Little Fires Everywhere (14 page)

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.

She began to walk the long way around to the store to avoid the playground, the elementary school, the bus stop. She began to hate pregnant women. She wanted to slap them, to throw things at them, to grab them by the shoulders and bite them. On their tenth wedding anniversary, Mr.
McCullough took her to Giovanni's, her favorite restaurant, and as they entered, a vastly pregnant woman waddled up behind them. Mrs. McCullough pushed the door open and then, as the pregnant woman came up behind, let it shut in the woman's face, and Mr. McCullough, turning back to take his wife's arm, for a moment could not recognize this woman, so callous, so different from the endlessly maternal woman he'd always known.

Finally, after one last doctor's appointment full of heartrending phrases—
low-motility
sperm; inhospitable womb; conception likely impossible—
they'd decided to adopt. Even IVF would likely fail, the doctors had advised them. Adoption was their best chance for a baby. They'd put their names on every waiting list they could find, and from time to time an adoption agent would call with a possible match. But something always fell through: the mother changed her mind; a father or a cousin or a grandmother showed up out of the blue; the agency decided another, often younger couple was a better fit. A year passed, then two, then three. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a baby, and demand far exceeded supply. That January morning, when the social worker had called to say that she'd gotten their name from one of the adoption agencies, that she had a baby who was theirs if they wanted her: it had felt like a miracle. If they wanted her! All that pain, all that guilt, those seven little ghosts—for Mrs. McCullough never forgot a single one—had, to her amazement, packed themselves into a box and whisked themselves away at the sight of baby Mirabelle: so concrete, so vivid, so inescapably present. Now, at the thought that Mirabelle might be taken as well, Mrs. McCullough realized that the box and its contents had never disappeared, that they had simply been stored away, waiting for someone to open the lid.

The news had cut to commercial, and through the line Mrs. Richardson could hear the tinny jingle of the Cedar Point ad on the McCulloughs'
set, a fraction of a second behind her own. She watched an elderly woman stumble, fall, fumble for the transmitter around her neck, and Barbra Pierce's voice-over echoed in her mind.
This couple wants to adopt her child. But she won't let her baby go without a fight.

“It'll blow over,” Mrs. Richardson said to Mrs. McCullough now. “People will forget about it. It'll pass.”

But it did not pass. Improbable as it seemed, something about the story had touched a nerve in the community. The news was slow: a woman had had septuplets; bears, the
New York Times
reported with a straight face, were the main cause of car break-ins at Yosemite. The most pressing political question—for a few more weeks, at least—was what President Clinton would name his new dog. The city of Cleveland was safe and bored, and eager for a sensation a bit closer to home.

On Friday morning there were two more camera crews at the McCulloughs' door, and three segments that evening, on Channels 5, 19, and 43. Footage of Bebe Chow holding a picture of May Ling at one month old, pleading for her baby back. Shots of the McCulloughs' house with its curtains drawn and front-door light off; a photo of Mr. and Mrs. McCullough, dressed in black tie at a benefit for leukemia, that had run in the glossy society pages of
Shaker
magazine the year before; footage of Mr. McCullough's BMW backing out of the garage and driving away as a reporter jogged alongside holding a microphone up to the window.

By Saturday all the camera crews were back, Mrs. McCullough had locked herself in the house with Mirabelle, and the secretaries at Mr. McCullough's investment firm had been instructed to decline any calls from news sources with “No comment.” Every night Mirabelle McCullough—or May Ling Chow, as some pointedly chose to call her—was a featured story on the evening news, always accompanied by photographs. At first there was only Bebe's snapshot of May Ling as a newborn, but then—
on the advice of the McCulloughs' lawyer, who wanted to provide a counterpoint—came more recent portraits from the McCulloughs, taken at the Dillard's photo studio, showing Mirabelle in a frilly yellow Easter dress with bunny ears, or in a pink romper standing beside an old-fashioned rocking horse. Supporters were emerging on both sides, and by Saturday afternoon, a local lawyer, Ed Lim, had offered to represent Bebe Chow, gratis, and sue the state for custody of her daughter.

Saturday evening, at dinner, Mr. Richardson announced, “Mark and Linda McCullough called this afternoon to ask if I'd work with their lawyer. Seems he doesn't have a lot of court experience, and they thought I might be a good backup.”

Lexie nibbled at her salad. “So will you?”

“None of this is their fault, you know.” Mr. Richardson sawed off a bite of chicken. “They just want to do right by the baby. And the suit isn't directed at them. It's at the state. But they'll be dragged into it, and they're the ones who'll be affected by it most.”

“Except for Mirabelle,” Izzy said. Mrs. Richardson opened her mouth for a sharp remark, but Mr. Richardson quieted her with a glance.

“This whole thing is about Mirabelle, Izzy,” he said. “Everyone involved—we all just want what's best for her. We just have to figure out what that is.”

We,
Izzy thought. Her father had become part of this already. She thought of the image the newspaper kept running of Bebe Chow: the sadness in her eyes, the palm-sized photo of baby May Ling in her hand, one corner creased, as if it had been kept in a pocket (which it had). Right away she'd recognized the woman she'd seen in Mia's kitchen, who had fallen silent as soon as she'd come in, who'd stared at her as if she were
afraid, almost hunted. “Just a friend,” Mia had said when Izzy had asked who she was, and if Mia trusted Bebe, Izzy knew where her loyalties lay.

“Baby stealer,” she said.

A shocked silence dropped over the table like a heavy cloth. Across the table, Lexie and Trip exchanged wary, unsurprised glances. Moody shot Izzy a look that said
shut up
, but she wasn't watching.

“Izzy, apologize to your father,” said Mrs. Richardson.

“What for?” Izzy demanded. “They're practically kidnapping her. And everyone's just letting them. Daddy's even helping.”

“Let's calm down,” Mr. Richardson began, but it was too late. When it came to Izzy, Mrs. Richardson was seldom calm, and for that matter, Izzy herself never was.

“Izzy. Go to your room.”

Izzy turned to her father. “Maybe they could just pay her off. How much is a baby worth in today's market? Ten thousand bucks?”

“Isabelle Marie Richardson—”

“Maybe they can bargain her down to five.” Izzy dropped her fork onto her plate with a clatter and left the room.
Mia should
hear about this,
she thought, running upstairs and into her bedroom. She would know what to do. She would know how to fix this. Lexie's laugh floated up the stairwell and down the hallway, and Izzy slammed the door shut.

Downstairs, Mrs. Richardson sank back into her seat, hands shaking. It would take her until the next morning to think of a suitable punishment for Izzy: confiscating her beloved Doc Martens and throwing them in the trash. If you dress like a thug, she would insist as she opened the trash barrel, of course you act like a thug. For now, she pressed her lips together tightly and set her knife and fork down in a neat X across her plate.

“Should we keep the news quiet?” she asked. “That you're working with the McCulloughs, I mean.”

Mr. Richardson shook his head. “It'll be in the paper tomorrow,” he said, and he was right.

On Sunday, the
Plain Dealer
ran the story on the front page, just below the fold:
LOCAL MOTHER FIGHTS FOR DAUGHTER'S CUSTODY
. It was a good article, Mrs. Richardson thought, sipping her coffee and skimming over it with a professional eye: an overview of the case; a quick mention that the McCulloughs would be represented by William Richardson of Kleinman, Richardson, and Fish; a statement from Bebe Chow's lawyer.
“We are confident,” said Edward Lim, “that the state will see fit to return custody of May Ling Chow to her biological mother.”
The very fact that the paper had run it so prominently, however, suggested that the real coverage was only beginning.

At the bottom of the article, a single sentence caught Mrs. Richardson's eye: “Ms. Chow had been informed of her daughter's whereabouts by a coworker at Lucky Palace, a Chinese restaurant on Warrensville Road.” Even so carefully and anonymously phrased, she realized with a jolt who that coworker must be. It could not be a coincidence. So it was her tenant, her quiet little eager-to-please tenant, who had started all of this. Who had, for reasons still unclear, decided to upend the poor McCulloughs' lives.

Mrs. Richardson folded the paper precisely and set it down on the table. She thought again of Mia's disaffection when she'd offered to buy one of Mia's photos, of Mia's reticence about her past. Of Mia's—well,
standoffishness
, even as she spent hours a day in Mrs. Richardson's own home, in this very kitchen. A woman whose wages she paid, whose rent she had subsidized, whose daughter spent hours and hours under this very roof every single day. She thought of the photograph at the art museum, which now, in her memory, took on a secretive, sly tinge. How hypocritical of Mia, with her stubborn privacy, to insert herself into places where
she didn't belong. But that was Mia, wasn't it? A woman who took an almost perverse pleasure in flaunting the normal order. It was unfairness itself, that this woman was causing such trouble for her dear friend Linda, that Linda should have to suffer for it.