Little Fires Everywhere (29 page)

Lexie flushed. Her father had been very busy lately—staying late at his office in preparation for the hearing, which was fast approaching—but she had been too preoccupied with Brian, with college, with the visit to the clinic and everything leading up to it, to pay much attention. “I didn't know anything,” she said stiffly. Then: “Is she? An unfit mother, I mean.”

Mia picked up her pencil and turned to her sketch again. A net, Lexie thought—no, perhaps it was a cage. “Was she before? Maybe. She was in a bad situation.”

“But she abandoned her baby.” This was something Lexie had heard her mother say enough times—into the telephone to Mrs. McCullough, anytime the case came up—to engrave it in her mind as fact.

“I think she was trying to do what was best for the baby. She knew she couldn't handle things.” Mia scribbled a hasty note in the corner of her drawing. “The question is whether things are still the same. Whether she should get another chance.”

“And you think she should?”

Mia did not answer for a moment. Then she said, “Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”

Lexie fell silent. Unconsciously, one hand crept down to her belly, where an ache was beginning to blossom.

“I'd better go home,” she said at last. “School's almost over, and my mom will probably be back now.”

Mia swept crumbs of eraser dust from the table and stood up. “Are you ready?” she said, with a gentleness that made Lexie ache.

“No,” Lexie said. She laughed nervously. “But am I ever going to be?” She stood up. “Thanks for—well. Thanks.”

“Are you going to tell her?” Mia asked, as Lexie gathered her things.

Lexie considered. “I don't know,” she said at last. “Maybe. Not now. But maybe one day.” She pulled her car keys from her pocket and lifted her purse. Beneath it was the pink discharge slip from the clinic. She paused, then crumpled it into a wad and tossed it into the garbage can, and then she was gone.

M
ia was right: by the time the custody hearing began, there had been a series of news stories—in print and on television—on Bebe Chow and her fitness to be a mother. Some of them portrayed her as a hardworking immigrant who had come in search of opportunity and had been overcome—temporarily, her supporters insisted—by the obstacles and the odds. Others were less kind: she was unstable, unreliable, an example of the worst kind of mother. The last week of March, as the hearing began, the steps to the courthouse were crowded with journalists and tabloid reporters alike, all rabid for scraps of anything that emerged in the testimony.

Because the hearing was kept private, like all proceedings in family court, the news stories could continue to be sensational and simplistic, easy arguments for one side or the other. Only those in the hearing room—the McCulloughs, their lawyer, Mr. Richardson, Ed Lim, Bebe, and the judge himself—heard about all that had happened, in all its messy complexity.

And it was complicated, what had happened. It was a terribly awkward, agonizingly slow, painfully intimate story that unfolded over the course of that week, back and forth between Mr. Richardson and Ed Lim:
one of them making a point for his client, the other expertly picking it up and turning it neatly on its head.

When the baby was found, she had been undernourished. Her fontanel was sunken in, a telltale sign of dehydration, and her ribs and the small bones of her spine had been visible under her skin, like a string of beads. At two months old, she had weighed only eight pounds.

(But the baby had refused to latch. Bebe had tried and tried until her nipples cracked and bled. She had cried, her breasts hard with milk she could not feed her child, the infant screaming on her lap, furiously turning her little face away, and at the sound of the baby's cries pink milk had gushed from her breasts and trickled down into her lap. After two weeks of this, Bebe's milk had dried up. She had spent her last seven dollars on formula and then her wallet was empty, except for a fake million-dollar bill someone had given her at work, for good luck.)

Severe diaper rash on the baby indicated that she had sat in soiled diapers for hours—if not days—on end.

(But Bebe had had no money for diapers. Remember that she had spent her last seven dollars on formula. She had done her best. She had taken the soiled diapers off, scraped them as clean as she could, refastened them around her daughter's waist. She had smeared Vaseline—the only thing she had—onto the angry red patches that blossomed on her daughter's buttocks.)

Neighbors had heard the baby squalling for hours on end. “All day, all night,” the neighbor from 3B had said. “Screaming when I left for work in the morning. Screaming when I came home at night.” He had thought about calling the police, but didn't want to interfere. “I keep to my own business.”

(But Bebe had cried, too. Yes, she had lain and sobbed, sometimes with the baby across her chest, frantically stroking her back and hair, sometimes alone, on the floor beside the dresser drawer she had used as a cradle, while the baby wailed alongside her, their voices floating to the roof in painful harmony.)

In her month and a half of turbulent motherhood, Bebe did not once seek help from a psychologist or a doctor.

(She should have, it is true. But she had no idea where to turn. Her English was middling at best; her reading comprehension minimal. She did not know how to find the social workers who might have helped her; she did not even know they existed. She did not know how to file for welfare. She did not know that welfare was a possibility. When she looked down, she saw no safety net, only a forest of skyscrapers stabbing upward like needles upon which she would be impaled. Could you blame her for tucking her daughter onto a safe ledge while she herself plummeted?)

Bebe had left her baby early in the morning on January 5, 1997, at the fire station on Kinsman Road. That night the temperature had dipped to thirty-one degrees. With windchill, it was seventeen. At two thirty
A.M.
, when the firemen opened the door and discovered the baby, lying in a cardboard box, it had just begun to snow, and everything was covered with a silvery, crystalline dusting.

(Although it had indeed been quite cold when Bebe placed her baby on the steps of the fire station, the baby had been wearing three shirts and two pairs of pants and had been swaddled in four blankets—every baby item Bebe had owned. Her little hands had been tucked inside to keep them warm and a fold of blanket had been drawn over her head to shield it from the wind. By everyone's best estimates, she had been outside for approximately twenty minutes when the fire chief opened the door, and in the snow for perhaps two. Only a little of the snow had begun to stick
to the blankets, making her look as if she had been sugared, or dipped in diamonds.)

Bebe had been in the country only two years by the time her baby was born, and in Cleveland for barely one. She had held three apartments in the time she'd been in Cleveland, had broken the lease on one and had been chronically late and short on rent on another, and had never held a job that paid more than minimum wage.

(She had been embarrassed, every month, about being behind. One month she had paid in full and then hadn't had enough money for groceries and electricity: what a thing, to choose between hunger and darkness. After that, she had decided to pay what she could, and on days when she got good tips she would write her name on a piece of paper, fold a twenty inside, and slide it under her landlord's door. She kept track of the balance on an old envelope that was always out on the kitchen counter. The balance ran like this:

Sept $100 short

9/8 paid $20

9/13 paid $20

9/18 paid $20

Oct $80 short so now $120 short

10/3 paid $20

10/14 paid $20

10/26 paid $20

Nov $70 short so now $130 short

Once she was behind, how could she catch up? And what other kind of job could she get, speaking little English, having not even the equivalent of a GED?)

During her pregnancy, and until shortly before she had left her baby, Bebe had worked at a restaurant where one of the cooks had been arrested for dealing heroin. Prior to that time, several of the other staff members had suspected something between the two of them. There had been flirting. On at least one occasion, the cook in question had given Bebe a ride home at the end of the night. Was it not probable that Bebe, with such dubious associates, had also been involved in something illicit?

(The cook, Vinny, had indeed been dealing heroin. This cannot be denied. But his interest in Bebe had been purely platonic. He had pitied her, watching her belly swell, knowing that her rat of a boyfriend had taken off and left her high and dry. Ten months earlier, his sister had been in the same boat and every night, when he came home to the apartment they shared with their mother, Teresa looked grayer, the baby squalling across her lap or slumped on her shoulder like a little old man, the two of them there on the couch looking elderly and exhausted. Is it any wonder that every morning, when he saw Bebe, his heart would feel bruised? Was it wrong for him to joke with her, trying to make her smile as he could no longer make his sister smile, to give her a ride home when he saw her feet swelling until the laces of her shoes nearly split?

As for Bebe: she had found Vinny attractive, it is true. But her attraction came largely from his kindness to her, and the thought of a man—any man—touching her as the baby drummed her heels within filled her with repulsion. When Vinny was picked up by the cops, Bebe had felt a deep sadness for him, as if he had been a brother she would never see again.)

Bebe's current job as a waitress paid her the state minimum for tipped employees: $2.35 per hour. At fifty hours per week plus tips, her average take-home pay each month was $317.50. Could she reasonably hope to support a child, and provide all its necessities, on that income? Would she
not be forced to seek welfare, and food stamps, and school lunches, would she and her child not become a drain on the community's resources?

(But there would be love, too, so much love. With that, you could get by with so little. It was enough for the basics: rent, food, clothes. How did you weigh a mother's love against the cost of raising a child?)

Mark and Linda McCullough, it was quite clear, had all the necessary resources for raising a child. Mr. McCullough had a steady, well-paying job; Mrs. McCullough had, for the past fourteen months, been a full-time mother to the baby and planned to be so indefinitely. They owned their own home in a safe, affluent neighborhood. Overall they were in the ninety-sixth percentile financially. While in their care, the baby had been well clothed, well fed, and well cared for. She had had regular medical checkups, plenty of socialization, and plenty of enrichment: library storytime, infant swim, mommy-and-me music classes. The McCullough home had been rigorously checked and certified as lead free.

Furthermore, the McCulloughs had shown themselves to be exceptionally devoted to raising a child. Records showed that they had tried to conceive children of their own for ten years, and had been waiting to adopt for another four. They had sought the advice of every medical expert in the greater Cleveland area—including the best fertility doctors at the Cleveland Clinic—and then engaged the most reputable adoption agency in the state. Did this not suggest that they would give the baby the most loving possible care, along with every opportunity?

(But the baby already had a mother. Whose blood flowed in her veins. Who had carried her in her womb for months, who had felt her kicking and flipping within, who had labored for twenty-one hours as she made her way faceup and screaming into the bright light of the delivery room, who had burst into ecstatic tears at hearing her child's voice for the first time, who had—even before the nurses had wiped the baby clean, even
before they had cut the cord—touched every part of her child, her tiny flaring nostrils and the faint shadows of her eyebrows and the womb-slicked soles of her feet, making certain she was wholly present, learning her by heart.)

Should custody be returned to Bebe, she would, of course, be raising her child as a single, working mother. Who would care for her child while she was at work? Would not the child be better off in a home with two parents—one of whom did not work and would be home raising her full time—rather than in a day care for the majority of the day? And would not the child be better off in a home with a mother
and
a father, studies showing the importance of a strong male figure in a child's life?

(It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a
mother
? Was it biology alone, or was it love?)

Back in the courtroom, Mr. Richardson was grateful that no one heard the last day, when Mrs. McCullough had been called to speak. She had come to the front—in family court, there was no witness box, just a chair, set to the side of the judge—and sat down, and he could see how nervous she was by the way she crossed and uncrossed her ankles, by the way she could not decide where to place her hands, on the arms of the chair or in the soft hammock of her skirt. It had not struck him before that the witness box in court, for all its formality and imposingness, hid you from the waist down: that at least the world would not see your feet fidgeting, that as much as you might be judged, at least your legs would not.

Ed Lim took his time in rising to question her. He was a tall man, especially for an Asian: six feet, lean and rangy, with the build of a basketball player—and indeed, he had played starting forward for Shaker's varsity team back in the sixties. He and Mrs. McCullough had been only
three years apart at school, lifelong Shaker residents and graduates, and before this case he had remembered her only as a shy, slightly plump freshman with long golden-brown hair. He'd been one of just two Asians in his class—the other had been Susie Chang; kids had teased that they would grow up and marry each other. They hadn't, of course; Susie had gone off to Oregon right after graduation, but in the end Ed had indeed met and married a nice Chinese girl in college, a first-generation kid like him. Mrs. McCullough, however, remembered none of this, not even Susie Chang, who'd been a cheerleader for a year alongside her.