Little Fires Everywhere(68)

From then on things changed quickly. Mia’s roommates did not notice anything until she began throwing up in the bathroom. “Sweet gig,” one of them said. The other said, “I wouldn’t go through all that, not for a million bucks.” Weeks passed. The Ryans moved her to a little studio apartment they owned, a quiet walk-up just off West End Avenue. “We rent it out but the tenants just left,” Madeline said to Mia. “Quieter for you. More space. Fewer people coming and going. And you’ll be so much closer to us, for when things start happening.” Mia quit her job at the art store—her belly was starting to show—but kept her other jobs, though she allowed the Ryans to linger under the impression that she had stopped working. After every doctor’s appointment, she came by to give them the latest updates, and as her clothes began to tighten the Ryans presented her with new ones. “I saw this dress,” Madeline would say, handing Mia a tissue-lined shopping bag with a flowered maternity dress inside it. “I thought it would look perfect on you.” She was, Mia realized, buying Mia the maternity clothes she would have bought herself, and she smiled and accepted them, and wore the dress on her next visit.

She said nothing to her parents about any of this; she told them only, as Christmas approached, that she would not be coming home. Too expensive, she claimed, knowing they would never ask her about school if she didn’t bring it up, and they didn’t. But at the end of January, she finally told Warren the truth. “You never talk about class anymore,” he said on the phone one evening. She was five months along by then, and though she could have kept it from him—how would he ever know?—she didn’t like the thought of hiding it from him any longer.

“Wren, promise you won’t tell Mom and Dad,” she’d said, taking a deep breath. Afterward, there was a long silence on the phone.

“Mia,” he’d said, and she knew he was serious, because he never used her full name. “I can’t believe you would do something like this.”

“I thought it through.” Mia set one hand on her belly, where she had recently begun to feel faint flutterings. The quickening, Madeline had called it, as she laid her hands on Mia’s skin—such an old-fashioned euphemism, one that made her think of quicksilver, a lithe little fish whipping about within her. “They’re such good people. Kind people. I’m helping them out, Wren. They want this baby so much. And they’re helping me, too. They’ve done so much for me.”

“But don’t you think it’s going to be hard to give it up?” Warren asked. “I don’t think I could do it.”

“Well, you’re not the one doing it, are you.”

“Don’t get pissy with me,” Warren said. “If you’d asked me, I’d have told you not to.”

“Just don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Mia said again.

“I won’t,” Warren said at last. “But I’ll tell you this. I’m the baby’s uncle, and I don’t like it.” There was an anger in his voice she had never heard before, at least not directed at her.

After that, she and Warren didn’t speak for a while. Every week, when she thought about calling him, she decided not to. Why call and argue again, she reasoned. In a few months the baby would be born, she would go back to her old life, and things would be as they had been. “Don’t get attached,” she said to her belly when the baby nudged her with a foot. It was never clear to her, even then, whether she was speaking to the baby, or to her belly, or to herself.

She and Warren were still not speaking when her mother called, very early in the morning, to tell her about the accident.




It had been snowy, this much she knew. He and Tommy Flaherty had been coming home late at night—where they’d been, her mother hadn’t said—and they’d taken a turn too fast and Tommy’s Buick had skidded and then overturned. Mia would not remember the details: that the roof of the car had been crushed in, that the emergency workers had had to cut the Buick open like a tin can, that neither Warren nor Tommy had been wearing their seat belts. She would not remember, at least for a while, about Tommy Flaherty in his hospital bed, with a punctured lung, a concussion, and seven broken bones, even though he’d grown up just up the hill from them, even though he and Warren had been friends for years, even though he’d once had a crush on her. She would remember only that Warren had been driving, and that now he was dead.

A plane ticket was expensive, but she couldn’t bear the thought of waiting, even an extra few hours. She wanted to be swallowed up by the house where she and Warren had grown up and played and argued and planned, where he no longer waited for her, which he would never enter again. She wanted to sink to her knees at the spot on the cold roadside where he had died. She wanted to see her parents, to not have to sit alone with the terrible numbness that threatened to swallow her up.

But when she stepped out of the taxi from the airport and came in the front door, her parents froze, staring at the bulge in her belly, which had grown too big for her to zip her coat. Mia’s hand drifted down to her waist, as if one palm could hide what was growing there.

“Mom,” she said. “Dad. It’s not what you think.”

A long silence unspooled in the kitchen, like gray ribbon. Hours and hours, it felt to Mia.

“Tell me,” her mother said at last. “Tell us what we think.”