Little Fires Everywhere (32 page)

“Space.” Brian slammed his hands against the steering wheel. “For the past month I've given you nothing but space. You haven't even kissed me in like a week. How much more space do you need?”

“Maybe all of it.” The words fell out of Lexie's mouth like stones. “I'm going off to Yale and you're heading to Princeton—maybe it's better this way.”

Stunned silence filled the car as Lexie and Brian both picked over what she'd said.

“That's what you want?” Brian said at last. “Okay. We're done, then.” He clicked the unlock button on the car door. “See you around.”

Lexie slung her bookbag over her shoulder and stepped out of the car. They had been parked on a quiet side street, a spot they'd used often when they wanted time alone.
He wouldn't just drive off,
she thought to herself.
This can't really be how it ends.
But as soon as she slammed the door shut, Brian started the car with a growl and drove away. He didn't look back, though Lexie thought she saw his eyes flick to the rearview mirror, just once, before he turned the corner.

Without thinking where she was going, she began to walk: down the sidewalk and around the corner and out to the main road, paths she'd
driven often but seldom walked before. She and Brian had been friends since the eighth grade, had been dating for almost two years. She thought of everything they'd done together—screaming from way up in the bleachers at Indians games, watching from the middle school parking lot on the Fourth of July as the city shot fireworks high into the night sky. Homecoming, Brian slipping a rose corsage onto her wrist, an Italian dinner at Giovanni's neither of them knew how to pronounce, dancing in the gym to the Fugees until they were both beaded with sweat, then pressed in his arms during “I Don't Want to Miss a Thing,” so close that their sweat mingled. Now all that was gone. She walked and walked, following the curve of the road, stopping now and then only to let cars pass by, and then she found her feet had taken her somewhere she hadn't expected, but that felt like the only place in the world she wanted to be: not home, but the duplex on Winslow. Through the upstairs windows she could see Mia hard at work on something, and Lexie knew that Mia would know just the right thing to say, would give her the space to think this through, to process what had just happened, what would happen next, why she'd just left what she'd thought was a perfect boyfriend, a perfect relationship, how it had all suddenly fallen apart.

When Lexie climbed the stairs and opened the door into the kitchen, Izzy was there, too, sitting at the table beside Mia, folding scraps of paper into cranes. Handfuls of them in all sizes lay on the table already, scattered across it like confetti. She shot Lexie a hostile look, but before she could open her mouth, Mia cut her off.

“Lexie. I'm glad you came.”

She pulled out a chair and Lexie settled into it, her face so still that even Izzy could tell something was wrong. Lexie looked almost as if she were going to be physically ill. She had never seen her sister like this before.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” Lexie said through dry lips. “I'm fine.”

“You're fine,” Mia said, squeezing Lexie's shoulder. “You're going to be fine.” She pulled an extra mug from the cupboard and put the kettle on.

Without meeting Izzy's eyes, Lexie said, “Before you ask, Brian and I broke up.”

“I'm sorry,” Izzy said, and found that she really meant it. Brian had always been nice to her, letting her tag along for milkshakes once or twice at Yours Truly when he and Lexie had first started dating and she'd still been in middle school; giving her a ride home now and then when he'd passed her walking. She glanced at Lexie, then at Mia. “Do you—want me to leave?”

At the stove, Mia pretended to busy herself with opening a tea bag. Lexie shook her head. “Stay,” she said. “It's fine. I'm fine. Just—stay.”

After a moment, Izzy slid a square of paper across the table, and Lexie took it and began to follow her sister's lead: folding over, back, to the center, out, until at last she took hold of the corners and pulled and a crane bloomed like a pale flower in her hands.

“Judge Rheinbeck says he's not yet ready to make a decision,” Mr. Richardson told Mrs. Richardson the last week of April. Harold Rheinbeck was sixty-nine, gray haired, a longtime boxing fan, and an enthusiastic recreational hunter, but he was a sensitive man, too, and well aware of the intricate emotional complexities of the case. Over the past month, since the hearing had ended, he had in fact spent nights lying awake for hours thinking about little May Ling–Mirabelle, as he thought of her—trying to be scrupulously fair, every time he heard one name he appended the other in his mind, and for him the two names had firmly blended into
one. Because the baby herself was in the care of a sitter and not present—infants being notoriously indisposed to long hearings—Ed Lim had wisely blown up a photograph and placed it on his prep table, and everyone in the court had been staring at it every day. As a result, the judge pictured her small face as he mulled over each day's testimony, and the more he thought about it, the more undecidable the case became. He felt a sudden, intense sympathy for King Solomon, and each morning, short on sleep and uncomfortable in mind, he barked unfairly at his clerks and his secretary without even realizing why.

“It's agony,” Mrs. McCullough said to Mrs. Richardson over a commiserating cup of coffee. They were, as usual, in Mrs. McCullough's home, to avoid scrutiny. “What else does he want? How can this be a hard decision?” The baby monitor on the table beside them crackled, and she adjusted the volume slightly higher. Both women fell silent, and the quiet sound of Mirabelle's sleeping breathing filled the kitchen.

“Can you think of anything else you could tell the judge?” Mrs. Richardson asked. “Things that give more context. Other factors for him to weigh.” She leaned forward. “Can you think of anything else you and Bill haven't brought up? Reasons you'd be the better choice for custody? Or—” She hesitated, then plunged in anyway. “Or other reasons Bebe might be unfit? Anything at all.”

Mrs. McCullough nibbled one fingernail. It had been her nervous habit as a child, and Mrs. Richardson noticed she'd been doing it again of late. “Well,” she began, then stopped. “It's probably not true.”

“This might be your last chance, Linda,” Mrs. Richardson said gently. “Anything you've got, we'd better throw at them.”

“It's only a suspicion. I don't have any proof.” Mrs. McCullough sighed. “About three months ago, I noticed that Bebe seemed—plumper. Her face got rounder and rounder, I noticed that particularly, when she
came with the social worker to pick up Mirabelle. And her—her chest. And the social worker told me something strange. She said that on one of their visits around then, Bebe had to run off to the bathroom suddenly. They were at the library and she suddenly handed Adrienne the baby and dashed off. Adrienne said she heard Bebe throwing up.” Mrs. McCullough looked up at Mrs. Richardson. “It just made me wonder if she might have been pregnant. She seemed so incredibly exhausted then, too. I just had this hunch. There's a look women get—you can see it, if you look. All these years, all this time we were trying, and one after another of my friends got pregnant—every time, I knew before they told me. I knew every time you were pregnant. Didn't I, Elena?”

“You did,” said Mrs. Richardson. “Every time, you knew. Before I'd said a word.”

“And then, about a month ago, she suddenly went back to normal. Her face flattened out again. Back to being skinny and straight as a rail. I wondered.” Mrs. McCullough took a deep breath. “I wondered if she might have been pregnant, and then ended it.”

“An abortion.” Mrs. Richardson settled back in her chair. “That's a big accusation.”

“I'm not accusing,” Mrs. McCullough insisted. “I told you, I don't have proof. Only a suspicion. And you said
anything.
” She sipped her coffee, which had gone cold. “If she
had
had an abortion, would that change anything?”

“Maybe.” Mrs. Richardson considered. “Having an abortion doesn't make her a bad mother, of course. Though it would likely turn public opinion against her, if the news got out. People don't like to hear about abortions. And an abortion while trying to get back a baby you abandoned?” She drummed her fingers on the table. “At the very least, it would suggest that she was careless enough to get pregnant again.” She
took Mrs. McCullough's hand and squeezed it. “I'll look into it. See if there's anything that might help. If there is, we can bring it up with the judge.”

“Elena,” Mrs. McCullough sighed. “You always know what to do. What on earth would I do without you?”

“Don't say anything to Bill or Mark,” Mrs. Richardson said, gathering her purse. “Let's not get their hopes up yet. Trust me. I'll take care of everything.”

Bebe had not, in fact, been pregnant. Under the stress of the impending hearing, with news crews filming outside the restaurant one day and a journalist stopping her on the street to shove a microphone into her face the next, with a story about the case out every other day, it felt like, and her boss grumbling about the time she'd have to take off for the hearing—she had given in to junk food cravings: Oreos, French fries, once an entire bag of pork rinds, ballooning up fifteen pounds in a month. She'd put in extra hours to make up for the time she'd be taking off, working until two or three on the nights she closed and arriving at nine to open the next morning. That time, in her memory, existed only as a blur. And then she'd gotten food poisoning—a box of leftovers that had sat too long in the fridge—and thrown up right in the library, in front of the social worker. She hadn't been able to eat for days afterward, and when she recovered, she found that, with the hearing mere weeks away, she was too nervous to eat. By the time the hearing began she had lost the extra fifteen pounds plus ten more.

Mrs. Richardson, however, knew none of this. With no way to prove a negative, she began, logically enough, by searching for evidence of the positive. She could find anything out, she reminded herself. Even if she didn't know it herself, she had connections. The next morning, she pulled out her Rolodex and flipped to the M's:
Manwill, Elizabeth.

She and Elizabeth Manwill had been roommates freshman year in college, and though they'd found other roommates in later years, they'd stayed in touch, through graduation and afterward. They had reconnected when Elizabeth moved to Cleveland and became the head of a medical clinic just east of Shaker Heights—the only clinic on the East Side, it happened, that provided abortions.

It was a small thing Mrs. Richardson wanted to ask: a small, illicit, slightly illegal thing. Could she check the clinic's records and see if Bebe Chow's name appeared in the list of recent abortions? “Unofficially. Off the record,” Mrs. Richardson assured her friend, tucking the phone receiver against her shoulder and double-checking that her office door was shut.

“Elena,” Elizabeth Manwill said, shutting her own office door. “You know I can't do that.”

“It doesn't have to be a big thing. No one needs to know.”

“It's confidential. Do you know how much the fines are for that? Not to mention the ethics of it.”

Elizabeth Manwill had been friends with Mrs. Richardson for many years, and she owed Mrs. Richardson a great deal, though she herself hated to put it that way. She had shown up at Denison as Betsy, a painfully shy girl from Dayton, relieved to escape the constant teasing that had been her high school years, terrified that college might turn out to be the same. At eighteen, Elizabeth Manwill was an easy target for mockery: glasses perpetually sliding down her nose, forehead knobby with acne, clothes frumpy and ill fitting. Her new roommate looked just like the snotty girls who had made high school miserable: pretty, beautifully dressed, somehow at ease with the world, and that first night she had cried herself to sleep.

But Elena had taken her under her wing and transformed her. She'd
lent her lipstick and Noxzema, taken her shopping, taught her new ways to style her hair. Walking to class with Elena, sitting beside her in the dining hall, Elizabeth had learned a new confidence as well. She began to speak as Elena did—as if she knew people wanted to hear her thoughts—and to hold herself taller, like a dancer. By the time they graduated, Elizabeth was a different person, Liz Manwill, who wore pantsuits and heels and architect's glasses that made her look almost as smart as she was, a person who would go on to run a clinic with ease. In the years that followed, Elena—now Mrs. Richardson—had continued to offer her assistance. With her many local connections, she had put in a good word when Elizabeth had applied to the clinic, and after Elizabeth had gotten the job and moved to town, had introduced her to all sorts of people, both professionally and personally. In fact, Elizabeth had met her husband at a cocktail party the Richardsons had thrown some years before; he had been a colleague of Mr. Richardson's. Mrs. Richardson had never asked, or even hinted, at repayment, and both of them were keenly aware of this.