Little Fires Everywhere(27)
Mia looked down at Izzy, this wayward, wild, fiery girl suddenly gone timid and dampened and desperate. She reminded Mia, oddly, of herself at around that age, traipsing through the neighborhood, climbing over fences and walls in search of the right photograph, defiantly spending her mother’s money on film. Single-minded almost to excess. Something inside Izzy reached out to something in her and caught fire.
“All right,” Mia said, and opened the door wider to let Izzy inside.
8
Izzy’s newfound fascination with Mia proved lasting. Instead of sequestering herself in her bedroom with her violin, she would walk the mile and a half to the house on Winslow right after school, where Mia would be hard at work. She would watch Mia, learning to frame a shot, develop film, make a print. Pearl, meanwhile, did the exact reverse, walking with Moody to his house, lounging in the sunroom with the three oldest Richardson children. Deep down she was grateful to Izzy for diverting her mother’s attention: for so many years, it had been only the two of them, and now, on the Richardsons’ big sofa, she stretched her legs out in luxurious satisfaction. At five o’clock, Izzy would hop into the passenger seat of the Rabbit and Mia would drive them both to the Richardsons’, where Izzy would perch at the end of the kitchen counter and Mia would prepare dinner, listening intently to her daughter and the others in the next room. Only when Mia headed home—with Pearl in the passenger seat this time—would Izzy join her siblings and slump onto the couch beside them. “Someone’s got a little crush on Mia,” Lexie singsonged, and Izzy rolled her eyes and went upstairs.
But crush was, perhaps, the right term. Izzy hung on Mia’s every word, sought and trusted her opinion on everything. Along with the basics of photography, she began to absorb Mia’s aesthetics and sensibilities. When she asked Mia how she knew which images to put together, Mia shook her head. “I don’t,” she said. “This—this is how I figure out what I think.” She waved a hand at the X-Acto knife on the table, the photograph she was carefully cutting apart: a line of cars speeding across the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, beneath the watchful eyes of the two huge statues carved into the bridge’s pillars. She had meticulously excised each car, leaving only its shadow. “I don’t have a plan, I’m afraid,” she said, lifting the knife again. “But then, no one really does, no matter what they say.”
“My mother does. She thinks she has a plan for everything.”
“I’m sure that makes her feel better.”
“She hates me.”
“Oh, Izzy. I’m sure that’s not true.”
“No, she does. She hates me. That’s why she picks on me and not any of the others.”
Mia had, since starting to work at the Richardsons’, noted the peculiar dynamic between Izzy and the rest of her family, especially her mother. Truth be told, her mother was harsher on Izzy: always criticizing her behavior, always less patient with her mistakes and her shortcomings. She seemed to hold Izzy to a higher standard than her other children, to demand more from her, yet at the same time to overlook her successes in favor of her faults. Izzy, Mia noticed, tended to respond by needling her mother even more, pushing her buttons with the expertise only a child could.
“Izzy,” she said now, “I’ll tell you a secret. A lot of times, parents are not the best at seeing their children clearly. There’s so much wonderful about you.” She gave Izzy’s elbow a little squeeze and swept a handful of scraps into the garbage, and Izzy beamed. During those afternoons, when it was just the two of them, it was easy for Izzy to pretend that Mia was her mother, that the bedroom down the hallway was hers, and that when night fell she would go into it and sleep and wake in the morning. That Pearl—a mile and a half away, watching television with her own brothers and sister—did not exist, that this life belonged to her, Izzy, and her alone. In the evenings, back at home, with jazz screeching from Moody’s room and Alanis Morissette wailing from Lexie’s and Trip’s stereo providing a thumping undercurrent of bass, Izzy would imagine herself in the house on Winslow: lying in bed reading, perhaps, or maybe writing a poem, Mia out in the living room working late into the night. There were many convoluted routes into this fantasy: she and Pearl had been accidentally switched at birth years ago; she had been taken home by her parents, who were therefore not her parents, and this was why no one in her family seemed to understand her, why she seemed so different from them all. Now, in her carefully spun dreams, she was reunited with her true mother. I knew I’d find you someday, Mia would say.
Everyone in the Richardson family noticed Izzy’s improved demeanor. “She’s almost pleasant around you,” Lexie told Mia one day. Izzy’s adoration for Mia, like everything she did, did not come by halves: there was nothing Izzy wouldn’t do for her. And she soon found something, she was sure, that Mia really wanted.
In mid-November, Pearl and Moody, along with the rest of their modern European history class, had gone to the art museum to look at paintings. The docent giving the class a tour was elderly and thin and looked as if all the juice had been sucked out of him through a straw via his pursed mouth. He disliked high school groups: teens didn’t listen. Teens could pay attention to nothing but the sexuality billowing off each other like steam. Velázquez, he thought; some still lifes, maybe some Caravaggio. Definitely no nudes. He led them the long way around to the Italian wing, through the main hall with its tapestries and suits of armor in glass cases.