Little Fires Everywhere (28 page)

“I'm helping Lexie with her English paper,” Pearl said. “We thought we'd work better over here.”

“It's okay, Izzy,” Mia said. “But you know, since the girls are here, I'm not working today. Tomorrow, okay?” Then, when Izzy hesitated, she said, “Tomorrow, I promise. After school. Just like always.” She gave Izzy's elbow a little squeeze as she turned her around in the doorway, and Izzy, with a glare at Lexie, clumped back down the stairs. In a moment they heard the door slam shut behind her.

“She is so pissed at me,” Lexie murmured. “Well, what else is new.” Now that Izzy was gone, she felt herself drained, and she slumped backward in her chair, letting her ponytail drape over the back.

Pearl eyed her. “You don't look so good.”

“Back to bed,” Mia said calmly. “You've been through a lot today.” In the bedroom, she settled Lexie onto the mattress again and spread the comforter over her and patted her back gently, as if she were a child. It was oddly soothing.

“Shit,” Lexie said. “The robocall. My parents will know I cut.” Shaker Heights took attendance seriously: at the start of each class, a teacher filled out a Scantron marking anyone absent. Back in the main office, a secretary ran the attendance sheets through a machine and a recorded call went out to the parents' home phone, alerting them about their truant children.

“I called you in,” Mia said. “After you and Pearl got here. I said you weren't feeling well today and you'd be out all day and tomorrow.”

Lexie felt as if her head were made of wood. “But you need a parent to excuse you,” she mumbled, pushing herself up on her forearms. The room began to wobble.

“I told them I was your mother. How would they know the difference?” Mia put a hand on Lexie's shoulder and gently pushed her back down. Her voice, Lexie thought, was so calm. As if she knew how to get away with anything. “Rest,” Lexie heard her say, and she was asleep almost at once.

When she woke again, it was late evening. She lay in the dimness, watching the sky darken, until Mia knocked on the door carrying a steaming mug of tea. “I thought you might be thirsty,” she said, and Lexie accepted the cup and took a grateful sip. Peppermint. Under her fingers the mug was comfortingly solid, like a warm, strong shoulder.

“I called your father,” Mia said. Her mother, Lexie remembered suddenly, was supposed to arrive home the next afternoon.

“Shit,” she whispered. “Did you tell him?”

“I told him you were staying over here tonight. That Pearl had asked you to sleep over.”

After a moment, Lexie said, “Thanks.”

“You can stay as long as you need to. But I'm betting you'll be ready to go home tomorrow.”

Lexie turned the mug around slowly between her palms. “And then?”

“Then it's up to you what you do. Who you tell.”

Mia got up to leave, but Lexie, in a panic, grabbed her hand.

“Wait,” she said. “Do you think I made a huge mistake?” She gulped. “Do you think I'm a terrible person?” She had never given much thought to Mia, but suddenly it felt crucial to know if Mia disapproved of her. In the face of Mia's kindness, she could not bear it if Mia disapproved of her.

“Oh, Lexie.” Mia sat down again, still holding Lexie's hand. “You were in a very hard situation. A situation no one wants to be in.”

“But what if I chose wrong?” Lexie paused, closing her eyes, trying to feel that spark of life that she'd been so certain was cartwheeling inside
her before. “Maybe I should have kept it. Maybe I should have told Brian. We could have made it work.”

“Would you have been ready to be a good mother?” Mia asked. “The kind of mother you'd have wanted to be? The kind of mother a child deserves?” They sat in silence for a few minutes, Mia's hand warm on Lexie's. Lexie felt an overwhelming urge to lean her head on Mia's shoulder, and after a moment, she did. For the first time, she wondered what it would have been like to grow up as Pearl, to have Mia as her mother, to have this life as her life. The thought made her a bit dizzy.

“You'll always be sad about this,” Mia said softly. “But it doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. It's just something that you have to carry.” She sat Lexie up gently and gave her a pat on the shoulder, then bent to pick up the empty mug.

“But do you think I made the wrong choice?” Lexie persisted. She felt sure Mia would know.

Mia paused, one hand on the doorknob. “I don't know, Lexie,” she said. “I think you're the only one who can know that.” The door closed softly behind her.

When Lexie opened her eyes, it was early morning. There was no sign of anyone, but someone had turned the lamp off, and someone had set a glass of water at her bedside.

Pearl was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal.

“You look better,” she said to Lexie. “You okay?”

“Getting there.” Lexie settled herself gingerly onto the other mismatched chair opposite Pearl. “Where's your mom?”

“At your house. She went over to clean early. She's doing lunch shift at the restaurant today.” Pearl suddenly remembered Lexie's views on the
McCullough case and decided not to mention the reason for the unusual schedule: Bebe was meeting with her lawyer to prepare for the hearing, which was starting in less than two weeks, and had asked Mia to cover for her at work. Instead she nudged the box of cereal toward Lexie, who tipped it toward her and took a handful.

“Did she sleep on the floor?”

“With me.”

“Sorry.”

Pearl shrugged. “It's okay. We're used to it. Sometimes we don't have space for two beds.” She slid a bowl across the table. “Don't eat it out of the box, pour some out. Freak.” Lexie seemed much younger somehow, and she couldn't tell if it was the morning light, soft and pale yellow, or Lexie herself—no makeup, hair loose around her face—or the strangeness of this moment, of Lexie breakfasting in her kitchen, of what they'd been through together the day before.

“Your mom was really nice to me last night.” Lexie stirred the cereal in her bowl.

“My mom
is
nice,” Pearl said, with a prickle of pride.

“I always thought she didn't like me.”

“Well.” Pearl considered. She, too, had had this feeling, but could sense now that something had shifted. “I don't think you knew each other.”

“You think she likes me now?” Lexie asked at last.

“Maybe.” Pearl grinned, and Lexie got up, slung an arm around her, and kissed her on the cheek.

The night before, as they lay side by side in Pearl's little twin bed, Mia had reached out to rub her daughter's back, something she hadn't done in years. When Pearl had been young, they had often shared a bed: it was easier to find one mattress than two, of course, but there had also been an
intense comfort in being close together, like small animals sheltered deep in their den. As Pearl had grown taller, sharing a bed became less and less feasible, and it had been a long time since they'd lain together this way.

“Poor Lexie,” Mia murmured. “Such a hard place to be in.” There was something she felt she needed to say, but she wasn't sure how, and after a moment she simply plunged in. “Are you—do you—” She paused. “We've never really had this talk before.”

Pearl pulled away and flopped abruptly onto her back. “Oh my god, Mom. Let's not do this.”

“I just want to make sure you know how to be careful.” Mia rubbed a scratch on her thumbnail. She'd nicked it the day before, working on something. “I know you and Moody are very close.”

Beside her she felt Pearl's whole body go very still, then, just as suddenly, relax again.

“Mom,” Pearl said. “Moody and I are just friends.”

“But maybe someday you'll want to be more. I know how it goes—” Mia stopped. She didn't, she realized suddenly; she didn't know how it went, not at all. As a teenager she'd had plenty of friends, some of them boys—but none as close as the friendship between her daughter and Moody seemed to be. They were together constantly, it seemed; they finished each other's sentences, they talked in a patois of inside jokes and shared references that sometimes she barely understood. More than once she'd seen Pearl lean over carelessly to fix Moody's collar; just the other day, she'd seen Moody reach out to pluck a wayward leaf from Pearl's hair with such tenderness that she could call it nothing other than love. But she herself had never felt that way about anyone, not as a teenager, not in art school, not since. It occurred to her that except for her brother, when they were children, she'd never seen a man naked. More than that: she'd never touched anyone and felt that warmth, that electric tension at the nearness
of someone else. The only thing that had given her that feeling had been art—and then, of course, Pearl. She had nothing useful to say about this, she thought, and the silence billowed out between them.

“Mom.” In the dark Mia couldn't tell if Pearl was serious or smiling. “You don't need to worry. I promise. There's nothing between Moody and me.” She rolled over onto her side, away from Mia, the pillow now muffling her voice. “And I got an A in health class. I know all this stuff.” It was the truth, she told herself; not a single word she'd said had been a lie. Omission, Pearl decided, was not the same as lying. She felt Mia begin to rub her back again, the same gentle caress that, as a child, had told her she was not alone, that her mother was there, which meant that everything was all right. As it had all those years ago, it put her to sleep almost at once.

After Pearl had begun to snore softly, Mia kept her hand in place, as if she were a sculptor shaping Pearl's shoulder blades. She could feel Pearl's heart, ever so faintly, beating under her palm. It had been a long time since her daughter had let her be so close. Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she'd worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she'd set her down, Pearl would cry. There'd scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother's leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there were something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia's in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia's arm pinned beneath Pearl's head, or Pearl's legs thrown across Mia's belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl's caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all
the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.

After Pearl went to school, Lexie stayed at the house on Winslow all morning. She lay across the bed and drifted off to sleep, and was still asleep when Mia came home from the restaurant with two foam containers of leftover noodles and a new idea. When the phone rang at two o'clock, waking Lexie at last, Mia was back at the table sketching with a pencil on a scratch piece of paper.

“I know, Bebe,” Mia was saying into the receiver as Lexie came into the living room. “But you can't let it get to you. The hearing is going to be even worse. This is only the tip of the iceberg.” She glanced at Lexie, then turned back to the phone. “It's going to be okay. Take a deep breath. I'll call you later.”

“Was that—Mirabelle's mother?” Lexie asked, when Mia had hung up the phone. To her embarrassment, she could not remember the baby's birth name.

“She's a friend of mine.” Mia settled herself back at the table and Lexie pulled up a chair alongside her. “There was an article today in the paper that said some unkind things about her. It suggested she was an unfit mother.” She glanced at Lexie. “Maybe you knew that already. With your father representing the McCulloughs, of course.”