Little Fires Everywhere(82)
“There are resources out there.” Mrs. Richardson waved a dismissive hand, inadvertently flicking a few drops of stroganoff onto the counter. “I don’t see why they can’t learn it alongside her. Wouldn’t that bond them all closer, learning about Chinese culture together?” She had vivid childhood memories of Linda swaddling her Raggedy Ann in an old kerchief and gently putting it to bed. More than anyone, she knew how fiercely Linda McCullough had always wanted a baby, how deep that longing to be a mother—that magical, marvelous, terrifying role—ran in her friend. Mia, she thought, ought to understand that better than anyone: Hadn’t she seen that in the Ryans? Hadn’t she, maybe, even felt it herself, hadn’t that been why she’d run away with Pearl? She swabbed at the counter with her thumb, smudging the granite. “Honestly, I think this is a tremendous thing for Mirabelle. She’ll be raised in a home that truly doesn’t see race. That doesn’t care, not one infinitesimal bit, what she looks like. What could be better than that? Sometimes I think,” she said fiercely, “that we’d all be better off that way. Maybe at birth everyone should be given to a family of another race to be raised. Maybe that would solve racism once and for all.”
She shut the dishwasher with a clang and left the room, the dishes inside still rattling in her wake. Mr. Richardson took a sponge and wiped the sticky counter clean. He should have known better than to bring it up, he realized: it was too personal for her; she couldn’t see clearly; she was so close that she didn’t even realize how unclearly she was seeing. For her it was simple: Bebe Chow had been a poor mother; Linda McCullough had been a good one. One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on. He had always admired his wife’s idealism, her belief that the world could be made better, could be made orderly, could perhaps even be made perfect. For the first time, he wondered if the same held true for him.
17
It soon became clear, however, that Mr. Richardson was not the only conflicted party. The judge seemed to be waffling as well. A week passed after the hearing, then two, with no decision made. In mid-April, Lexie was due for a follow-up appointment at the clinic, and to both Pearl’s and Mia’s surprise, she asked Mia to accompany her.
“You don’t have to do anything,” she promised Mia. “I’d just feel better if you were there.” The earnestness in her voice was persuasive, and on the afternoon of the appointment, after tenth period, Lexie parked her Explorer outside the house on Winslow. Mia started up the Rabbit and Lexie climbed into the passenger seat and they drove away together, as if she really were Pearl, as if Mia really were her mother taking her on this most intimate errand.
In fact, since the visit to the clinic, Pearl had felt a strange sense of reversal: as if, while she and Lexie slept under the same roof, Lexie had somehow taken her place and she’d taken Lexie’s and they had not quite disentangled. Lexie had gone home in a borrowed T-shirt, and Pearl, watching her walk out the door in her own clothing, had had the eerie feeling of watching herself walk away. The next morning, she’d found Lexie’s own shirt on her bed: laundered and carefully folded by Mia, presumably left there to be returned at school. Instead of tucking it into her bag, Pearl had put it on, and in this borrowed skin she’d felt prettier, wittier, had even been a bit sassy in English class, to the amusement of her classmates and her teacher alike. When the bell rang, a few kids had glanced back at her, impressed, as if they were noticing her for the first time. So this is what it’s like to be Lexie, she’d thought. Lexie herself was back at school, wan and somewhat subdued and with dark rings under her eyes, but upright. “You stole my shirt, bitch,” she said to Pearl, but affectionately, and then, “Looks good on you.”
Days later, shirt returned and her own retrieved, Pearl still felt Lexie’s confidence fizzing in her veins. So now, when presented with a rare empty house, Pearl decided to take full advantage. She left a note in Trip’s locker; she told Moody that she’d promised to help her mother at home all afternoon. Mia, meanwhile, had told Izzy she had a shift at the restaurant—“Go do something fun,” she’d said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”—so no one was home when Trip and Pearl arrived at the house on Winslow after school and went upstairs to Pearl’s bedroom. It was the first time Trip had been to her house, and to her it seemed momentous to be able to lie down with him in a place of her own choosing, instead of on the old worn-out couch in Tim Michaels’s basement, surrounded by the PlayStation and the air hockey table and Tim’s old soccer trophies, all the paraphernalia of someone else’s life. This would be in her own space, in her own bed, and that morning, as she’d made it carefully, she’d felt a warm glow at the base of her throat, thinking of Trip’s head lying on her pillow.
Moody, left to his own devices, had just shut his locker and was headed home when he heard someone calling his name. It was Tim Michaels, gym bag slung over his shoulder. Tim was tall and tough and had never been very kind to Moody: years ago, when Tim and Trip had been closer and he’d come over to the Richardsons’ now and then to play video games, he’d nicknamed Moody Jake—“Jake, get me another Coke,” “Jake, move your big head, you’re blocking my view.” Moody had dared to think it was affectionate, but then he’d heard the word at school and understood what it meant in Shaker slang. Dave Matthews Band was dope; Bryan Adams was jake. Getting to third base was dope; being grounded was jake. After that, he’d stayed upstairs when Tim came over, and was meanly glad when he and Trip began to drift apart. Now here was Tim calling Moody’s name—his real name—and jogging down the theatre wing toward him.