Little Fires Everywhere(73)

For now, Mrs. Richardson stacked her notes in her folder, which she had discreetly labeled M.W. Tomorrow she would drive back home.




On the way out of the clinic, Lexie was having trouble processing what was happening to her, what had just happened to her. Her legs and her body trotted confidently ahead while her head drifted along behind like a dawdling balloon. She had been pregnant and now she was not. There had been something alive inside her and now there was not. Deep in her belly she felt a vague cramping and a warm damp trickle into the thick sanitary pad the nurse had given her. The rest of the package was in her bag, along with a bottle of Advil. “You’ll want this later on, when the anesthetic wears off,” the nurse had told her.

Pearl took her arm. “You okay?”

Lexie nodded and the parking lot spun around and landed on its side. Pearl caught her as she began to tip. “Okay. Come on. Almost there.”

The original plan had been to drive Lexie home. Her mother wasn’t due back until tomorrow afternoon, and by then, Lexie had assumed, she would be back to normal, ready to pretend nothing had happened. But it was clear to Pearl, as she guided Lexie into the front seat of the Explorer, that Lexie was in no condition to go home. She was woozy from the anesthesia, and in the end, Pearl had to buckle the seat belt around her.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll go to my house.”

“What about your mom?” Lexie asked, and when Pearl said, “She can keep a secret,” this seemed like the saddest thing Lexie had ever heard, and she burst into tears.

It was just past noon when they entered the house on Winslow, and Mia—cutting a maple tree out of a magazine ad with an X-Acto knife—looked up in alarm as they entered the kitchen. At the sight of the scalpel in Mia’s hands, Lexie—who had calmed down by the end of the drive—began to cry again. To everyone’s surprise, even her own, Mia pulled Lexie into her arms.

“You’re all right,” she said. “It’s all going to be okay.”

Lexie was never entirely sure, afterward, whether she had told Mia what had happened, or if Pearl had, or if Mia had simply intuited it on her own. All she would remember was Mia holding her tight, so tight that the world stopped spinning at last, Mia tucking her into a low soft bed that, it turned out later, was Mia’s own.

Mia, in fact, had already had suspicions about Lexie’s situation. Though Brian had cautiously flushed their condoms down the toilet, a few times when Mia emptied the garbage in Lexie’s room she had found the condom wrappers balled into a wad of tissues. One afternoon, when she’d come back to the Richardson house to retrieve her purse, which she’d left behind that morning by mistake, she’d tripped over Brian’s size 12 tennis shoes in the entryway right beside Lexie’s platform sandals. There had been no sign of the two of them, but Mia had grabbed her bag from the kitchen island and hurried out, half afraid of what she might hear from upstairs, shutting the door quietly and hoping the noise wouldn’t carry. Lexie, every time Mia saw her, struck her as terrifyingly young, and Mia did not want to think about what Lexie was certainly up to, nor what—by extension—Pearl might be up to as well.

So when Lexie had appeared in the doorway, half leaning on Pearl’s arm, Mia took in her wan and grayish face, the pink discharge form from the clinic still clutched in her hand, the plastic bag full of pads dangling from Pearl’s wrist, and understood immediately what had happened. If someone had asked her, a month or even a week before, to guess what she might have felt, she might have anticipated a sliver of gloating, or at least a moment of holier-than-thou. In the actual moment, however, she felt nothing but a flood of deep sympathy for Lexie, for the bind she had found herself in, for the pain—both physical and emotional—she would have to fight through to get out of that bind.

Lexie woke up nestled under a crisp white comforter. It was midafternoon, and the curtains were drawn, but a lamp in the corner had been left on, a towel draped over the shade to mute it, and the thoughtfulness of this pierced her. For the third time that day she found herself sobbing. And then Mia was there, sitting at her bedside, stroking her back.

“It’s okay,” she said to Lexie, and though she said nothing else, just this—it’s okay, it’s okay—Lexie found herself breathing easier. Mia settled herself cross-legged on the floor and handed Lexie a tissue, and Lexie realized that the bed wasn’t simply low: it was a mattress set on the carpet. She blew her nose. There was no garbage can in sight, but Mia held out her hand, and after a moment of embarrassment Lexie handed over the damp wad of tissue.

“You slept a long time. That’s good. Do you think you can eat something?” In the kitchen, Mia set a bowl of soup in front of her, and Lexie brought a spoonful to her lips: chicken noodle, salty, searingly hot. There was no sign of Pearl, but the clock on the stove read 3:15. School had let out a little while ago. She must have told her mother everything, Lexie thought.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she blurted out. She felt an intense need to explain herself, to make sure Mia did not think ill of her. At that moment, Pearl came up into the apartment. She was flushed in the face and panting a little.

“I borrowed Moody’s bike,” she said. “Had to get home and see if you were doing okay.”

“You didn’t—” Lexie began, and Pearl shook her head.