Little Fires Everywhere(65)

Five minutes, she thought, and if they didn’t come, she would go home. She had forgotten to wear a watch, so she began to count slowly, as she and Warren had as children playing hide-and-seek. She would count to three hundred, and then she would go home and forget this crazy thing had ever happened. And then, just as she reached a hundred and ninety-eight, Joseph Ryan appeared at her elbow, like a waiter.

“Picasso,” he said.

“What?”

“The tapestry.” Here in the lobby he seemed almost bashful, and she had almost forgotten the menace she’d felt the day before. “Well, not a tapestry per se, I guess. He painted it on a curtain. They asked him for a painting, but he didn’t have time to make one, so he gave them this instead. I’ve always admired it.”

“I thought you were bringing your wife,” Mia said.

“She’s at the table.” He made as if to take her arm, then thought better of it and put his hands into his jacket pockets instead. It was almost comical, his gentlemanliness, she thought as she followed him down the hallway.

A huge white room with—she blinked—a jade-green pool in the center. Trees inside, studded with pink blossoms and starred with lights. Like a fairy forest hidden in the center of a New York office building. All around the soft hum of conversation. A scrim of fine chains lacing the window, rippling like waves though there was no breeze. And then the strange thing happened. As they came into the dining room and Joseph Ryan approached the table in the corner, Mia saw herself somehow already sitting at the table, in a neat navy dress, a cocktail in her hand. For a moment Mia thought she was approaching a mirror, and she paused, confused. And then the woman at the table stood up and reached across to take Mia’s hand.

“I’m Madeline,” she said, and Mia had the uncanny sensation, as their hands met, of touching her reflection in a pool.




The rest of the evening unfolded as if some kind of dream. Every time she looked at Madeline Ryan she saw herself; they shared not just the curly dark hair and similar features but some of the same mannerisms: the same tendency to bite their bottom lips, the same absent habit of pulling one curl down, like a spring, to their earlobes and letting it bounce back up. They were not identical—Madeline’s chin was a bit more pointed, her nose a little thinner, her voice deeper, richer, almost throaty—but they looked so similar they could have been mistaken for sisters. Late that night, long after the taxi the Ryans had summoned had dropped her back at home, Mia sat awake, thinking over all she’d heard.

How Madeline, at seventeen, had still not gotten her period, and how the doctor had then examined her and discovered that she had no uterus. One in five thousand women, Madeline had explained—there was a long German name for it, Mayer-something syndrome, which Mia had not fully caught. How the only way for them to have a child was a surrogate. This was 1981, and three years before headlines had trumpeted the arrival of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, but the odds of such a birth were still poor, and most people still viewed brewing babies in petri dishes as suspicious. “Not for us,” Madeline had said, twisting the stem of the wineglass between her elegant fingers. “No Frankenbabies, no thank you.” Instead, the Ryans had decided to take a more old-fashioned route: as old, Joseph pointed out, as the Bible. Sperm from the father, egg from—and carried by—a woman who seemed a suitable match. They had been advertising for months—discreetly, Madeline added—for a surrogate with the right characteristics, and had found no one. And then Joseph Ryan, riding the subway from a lunch meeting, had spotted an eerily familiar face at the other end of the car, and it had felt like fate.

“We see it,” he said, “as an opportunity for us to do each other some mutual good.” He and Madeline glanced at each other, and Madeline gave him the merest nod of the head, and they both sat up a little straighter and turned to Mia, who set her fork down.

“Don’t think that we’re entering into this lightly,” Madeline said. “We’ve been thinking about this for a long time. And we’ve been looking for just the right woman.” She tipped the carafe of water and refilled Mia’s glass. “We think that woman is you.”

In her room now, Mia did calculations. Ten thousand dollars, they had offered, to carry a healthy baby for them. They had said this to her as if outlining the terms of a job offer, laying out the benefits package in the most attractive way. “And of course we’d pay for all your medical expenses,” Joseph had added.

At the end of dinner, Joseph had slid a folded sheet of paper across the table. “Our home number,” he said. “Think it over. We’ll draw up a contract for you to look over. We hope you’ll call us.” He had already paid the bill, which Mia had not seen but knew must be appallingly high: they’d had oysters and wine; a tuxedoed man had prepared steak tartare at their table, deftly folding the golden yolk into the ruby-red meat. Joseph hailed Mia a taxi. “We hope you’ll call,” he said again. Behind him, behind the glass window of the lobby, Madeline buttoned the fur collar of her coat. Only after he had shut the door, and the taxi was on its way back downtown to Mia’s cramped apartment, did she unfold the paper to see that astonishing figure again: $10,000. And below it, a single word: please.

The next morning, she’d thought it was a bizarre dream until she saw that creased note still lying on her dresser. Insane, she thought. Her womb was not an apartment for rent. She could barely imagine having a baby, let alone giving one away. In the gray and steely morning light, the evening before now looked like a childish fantasy. She shook her head, dropped the note into her dresser drawer, pulled out her uniform for work.