Little Fires Everywhere (17 page)

“Cliff and Clair were fighting about it last night,” Brian told Lexie one afternoon. They were lying in his bed, half dressed, having skipped lacrosse and field hockey practice for a different kind of exercise. “Cliff and Clair
never
fight.” It had started over dinner, and by the time he'd gone to bed his parents had lapsed into a stony, stubborn silence. “My dad thinks she's better off with the McCulloughs. He thinks she has no future with a mother like Bebe. He said moms like Bebe are the kind of parents who keep the cycle of poverty going.”

“But what do
you
think?” Lexie persisted. Brian hesitated. His mother had interrupted his father's tirade—something she did often, but never with such vehemence. “And what about all those black babies going to white homes?” she had said. “You think that breaks the cycle of poverty?” She dropped a pot into the sink with a clatter and turned on the water. Steam rose up in a hissing cloud. “If they want to help the black community, why don't they make some changes to the system first instead?” His father's reasoning made all logical sense to Brian—the baby safe and cared for and adored, with every possible opportunity. And yet there was something about the little brown body wrapped in Mrs. McCullough's
long, pale arms that discomfited him as it had his mother. He felt a flare of annoyance—no, anger—at Bebe for putting him in this position.

“I think if she'd been more careful this whole thing could've been avoided,” he said stiffly. “I mean, use a condom. How hard is that? A buck at the drugstore and this whole thing would never have happened.”

“Way to miss the point, Bry,” Lexie said, and fished her jeans up from the floor.

Brian tugged them out of her hands. “Forget about it. Not our problem, right?” He put his arms around her, and Lexie forgot all about little Mirabelle, the McCulloughs, everything except his lips on her ear.

With Ed Lim's help, Bebe had formally filed papers and had been granted visitation rights in the interim, once per week for two hours. Mr. and Mrs. McCullough were to maintain custody of the baby for the time being.

No one was satisfied with this arrangement.

“Only in the library or ‘public place,'” Bebe complained to Mia. “She cannot even come to my home. I have to hold my baby in the library. And the social worker sitting right there, watching me all the time. Like I am some criminal. Like I might hurt my own baby. Those McCulloughs, they say I can come to their house, visit her there. They think I am going to sit there and smile while they steal my baby? They think I am going to sit there by the fireplace and look at pictures of some other woman holding my child?”

Meanwhile, Mrs. McCullough had her own complaints.

“You have no idea what it's like,” she told Mrs. Richardson over the phone. “Handing your baby over to a stranger. Watching some woman you don't even know walk away carrying your child. I break out in hives every time the doorbell rings, Elena. After they leave, I literally get down on my knees and pray she'll come back like she's supposed to. The night
before I can't even sleep. I've had to take sleeping pills.” Mrs. Richardson gave a sympathetic cluck. “And it's never the same day. Every week I say, please, can we just pick a set time. Please, let's just settle on one day. At least that way I would know it was coming. I'd have time to prepare myself. But no, she never tells the social worker until the day before. Says she doesn't know her work schedule until then. I get a call in the afternoon—
Oh, we'll be by tomorrow at ten.
Less than half a day's notice. I'm completely on edge.”

“It's only for a while, Linda,” Mrs. Richardson said soothingly. “The court date is just at the end of March and, of course, the state will decide the baby belongs with you.”

“I hope you're right,” Mrs. McCullough said. “But what if they decide—” She stopped, her throat tightening, and took a deep breath. “I don't want to think about it. They can't possibly. They wouldn't.” Her tone sharpened. “If she can't even arrange her work schedule, how can she possibly expect to be stable enough to raise a child?”

“This too shall pass,” Mrs. Richardson said.

Mrs. Richardson's calm, however, belied her true feelings. The more she thought about Mia, the angrier she became, and the more she could not stop thinking about her.

She had spent her whole life in Shaker Heights, and it had infused her to the core. Her memories of childhood were a broad expanse of green—wide lawns, tall trees, the plush greenness that comes with affluence—and resembled the marketing brochures the city had published for decades to woo the right sort of residents. This made a certain amount of sense: Mrs. Richardson's grandparents had been in Shaker Heights almost from the beginning. They had arrived in 1927, back when it was still technically a village—though it was already being called the finest residential district in the world. Her grandfather had grown up in downtown Cleveland on
what they called Millionaires' Row, his family's crenellated wedding cake of a house tucked beside the Rockefellers and the telegraph magnate and President McKinley's secretary of state. However, by the time Mrs. Richardson's grandfather—by then a successful lawyer—was preparing to bring his bride home, downtown had grown noisy and congested. Soot clogged the air and dirtied the ladies' dresses. A move to the country, he decided, would be just the thing. It was madness to move so far from the city, friends insisted, but he was an outdoorsman and his bride-to-be an avid equestrienne, and Shaker Heights offered three bridle paths, streams for fishing, plenty of fresh air. Besides, a new train line whisked businessmen straight from Shaker to the heart of the city: nothing could be more modern. The couple bought a house on Sedgewick Road, hired a maid, joined the country club; Mrs. Richardson's grandmother found a stable for her horse, Jackson, and became a member of the Flowerpot Garden Club.

By the time Mrs. Richardson's mother, Caroline, was born in 1931, things were less rural but no less idyllic. Shaker Heights was officially a city; there were nine elementary schools and a new redbrick senior high had just been completed. New and regal houses were springing up all over town, each following strict style regulations and a color code, and bound by a ninety-nine-year covenant forbidding resale to anyone not approved by the neighborhood. Rules and regulation and order were necessary, the residents assured each other, in order to keep their community both unified and beautiful.

For Shaker Heights was indeed beautiful. Everywhere lawns and gardens flourished—residents promised to keep weeds pulled, to grow only flowers, never vegetables. Those who were lucky enough to live in Shaker were certain theirs was the best community in America. It was the kind of place where—as one resident discovered—if you lost your
thousand-dollar diamond wedding ring shoveling the driveway, the service department would remove the entire snowbank, carry it to the city garage, and melt it under heat lamps in order to retrieve your treasure. Caroline grew up picnicking by the Shaker lakes in the summer, skating on city-flooded rinks in the winter, caroling at Christmas. She saw matinees of
Song
of the South
and
Anna and the King of Siam
at the cinema at Shaker Square and on special occasions—such as her birthday—her father took her to Stouffer's Restaurant for a lobster luncheon. As a teenager, Caroline became the drum majorette for the school's marching band, went parking down by the Canoe Club with the boy who would become her husband a few years later.

It was, as far as she could imagine, a perfect life in a perfect place. Everyone in Shaker Heights felt this. So when it became obvious that the outside world was less perfect—as
Brown v.
Board
caused an uproar and riders in Montgomery boycotted buses and the Little Rock Nine made their way into school through a storm of slurs and spit—Shaker residents, including Caroline, took it upon themselves to be better than that. After all, were they not smarter, wiser, more thoughtful and forethoughtful, the wealthiest, the most enlightened? Was it not their duty to enlighten others? Didn't the elite have a responsibility to share their well-being with those less fortunate? Caroline's own mother had always raised her to think of those in need: she had organized Christmastime toy drives, had been a member of the local Children's Guild, had even overseen the compilation of a Guild cookbook, with all proceeds benefiting charities, and contributed her own personal recipe for molasses cookies. When the troubles of the outside world made their presence felt in Shaker Heights—a bomb at the home of a black lawyer—the community felt obliged to show that this was not the Shaker way. A neighborhood association sprang up to encourage integration in a particularly Shaker Heights
manner: loans to encourage white families to move into black neighborhoods, loans to encourage black families to move into white neighborhoods, regulations forbidding
FOR SALE
signs in order to prevent white flight—a law that would remain in effect for decades. Caroline, by then a homeowner herself with a one-year-old—a young Mrs. Richardson—joined the integration association immediately. Some years later, she would drive five and a half hours, daughter in tow, to the great March on Washington, and Mrs. Richardson would forever remember that day, the sun forcing her eyes into a squint, the scrum of people pressed thigh to thigh, the hot fug of sweat rising from the crowd, the Washington Monument rising far off in the distance, like a spike stretching to pierce the clouds. She clamped her mother's hand in hers, terrified that her mother might be swept away. “Isn't this incredible,” her mother said, without looking down at her. “Remember this moment, Elena.” And Elena would remember that look on her mother's face, that longing to bring the world closer to perfection—like turning the peg of a violin and bringing the string into tune. Her conviction that it was possible if you only tried hard enough, that no work could be too messy.

But three generations of Shaker reverence for order and rules and decorum would stay with Elena, too, and she would never quite be able to bring those two ideas into balance. In 1968, at fifteen, she turned on the television and watched chaos flaring up across the country like brush fires. Martin Luther King, Jr., then Bobby Kennedy. Students in revolt at Columbia. Riots in Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore, D.C.—everywhere, everywhere, things were falling apart. Deep inside her a spark kindled, a spark that would flare in Izzy years later. Of course she understood why this was happening: they were fighting to right injustices. But part of her shuddered at the scenes on the television screen. Grainy scenes, but no less terrifying: grocery stores ablaze, smoke billowing from their
rooftops, walls gnawed to studs by flame. The jagged edges of smashed windows like fangs in the night. Soldiers marching with rifles past drugstores and Laundromats. Jeeps blocking intersections under dead traffic lights. Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new? The carpet at her feet was soft. The sofa beneath her was patterned with roses. Outside, a mourning dove cooed from the bird feeder and a Cadillac glided to a dignified stop at the corner. She wondered which was the real world.

The following spring, when antiwar protests broke out, she did not get in her car and drive to join them. She wrote impassioned letters to the editor; she signed petitions to end the draft. She stitched a peace sign onto her knapsack. She wove flowers into her hair.

It was not that she was afraid. It was simply that Shaker Heights, despite its idealism, was a pragmatic place, and she did not know how to be anything else. A lifetime of practical and comfortable considerations settled atop the spark inside her like a thick, heavy blanket. If she ran off to Washington to join the protests, where would she sleep? How would she stay safe? What would become of her classes, would she be expelled, could she still graduate and go to college? The spring of their senior year, Jamie Reynolds had pulled her aside after history class one day. “I'm dropping out,” he said. “Going to California. Come with me.” She had adored Jamie since the seventh grade, when he had admired a sonnet she'd written for English. Now, at almost eighteen, he had long hair and a shaggy beard, a dislike for authority, a VW van in which, he said, they could live. “Like camping out,” he'd said, “except we can go anywhere,” and she had wanted so badly to go with him, anywhere, to kiss that crooked, bashful smile. But how would they pay for food, where would they do their laundry, where would they bathe? What would her parents say? The neighbors, her teachers, her friends? She'd kissed Jamie on the cheek and cried when, at last, he was out of sight.

Months later, off at Denison, she sat with classmates and watched the draft lottery live on the grainy common-room television. Jamie's birthday—March 7—had come up on the second pick. So he would be among the first to be called to fight, she thought, and she wondered where he had gone, if he knew what awaited him, if he would report, or if he would run. Beside her, Billy Richardson squeezed her hand. His birthday was one of the last drawn, and anyway, as an undergraduate, he had been granted a deferral. He was safe. By the time they graduated, the war would be over and they would marry, buy a house, settle down. She had no regrets, she told herself. She'd been crazy to have considered it even for a moment. What she had felt for Jamie back then had been just a tiny, passing flame.

All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.