Little Fires Everywhere(13)

The Richardson children, Pearl soon learned, had their most heated discussions about Jerry Springer. “Thank god we live in Shaker,” Lexie said one day during a provocative episode entitled “Stop Bringing White Girls Home to Dinner!” “I mean, we’re lucky. No one sees race here.”

“Everyone sees race, Lex,” said Moody. “The only difference is who pretends not to.”

“Look at me and Brian,” said Lexie. “We’ve been together since junior year and no one gives a crap that I’m white and he’s black.”

“You don’t think his parents would rather he was dating somebody black?” said Moody.

“I honestly don’t think they care.” Lexie popped the tab on another Diet Coke. “Skin color doesn’t say anything about who you are.”

“Shhh,” said Trip. “It’s back.”

It was during one of those afternoons—during “I’m Having Your Husband’s Baby!”—that Lexie suddenly turned to Pearl and asked, “Do you ever think about trying to find your father?” Pearl gave her a calculated blank stare, but Lexie continued anyway. “I mean, like where he is. Don’t you ever want to meet him?”

Pearl turned her eyes to the TV screen, where burly security guards were wrestling an orange-haired woman built like a BarcaLounger back into her seat. “I’d have to start by finding out who he is,” she said. “And, I mean, look at how well this is going. Why wouldn’t I want to?” Sarcasm didn’t come naturally to her, and even to herself she sounded more plaintive than ironic.

“He could be anybody,” Lexie mused. “An old boyfriend. Maybe he split when your mom got pregnant. Or maybe he got killed in an accident before you were born.” She tapped one finger on her lip, brainstorming possibilities. “He could have left her for another woman. Or—” She sat up, titillated. “Maybe he raped her. And she got pregnant and kept the baby.”

“Lexie,” Trip said suddenly. He slid across the sofa and slung an arm over Pearl’s shoulders. “Shut the fuck up.” For Trip to pay attention to a conversation that wasn’t about sports, let alone tune in on someone else’s feelings, was nothing short of unusual, and they all knew it.

Lexie rolled her eyes. “I was just kidding,” she said. “Pearl knows that. Don’t you, Pearl?”

“Sure,” Pearl said. She forced herself to smile. “Duh.” She felt a sudden rush of dampness beneath her arms, her heart pounding, and she wasn’t sure if it was Trip’s arm around her shoulders, or Lexie’s comments, or both. Above them, somewhere overhead, Izzy practiced Lalo on her violin. On the screen, the two women leapt from their seats again and began to claw at each other’s hair.

But Lexie’s comment rankled. It was nothing Pearl hadn’t thought about herself over the years, but hearing it spoken aloud, from someone else’s mouth, made it feel more urgent. She had wondered these things, now and again, but when she’d asked as a child, her mother had given her flippant answers. “Oh, I found you in the bargain bin at the Goodwill,” Mia had said once. Another time: “I picked you from a cabbage patch. Didn’t you know?” As a teen, she’d finally stopped asking. This afternoon, the question still churning in her mind, she got home and found her mother in the living room, applying paint to a photograph of a stripped-down bicycle.

“Mom,” she began, then found she could not repeat Lexie’s blunt words. Instead she asked the question that ran below all the other questions like a deep underground river. “Was I wanted?”

“Wanted where?” With one careful lick of the brush Mia supplied a Prussian-blue tire in the empty fork of the bike.

“Here. I mean, did you want me. When I was a baby.”

Mia said nothing for such a long time that Pearl wasn’t sure if she’d heard. But after a long pause, Mia turned around, paintbrush in hand, and to Pearl’s amazement, her mother’s eyes were wet. Could her mother be crying? Her unflappable, redoubtable, indomitable mother, whom she had never seen cry, not when the Rabbit had broken down by the side of the road and a man in a blue pickup had stopped as if to help, taken Mia’s purse, and driven away; not when she’d dropped a heavy bedstead—salvaged from the side of the road—on her baby toe, smashing it so hard the nail eventually turned a deep eggplant and fell away. But there it was: an unfamiliar shimmer over her mother’s eyes, as if she were looking into rippled water.

“Were you wanted?” Mia said. “Oh, yes. You were wanted. Very, very much.”

She set the paintbrush down in the tray and walked rapidly out of the room without looking at her daughter again, leaving Pearl to contemplate the half-finished bicycle, the question she’d asked, the puddle of paint slowly forming a skin over the bristles of the brush.





5



As if the Jerry Springer episode had awakened her to Pearl’s presence, Lexie began to take a new interest in her little brother’s friend—Little Orphan Pearl, she said to Serena Wong one evening on the phone. “She’s so quiet,” Lexie marveled. “Like she’s afraid to speak. And when you look at her, she turns bright red—red-red, like a tomato. A literal tomato.”

“She’s super shy,” Serena said. She’d met Pearl a few times, at the Richardsons’, but hadn’t yet heard her say a word. “She probably just doesn’t know how to make friends.”