mia wrapped her arms around her daughter quickly, as if she were on the edge of a precipice, and held her so long and so tightly that Pearl finally said, “Mom. Are you okay?”

These McCulloughs, Mia was sure, were good people. But that wasn't the point. She thought suddenly of those moments at the restaurant, after the dinner rush had ended and things were quiet, when Bebe sometimes
rested her elbows on the counter and drifted away. Mia understood exactly where she drifted to. To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a
place,
a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.

Early, early on, the very first night she and Pearl had begun their travels, Mia had curled up on their makeshift bed in the backseat of the Rabbit, with baby Pearl snuggled in the curve of her belly, and watched her daughter sleep. There, so close that she could feel Pearl's warm, milky breath on her cheek, she had marveled at this little creature.
Bone of my bones and
flesh of my flesh,
she had thought. Her mother had made her go to Sunday school every week until she was thirteen, and as if the words were a spell she suddenly saw hints of her mother's face in Pearl's: the set of the jaw, the faint wrinkle between the eyebrows that appeared as Pearl drifted into a puzzling dream. She had not thought about her mother in some time, and a sharp bolt of longing flashed through her chest. As if it had disturbed her, Pearl yawned and stretched and Mia had cuddled her closer, stroked her hair, pressed her lips to that unbelievably soft cheek.
Bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh,
she had thought again as Pearl's eyes fluttered closed once more, and she was certain that no one could ever love this child as she did.

“I'm fine,” she said to Pearl now, and with a wrenching effort she let her daughter go. “All finished here. Let's go home, okay?”

Even then Mia had a sense of what she was starting; a hot smell pricked her nostrils, like the first wisp of smoke from a far-off blaze. She did not know if Bebe would get her baby back. All she knew was that the thought of someone else claiming her child was unbearable. How could these people, she thought, how could these people take a child from its mother? She told herself this all night and into the next morning, as she dialed, as she waited for the phone to ring. It wasn't right. A mother should never have to give up her child.

“Bebe,” she said, when a voice picked up on the other end. “It's Mia, from work. There's something I think you should know.”

T
his was why, while Pearl and Mia were eating dinner Tuesday evening, the doorbell rang followed by a frantic knocking. Mia ran down to the side door, and Pearl heard a murmur of voices and crying, and then her mother came into the kitchen followed by a young Chinese woman, who was sobbing.

“I knock and knock,” Bebe was saying. “I ring the doorbell and they don't answer so I knock and knock. I can see that woman inside. Peeking out from behind the curtain to check if I go away.”

Mia guided her to a chair—her own, with a plate of half-finished noodles still in front of it. “Pearl, get Bebe some water. And maybe make some tea.” She sat down in the other chair and leaned across the table to take Bebe's hand. “You shouldn't have just gone over there like that. You couldn't expect them to just let you come right in.”

“I call her first!” Bebe wiped her face on the back of her hand, and Mia took a napkin from the table and nudged it toward her. It was actually an old flowered handkerchief from the thrift store, and Bebe scrubbed at her eyes. “I look them up in the phone book and call them, right after I hang up with you. Nobody answer. I just get the machine. What kind of
message I am going to leave? So I try them again, and again, all morning, until finally somebody answer at two o'clock.
She
answer.”

Across the kitchen, Pearl set the kettle on the stove and clicked on the burner. She had never met Bebe before, though her mother had mentioned her once or twice. Her mother hadn't said how pretty Bebe was—big eyes, high cheekbones, thick black hair swept up into a ponytail—or how young. To Pearl, anyone over about twenty seemed impossibly adult, but she guessed that Bebe might be twenty-five or so. Definitely younger than her mother, but there was something almost childish in the way she spoke, in the way she sat with her feet primly together and her hands clasped, in the way she glanced up at Mia helplessly, as if she were Mia's daughter, too, that made her think of Bebe as if she were another teenager. Pearl did not realize, nor would she for a while yet, how unusually self-possessed her mother was for someone her age, how savvy and seasoned.

“I tell her who I am,” Bebe was saying. “I say, ‘This is Linda McCullough?' And she say yes, and I tell her, ‘My name is Bebe Chow, I am May Ling's mother.' Just like that, she hang up on me.” Mia shook her head.

“I call her back and she pick up the phone and hang it up again. And then I call her again and I get just a busy signal.” Bebe wiped her nose with the napkin and crumpled it into a ball. “So I go over there. Two buses and I have to ask the driver where to change, and then I walk another mile to their house. Those huge houses—everybody over there drive, no one wants take a bus to work. I ring the front doorbell, and nobody answer, but she watching from upstairs, just looking down at me. I ring the bell again and again and I calling, ‘Mrs. McCullough, it's me, Bebe, I just want to talk to you,' and then the curtain closed. But she still in there, just waiting for me to go away. Like I am going to go away when my baby is in there.

“So I keep on knocking and ringing. Sooner or later she have to come out and then I can talk to her.” She glanced at Mia. “I just want to see my baby again. I think, I can talk with these McCulloughs and get them to understand. But she will not come out.”

Bebe fell silent for a long time and looked down at her hands, and Pearl saw the skin, reddened and raw, along the sides of her fists. She must have been banging on the door for a long, long time, she realized, and she thought simultaneously of how much pain Bebe must have been in, must still be in, and how terrified Mrs. McCullough, locked inside the house, must have felt.

The rest of the story poured out haltingly, as if Bebe were only now piecing the scene together herself. Sometime later a Lexus had pulled up, with a police car right behind it, and Mr. McCullough had emerged. He had told Bebe to leave the property, two police officers flanking him like bodyguards. Bebe had tried to tell them she only wanted to see her baby, but wasn't sure now what she had said, if she had argued or threatened or raged or begged. All she could remember was the line Mr. McCullough kept repeating—“You have no right to be here. You have no right to be here”—and finally one of the officers took her by the arm and pulled her away. Go, they had said, or they would take her down to the station and charge her with trespassing. This she recalled clearly: as the policemen pulled her away from the house, she could hear her child crying from behind the locked front door.

“Oh, Bebe,” Mia said, and Pearl could not tell if she was disappointed or proud.

“What else I can do? I walk all the way here. Forty-five minutes. Who else I can ask for help but you?” She glared at Pearl and Mia fiercely, as if she thought they might contradict her. “I am her
mother.”

“They know that,” Mia said. “They know that very well. Or they wouldn't have run you off like that.” She nudged the mug of tea—lukewarm now—toward Bebe.

“What I can do now? If I go over there again, they call the police and arrest me.”

“You could get a lawyer,” Pearl suggested, and Bebe gave her a gentle pitying glance.

“Where I am going to get money for a lawyer?” she asked. She glanced down at her clothing—black pants and a thin white button-down—and Pearl understood suddenly: this was her work uniform; she'd left work without even bothering to change. “In the bank I have six hundred and eleven dollars. You think a lawyer help me for six hundred and eleven dollars?”

“Okay,” said Mia. She pushed the remains of Pearl's dinner—glazed now with a white sheen of fat—to one side. All this time she had been thinking; in fact, she'd been thinking about this ever since Lexie had mentioned the baby: about what she would do if she were in Bebe's position, about what it was possible for anyone in Bebe's position to do. “Listen to me. You want to fight this fight? Here's what you do.”

Wednesday afternoon, had any of the Richardson children been paying attention to the commercials during Jerry Springer, they might have noticed the teasers for the Channel 3 evening news, with a photo of the McCulloughs' house. If they had, they might have notified their mother, who was hammering out a story on a proposed school levy and would not be home to watch the news—or to alert Mrs. McCullough.

But as it happened, Lexie and Trip were so involved in a spirited
argument over which guest had better hair, the drag queen or his embittered ex-wife, that no one heard the commercials. Pearl and Moody, looking on in bemusement, didn't even glance at the screen, and Lexie had interrupted before Trip was halfway through his case for the drag queen. Izzy, meanwhile, was at Mia's in the darkroom, watching her pull a new print from the developer and hang it to dry. So no one saw the teasers for the nightly news or watched the news that evening. Mrs. McCullough was also not a news watcher, and thus, when she answered her doorbell early Thursday morning with Mirabelle on her hip, expecting a parcel from her sister, she was alarmed to find Barbra Pierce—Channel 9's bouffanted local investigative journalist—standing on her front steps with a microphone in hand.

“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.”