Little Fires Everywhere (21 page)

“I was hoping to speak to Warren's sister as well,” she said, and pretended to consult her notes. “Mia. Would you be willing to give me her current phone number?”

Mr. and Mrs. Wright exchanged uneasy looks, as she had known they would.

“I'm afraid we've been out of contact with our daughter for some time,” Mrs. Wright said.

“Oh dear, I'm so sorry.” Mrs. Richardson glanced from one parent to the other. “I hope I haven't broached a taboo subject.” She waited, letting
the uneasy silence grow. No one, she had learned from experience, could stand such silence for long. If you waited long enough, someone would start talking, and more often than not they would give you a chance to press further, to crack the conversation open and scoop out what you needed to know.

“Not exactly,” Mr. Wright said after a moment. “But we haven't spoken with her since shortly after Warren died.”

“How sad,” Mrs. Richardson said. “That happens quite a lot, one family member taking a loss very hard. Dropping out of contact.”

“But what happened with Mia had nothing to do with what happened to Warren,” Mrs. Wright broke in. “What happened with Warren was an accident. Teenage boys being reckless. Or maybe just the snow. Mia—well, that's a different story. She was an adult. She made her own choices. George and I—” Mrs. Wright's eyes welled up.

“We didn't part on the best terms,” put in Mr. Wright.

“That's terrible.” Mrs. Richardson leaned closer. “That must have been so hard for you both. To lose both of your children at once, in a way.”

“What choice did she give us?” Mrs. Wright burst out. “Showing up in that state.”

“Regina,” Mr. Wright said, but Mrs. Wright did not stop.

“I told her, I didn't care how nice these Ryan people were, I didn't approve of it. I didn't think it was right to sell your own child.”

Mrs. Richardson's pencil froze in midair. “Pardon?”

Mrs. Wright shook her head. “She thought she could just give it up and go on with her life. Like nothing had happened. I had two children, you know. I knew what I was talking about. Even before we lost Warren.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, as if there were a mark there that she wanted to rub out. “You don't ever get over that, saying good-bye to a child. No matter how it happens. That's your flesh and blood.”

Mrs. Richardson's head was spinning. She set her pencil down. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said. “Mia was pregnant and was planning to let this couple—the Ryans—adopt her baby?”

Mr. and Mrs. Wright exchanged looks again, but this time the look between them said: in for a penny. It was clear, to Mrs. Richardson's practiced eye, that they wanted to talk about it, that perhaps they had been waiting to talk to someone about it for a long, long time.

“Not exactly,” Mr. Wright said. There was a long pause. Then: “It was their baby, too. They couldn't have their own. She was carrying it for them.”

I
n the fall of 1980, Mia Wright, just turned eighteen, left the little yellow house in Bethel Park for the New York School of Fine Arts. She had never been outside of Pennsylvania before, and she left home with two suitcases and her brother's love and without her parents' blessing.

She had not told her parents she was applying to art school until the acceptance letter had arrived. It was not wholly unexpected, or should not have been. As a child she had been fascinated by things that, to her bemusement, no one else seemed to even notice. “You were such a woolgatherer,” her mother would say. “You sat in your stroller just staring out at the lawn. You'd sit in the tub and pour water back and forth from one cup to another for an hour if I'd let you.” What Mia remembered of those moments was watching the blades of grass in the breeze, changing color as they went, from dark to light, like the nap of velvet when you brushed your hand over it; the way the stream of water broke itself into droplets as it splashed against the cup's rim. Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Even the two boulders in the backyard sometimes turned to silver in the early morning sunlight. In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything
had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

Only her brother, Warren, seemed to understand the hidden layer she saw in things, but then they had always had an understanding, since before he had been born. “My baby,” Mia would say to anyone who would listen, tapping her mother's belly with a finger, and infallibly Warren would kick in reply. “My baby. In there,” she informed strangers in the grocery store, pointing. When they'd brought him home from the hospital, she had immediately claimed him as her own.

“My Wren,” she'd called him, not only because Warren had been too long to pronounce, but because it suited him. Even in those early days, he'd looked like a vigilant chick, head tipped to one side, two impossibly bright and focused eyes, searching the room for her. When he cried, she knew which toy would calm him. When he wouldn't nap, Mia lay next to him in the center of their parents' bed, blankets heaped around them in a chenille nest, singing him songs and patting his cheek until he dozed. When he fell skinning the cat on the monkey bars, it was Mia he ran crying for, and Mia who dabbed the gash on his temple with iodine and stuck a bandage across it.

“You'd think she was the mother,” their mother had said once, half in tones of complaint, half in admiration.

They had their own words for things, a jargon of obscure origin: for reasons even they had forgotten, they referred to butter as
cheese
; they called the grackles that perched in the treetops
icklebirds
. It was a circle they drew around the two of them like a canopy. “Don't tell anyone from France,” Mia would begin, before whispering a secret, and Warren's reply was always, “Wild giraffes couldn't drag it out of me.”

And then, at eleven—almost twelve—Mia discovered photography.

Warren, just turned ten, had himself discovered not only sports but
that he was good at them. Baseball in the summer, football in the fall, hockey in the winter, basketball in all the spaces in between. He and Mia were still close, but there were long afternoons at the baseball diamond in the park, long hours practicing passes and practicing layups. So it was natural that Mia, too, would find a passion of her own.

At the junk shop in town she spotted an old Brownie Starflex sitting in the corner of the front window. The camera had lost its flash and neck strap, but the shop owner assured her it would work, and as soon as Mia flipped up the little silver hood and saw the junk shop reflected in blurry miniature in the lens, she wanted it immensely. She dipped into the cat-shaped bank where she saved her allowance and began to carry the camera everywhere. She ignored the manual's suggestion that she write the Kodak Company for its helpful book
How to Make Good Pictures
and went by instinct alone. With the camera dangling from two of her mother's old silk scarves knotted together, she began to take photos—odd photos, to her parents' eyes: run-down houses, rusted-out cars, objects discarded on the side of the road. “Funny thing to be taking a picture of,” the clerk at the Fotomat remarked as he handed over an envelope of prints. That set had contained three images, taken over successive days, of a bird's corpse on the sidewalk, and he wondered briefly, not for the first time, if the Wright girl was a little touched in the head.

For Mia, however, the photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints—with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent—but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires. The Starflex, like all Brownies, allowed no focusing. The shuttle cocked automatically to avoid double exposures—which the manual billed as a convenience for the amateur. All you had to do was all that you could do: peek into the viewfinder and press the shutter. Instead
of holding the camera level against her chest, per the instructions, Mia tipped it at different angles, knotted her makeshift straps higher or lower. She draped silk scarves and wax paper over the lens; she tried shooting in fog, in heavy rain, in the smoke-filled lounge of the bowling alley.

“Waste of money,” her mother sniffed, when Mia brought home yet another envelope of blurred and grainy photos.

With each roll of film, however, she began to understand more and more how a photograph was put together, what it could do and what it could not, just how far you could stretch and twist it. Though she did not know it at the time, all of this was training her to be the photographer she would become. With only twelve exposures on a roll, she learned to be careful in composing her shots. And with no controls—no aperture control, no focus—she learned to be creative in the ways she manipulated her camera and her scene.

At this moment, fortuitously, their neighbor Mr. Wilkinson intervened. He lived up the hill from them, and for some time he'd seen Mia with her Brownie wandering the neighborhood, snapping pictures of this and that. Mia and Warren know only one thing about Mr. Wilkinson: he was a toy buyer and spent most of his time traveling to toy shows, perusing merchandise, sending reports to headquarters on which toys to stock. Every few months, Mrs. Wilkinson would round up the neighborhood children and distribute the sample toys Mr. Wilkinson had accumulated. Marvelous toys they were: a set of molds that you filled with plaster to cast Christmas ornaments; a Saturn-shaped ball on which you could bounce, pogo-style; a giant doll's head with hair of gold to coif; a box of perfumes to blend and pinkie-sized vials to hold your concoctions. “I need my basement back,” she'd said, laughing, making sure each child got something, even if only a yo-yo. The Wilkinsons' son was grown by then, living somewhere in Maryland, and no longer needed toys.

For a long time, this was the only image Mia had of Mr. Wilkinson, a mysterious cross between Marco Polo and Santa Claus who filled his home with treasures. But one afternoon, just after her thirteenth birthday, Mr. Wilkinson had called to her sternly from his front porch.

“I've been seeing you traipsing around for a year now,” he'd said. “I want to see what you've been up to.”

Mia, terrified, collected a stack of her photographs and brought them to the Wilkinsons' the next morning. She had never shown her photos to anyone but Warren before, and Warren, of course, had oohed and aahed. But Mr. Wilkinson was an adult, a man, a man she barely knew. He would have no incentive to be kind.

When she rang the Wilkinsons' doorbell, Mrs. Wilkinson led her into the den, where Mr. Wilkinson sat at a large desk typing something on a cream-colored typewriter. But when Mia entered, he swiveled around in his chair and swung the typewriter shelf down and under, where it folded into a cabinet in the desk as neatly as if it had been swallowed.

“Now then,” he said. He unfolded a pair of half-moon glasses that hung around his neck and placed them on his nose, and Mia's knees trembled. “Let's have a look.”

Mr. Wilkinson, it turned out, was a photographer himself—though he preferred landscapes. “Don't like shots with people in them,” he told her. “I'll take a tree over a person any day.” When he went on a trip, he took his camera with him and always scheduled himself half a day to go exploring. From a file he pulled a stack of photographs: a redwood forest at dawn, a river snaking through a field shot with dew, a lake reflecting the sun in a glittering triangle that pointed to the woods beyond. The photographs all over the hallway, Mia realized, were his as well.

“You've got a good eye,” Mr. Wilkinson said at last. “Good eye and good instincts. See this one here?” He tapped the top picture, a photo of
Warren perched in the low branches of a sycamore, back to the camera, silhouetted against the sky. “That's a fine shot. How'd you know how to frame that?”

“I don't know,” Mia admitted. “It just looked right.”

Mr. Wilkinson squinted at another. “Hold on to that. Trust your eyes. They see well.” He plucked out another photo. “But see this? You wanted that squirrel, didn't you?” Mia nodded. It had been running along the ridge of the fence and she'd been mesmerized by the undulating arc its body and tail had traced as it ran. Like watching a ball bounce, she'd thought as she clicked the shutter. But the photo had come out blurry, focused on the fence instead of the squirrel, the squirrel itself simply a smudge. She wondered how Mr. Wilkinson knew.

“Thought so. You need a better camera. That one's fine for a starter, or for birthday parties and Christmas. Not for you.” He went to the closet and rummaged in the back, the old overcoats and bagged dresses inside muffling his voice. “You—you want to take real pictures.” In a moment he returned and held out a compact box. “You need a real camera, not a toy.”

It was a Nikon F, a little silver-and-black thing, heavy and solid in her hands. Mia ran her fingers over the pebbled casing. “But I can't take this.”

“I'm not giving it, I'm lending it. You want it or not?” Without waiting for her to answer, Mr. Wilkinson opened a drawer in his desk. “I'm not using that one anymore. Someone might as well.” He removed a black canister of film and tossed it to Mia. “Besides,” he said, “I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with it.”

By the time Mia went home that afternoon, she had learned how to wind the film onto the spool inside the camera, how to focus it, how to adjust the lens. Strange and beguiling new words swirled in her head:
f-stop, aperture.
Over and over again she lifted the camera to her eye to
peer through the viewfinder. Under the hairline cross at its center, everything was transformed.

Mr. Wilkinson taught her how to extract the film from its roll and develop it, and Mia came to love the sharp bite of the developer, how to watch for the sheen of silver on the film's surface that told her it was ready. Like a pilot dipping the plane into a tailspin to practice pulling back out, she would deliberately take photos out of focus, with the wrong shutter speed or the wrong ISO, to see what happened. She learned how to control the light and the camera to get the effects she wanted, like a musician learning the intricacies of an instrument.

“But how can you—?” she would ask, watching the print form on the paper and comparing it to the image she'd had in her mind. At first Mr. Wilkinson would know the answer. “Dodging.” “Use a diffused bright fill.” “Let's try freelensing.” But soon her questions became more advanced, sending him to the copy of
Photographic Techniques
he kept on the bookshelf.

“The young lady wants a greater depth of field,” he mused one afternoon. By now Mia was fifteen. “What the young lady needs is a view camera.”

Mia had never heard of such a thing. But soon all her earnings, from clerking at Dickson's Pharmacy to waitressing at the Eat'n Park, were earmarked for a camera, and she spent hours poring over Mr. Wilkinson's camera catalogs and photography magazines.

“You spend more time reading those things than you do taking pictures,” Mr. Wilkinson teased her, but she eventually settled on one—the Graphic View II—and even Mr. Wilkinson couldn't dispute her choice.

“That's a solid camera,” he said. “Good value for your money. You take care of that, it'll be with you your whole life.” And when the Graphic View II arrived, procured secondhand from a classified ad, well loved
and packed into its own case like an expensive violin, Mia knew this would be true.

To her parents the camera was less impressive. “You spent how much on that?” her mother asked, while her father shook his head. It looked, to them, like something from the Victorian era, balanced on a spindly tripod, with a pleated belly like a bellows and a dark cloth that Mia ducked underneath. She tried to explain to them how it worked, but at the first mention of
shifts
and
tilts
their attention began to wander. Even her beloved Warren gave up at that point—“I don't need to know how it works, Mi,” he told her at last, “I just want to see the pictures”—and Mia realized that she was crossing into a place she would have to go alone.

She took pictures of the jungle gym at the local park, of streetlights at night, of city workers chopping down an oak that had been struck by lightning. She lugged the view camera downtown to photograph a rusty bridge stretching over the spot where the three rivers collided. By toying with the settings, she took a picture of Warren's football game, from up in the bleachers, where the players looked like miniatures, the kind you'd see on a train set. “That's me?” Warren had said, peering at one of the figures, the one long in the end zone, waiting for the pass. “That's you, Wren,” Mia said. She had a sudden image of herself as a sorceress, waving her hand over the field and transforming the boys below into pea-sized plastic dolls.