Little Fires Everywhere (26 page)

“But don't you think it's going to be hard to give it up?” Warren asked. “I don't think I could do it.”

“Well, you're not the one doing it, are you.”

“Don't get pissy with me,” Warren said. “If you'd asked me, I'd have told you not to.”

“Just don't tell Mom and Dad,” Mia said again.

“I won't,” Warren said at last. “But I'll tell you this. I'm the baby's uncle, and I don't like it.” There was an anger in his voice she had never heard before, at least not directed at her.

After that, she and Warren didn't speak for a while. Every week, when she thought about calling him, she decided not to. Why call and argue again, she reasoned. In a few months the baby would be born, she would go back to her old life, and things would be as they had been. “Don't get attached,” she said to her belly when the baby nudged her with a foot. It was never clear to her, even then, whether she was speaking to the baby, or to her belly, or to herself.

She and Warren were still not speaking when her mother called, very early in the morning, to tell her about the accident.

It had been snowy, this much she knew. He and Tommy Flaherty had been coming home late at night—where they'd been, her mother hadn't said—and they'd taken a turn too fast and Tommy's Buick had skidded and then overturned. Mia would not remember the details: that the roof of the car had been crushed in, that the emergency workers had had to cut the Buick open like a tin can, that neither Warren nor Tommy had been wearing their seat belts. She would not remember, at least for a while, about Tommy Flaherty in his hospital bed, with a punctured lung, a concussion, and seven broken bones, even though he'd grown up just up the hill from them, even though he and Warren had been friends for years, even though he'd once had a crush on her. She would remember only that Warren had been driving, and that now he was dead.

A plane ticket was expensive, but she couldn't bear the thought of waiting, even an extra few hours. She wanted to be swallowed up by the
house where she and Warren had grown up and played and argued and planned, where he no longer waited for her, which he would never enter again. She wanted to sink to her knees at the spot on the cold roadside where he had died. She wanted to see her parents, to not have to sit alone with the terrible numbness that threatened to swallow her up.

But when she stepped out of the taxi from the airport and came in the front door, her parents froze, staring at the bulge in her belly, which had grown too big for her to zip her coat. Mia's hand drifted down to her waist, as if one palm could hide what was growing there.

“Mom,” she said. “Dad. It's not what you think.”

A long silence unspooled in the kitchen, like gray ribbon. Hours and hours, it felt to Mia.

“Tell me,” her mother said at last. “Tell us what we think.”

“I mean.” Mia looked down at her belly, as if she herself were bewildered to find it there. “It isn't my baby.” Inside, the baby gave a fierce kick.

“What do you mean, it isn't
your
baby?” her mother said. “How can it not be your baby?”

“I'm a surrogate. I'm carrying it for this couple.” Mia found herself trying to explain: about the Ryans, about how kind they were, how much they wanted a baby, how happy they would be. She tried to focus on how much she was helping them, as if this were a charitable deed, purely altruistic: like volunteering at a soup kitchen, or adopting a dog from a shelter. But her mother understood immediately.

“These Ryans,” she said. “I suppose you're doing this for them just out of the goodness of your heart?”

“No,” Mia admitted. “They're paying me. When the baby is born.” She realized suddenly that she was still wearing her scarf and hat. A thin gray sludge trickled from her boot treads onto the cream-colored linoleum.

Her mother turned and headed for the doorway. “I can't cope with this
now,” she said, her voice fading as she stepped into the living room. “Not now.” At the foot of the staircase she stopped and hissed, with a venom that shocked Mia: “Your brother is dead—
dead,
you realize that?
—
and you come home like this?” Footsteps pounded up the steps.

Mia glanced at her father. She felt exactly as she had as a child, when she'd broken something or ruined something or spent on film the money that her mother had meant for clothes: in those moments her mother would rage and scream and run to her room, leaving Mia with her father, who would squeeze her hand and let the quiet lap over them like milk, then say quietly, “Buy a new one,” or “Give her an hour, and go apologize,” or sometimes, simply, “Fix it.” This was how they'd always fought. But this time her father did not take her hand. He did not say to her,
Fix it.
Instead he looked at her belly, as if he couldn't bear to look at her face. His eyes were wet and his jaw clenched.

“Dad?” she said at last. She would have preferred shouting to this protracted, knife-sharp silence.

“I can't believe you'd sell your own child,” he said, and then he, too, left the room.

They didn't tell her to leave, but even after she hung her coat in the hall closet, set her bag down in her old bedroom, they didn't speak to her. At dinner she sat at her old place at the table and her mother set a plate and fork in front of her and her father passed the casserole that one of their neighbors had brought, but they said nothing to her, and when she asked questions—When was the funeral going to be? Had they seen Warren?—they answered as briefly as possible. Mia gave up eventually and wound noodles and tuna around her fork. There was a whole stack of casseroles in the fridge, a leaning tower of Pyrex baking dishes crimped in foil. As if
no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to. None of them mentioned, or looked at, Warren's empty place by the window.

They decided everything without her, what the flowers would be, what the music would be, what color coffin Warren would be placed in: walnut with a blue silk lining. They suggested, tactfully, that Mia not go out; she must be tired, they said, they didn't want her to slip on the ice, but she understood: they didn't want the neighbors to see her. When Mia picked out a shirt and tie for Warren—the one he always chose when forced to dress up—her mother selected another, the white shirt and red-striped tie that she'd bought Warren when he entered high school, which he'd said made him look like a stockbroker, and which he never wore. At no point did they mention her interesting condition or her complicated situation. But when they said it would be best if she didn't attend the funeral—“We just don't want anyone getting the wrong idea,” her mother had put it—Mia gave in. The night before the funeral, she packed her things. From the back of the closet, she pulled her old duffel bag and took the quilt from her bed, a few old blankets. Then she tiptoed across the hall into Warren's room.

His bed was still unmade; she wondered if her mother would ever make it again, or if she'd simply strip the sheets, strip the room, paint it white, and pretend nothing had ever happened there. What would they do with Warren's things? she wondered. Would they give them away? Would they pack them into crates in the attic, to grow musty and faded and old? On Warren's bulletin board she spotted the photo from her art school application: the etched-in image of the two of them, children, climbing up the mountain of slag. She unpinned it and added it to her bag. Then, on his desk, she found what she'd been looking for: the keys to Warren's car.

Her parents were asleep; her mother had been taking sleeping pills at night to calm her nerves, and the crack beneath their bedroom door was dark. The Rabbit started up with a throaty growl. “A Porsche purrs,” Warren had told her once, “a VW kind of putts.” She had to pull the front seat all the way forward to reach the clutch; his legs had always been longer than hers. Then she pressed down on the gearshift and, after a moment of hunting, fiddled her way into reverse, and the darkened house faded in her headlights as the car backed out of the driveway.

She drove all night and reached the Upper West Side as the sun was rising. She'd never had to park in Manhattan before and circled the neighborhood for ten minutes before squeezing into a spot on 72nd Street. In her apartment, she sank into her borrowed bed and wrapped herself in the quilt. It would be a long time, she knew, before she would sleep in a bed this comfortable again. When she woke, the late afternoon sun was already sinking over the Hudson, and she got to work. Only the things she'd brought with her, that were truly hers, went into her bag: her too-tight clothes, the handful of loose muumuus she'd bought herself at Goodwill, a few old quilts, some faded bedsheets, a handful of silverware. A file box of negatives, and her cameras. The fancy maternity dresses from the Ryans she folded neatly and placed in a paper grocery bag.

Once she'd finished, she sat down with a pen and a piece of paper. She'd been thinking about what to say all the long drive from Pittsburgh, and in the end, she'd decided to lie. “There is no easy way to say this,” she wrote. “I lost the baby. I'm so ashamed and so sorry. You don't owe me anything from our agreement, but I feel I owe you. Here is money to pay you back for the medical appointments. I hope it's enough—it's all I can spare.” She placed her note on top of a stack of bills—nine hundred dollars of her saved-up wages. Then she bundled them into the bag with the maternity dresses.

The regular doorman was off duty that night, and with Mia's coat nestled around her, the night doorman didn't seem to notice her belly. He accepted the parcel for the Ryans without once glancing at her face, and Mia headed back to the Rabbit, parked several blocks away. In her belly, the baby kicked once, then turned over, as if settling into sleep.

She drove all night, through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, miles of highway whipping by in the dark. As the sun began to rise, she turned off the highway just outside Erie and drove until she found a quiet rural road. Once she'd parked well off the roadside, she locked all the doors, climbed into the backseat, and wrapped herself in her old quilt. She'd expected it to smell like detergent, like home, and she braced herself for a whirl of nostalgia. But the quilt, having lain on her bed untouched for the past year, smelled like nothing—not clean, not dusty, no smell at all—and pulling it over her head to shield her eyes from the sun, Mia fell asleep.

All week she drove this way, as if in a fever: driving until exhaustion forced her to stop, sleeping until she was rested enough to drive again, ignoring the clock, the light and dark of each day. She stopped now and then, when she passed a town, to buy bread, peanut butter, apples, to refill the gallon jug in the passenger seat with water at a fountain. Throughout her belongings she had hidden two thousand dollars, saved up from her tips and wages since she'd come to New York: in the box of negatives, in the glove compartment, in the right cup of her bra. Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska. Nevada. And then, suddenly, the teeming swirl of San Francisco, the Pacific churning blue-gray and white before her, and she could go no further.