Little Fires Everywhere(69)
“I mean.” Mia looked down at her belly, as if she herself were bewildered to find it there. “It isn’t my baby.” Inside, the baby gave a fierce kick.
“What do you mean, it isn’t your baby?” her mother said. “How can it not be your baby?”
“I’m a surrogate. I’m carrying it for this couple.” Mia found herself trying to explain: about the Ryans, about how kind they were, how much they wanted a baby, how happy they would be. She tried to focus on how much she was helping them, as if this were a charitable deed, purely altruistic: like volunteering at a soup kitchen, or adopting a dog from a shelter. But her mother understood immediately.
“These Ryans,” she said. “I suppose you’re doing this for them just out of the goodness of your heart?”
“No,” Mia admitted. “They’re paying me. When the baby is born.” She realized suddenly that she was still wearing her scarf and hat. A thin gray sludge trickled from her boot treads onto the cream-colored linoleum.
Her mother turned and headed for the doorway. “I can’t cope with this now,” she said, her voice fading as she stepped into the living room. “Not now.” At the foot of the staircase she stopped and hissed, with a venom that shocked Mia: “Your brother is dead—dead, you realize that?—and you come home like this?” Footsteps pounded up the steps.
Mia glanced at her father. She felt exactly as she had as a child, when she’d broken something or ruined something or spent on film the money that her mother had meant for clothes: in those moments her mother would rage and scream and run to her room, leaving Mia with her father, who would squeeze her hand and let the quiet lap over them like milk, then say quietly, “Buy a new one,” or “Give her an hour, and go apologize,” or sometimes, simply, “Fix it.” This was how they’d always fought. But this time her father did not take her hand. He did not say to her, Fix it. Instead he looked at her belly, as if he couldn’t bear to look at her face. His eyes were wet and his jaw clenched.
“Dad?” she said at last. She would have preferred shouting to this protracted, knife-sharp silence.
“I can’t believe you’d sell your own child,” he said, and then he, too, left the room.
They didn’t tell her to leave, but even after she hung her coat in the hall closet, set her bag down in her old bedroom, they didn’t speak to her. At dinner she sat at her old place at the table and her mother set a plate and fork in front of her and her father passed the casserole that one of their neighbors had brought, but they said nothing to her, and when she asked questions—When was the funeral going to be? Had they seen Warren?—they answered as briefly as possible. Mia gave up eventually and wound noodles and tuna around her fork. There was a whole stack of casseroles in the fridge, a leaning tower of Pyrex baking dishes crimped in foil. As if no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to. None of them mentioned, or looked at, Warren’s empty place by the window.
They decided everything without her, what the flowers would be, what the music would be, what color coffin Warren would be placed in: walnut with a blue silk lining. They suggested, tactfully, that Mia not go out; she must be tired, they said, they didn’t want her to slip on the ice, but she understood: they didn’t want the neighbors to see her. When Mia picked out a shirt and tie for Warren—the one he always chose when forced to dress up—her mother selected another, the white shirt and red-striped tie that she’d bought Warren when he entered high school, which he’d said made him look like a stockbroker, and which he never wore. At no point did they mention her interesting condition or her complicated situation. But when they said it would be best if she didn’t attend the funeral—“We just don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea,” her mother had put it—Mia gave in. The night before the funeral, she packed her things. From the back of the closet, she pulled her old duffel bag and took the quilt from her bed, a few old blankets. Then she tiptoed across the hall into Warren’s room.
His bed was still unmade; she wondered if her mother would ever make it again, or if she’d simply strip the sheets, strip the room, paint it white, and pretend nothing had ever happened there. What would they do with Warren’s things? she wondered. Would they give them away? Would they pack them into crates in the attic, to grow musty and faded and old? On Warren’s bulletin board she spotted the photo from her art school application: the etched-in image of the two of them, children, climbing up the mountain of slag. She unpinned it and added it to her bag. Then, on his desk, she found what she’d been looking for: the keys to Warren’s car.
Her parents were asleep; her mother had been taking sleeping pills at night to calm her nerves, and the crack beneath their bedroom door was dark. The Rabbit started up with a throaty growl. “A Porsche purrs,” Warren had told her once, “a VW kind of putts.” She had to pull the front seat all the way forward to reach the clutch; his legs had always been longer than hers. Then she pressed down on the gearshift and, after a moment of hunting, fiddled her way into reverse, and the darkened house faded in her headlights as the car backed out of the driveway.
She drove all night and reached the Upper West Side as the sun was rising. She’d never had to park in Manhattan before and circled the neighborhood for ten minutes before squeezing into a spot on 72nd Street. In her apartment, she sank into her borrowed bed and wrapped herself in the quilt. It would be a long time, she knew, before she would sleep in a bed this comfortable again. When she woke, the late afternoon sun was already sinking over the Hudson, and she got to work. Only the things she’d brought with her, that were truly hers, went into her bag: her too-tight clothes, the handful of loose muumuus she’d bought herself at Goodwill, a few old quilts, some faded bedsheets, a handful of silverware. A file box of negatives, and her cameras. The fancy maternity dresses from the Ryans she folded neatly and placed in a paper grocery bag.