Little Fires Everywhere (11 page)

Mrs. Richardson took it down—an Anita Rees—and, after a quick call to New York City's public information, obtained the phone number of the Rees Gallery in Manhattan. Anita Rees, when reached on the telephone, proved to be a true New Yorker: brisk, fast-talking, and unflappable.

“A Pauline Hawthorne? Yes, I'm sure I did. I represented Pauline Hawthorne for years.” Through the phone Mrs. Richardson heard the faint blare of a siren passing by and then receding into the distance. In her mind that was always what New York sounded like: honking, trucks, sirens. She had been to New York only once, in college, in the days when you had to hold your purse tight with both hands and didn't dare touch anything on the subway, even the poles. It had been cemented in her memory that way.

“But this photo,” Mrs. Richardson said, “was sold after Pauline's death. By someone else. It was a photo of a woman holding a baby.
Virgin and Child #1,
it was called.”

The phone line suddenly went so quiet that Mrs. Richardson thought they'd been disconnected. But after a moment, Anita Rees spoke again. “Yes, I remember that one.”

“I'm just wondering,” said Mrs. Richardson, “if you could give me the name of the person who sold the photograph.”

Something new flared in Anita's voice: suspicion. “Where did you say you were calling from again?”

“My name is Elena Richardson.” Mrs. Richardson hesitated for a moment. “I work as a reporter for the
Sun Press,
in Cleveland, Ohio. It's related to a story I'm researching.”

“I see.” Another pause. “I'm sorry, but the original owner of that photograph wished to remain anonymous. For personal reasons. I'm not at liberty to give the seller's name.”

Mrs. Richardson crimped the corner of her notepad in annoyance. “I understand. Well, what I'm actually interested in is the subject of the photograph. Would you happen to have any information on who she is?”

This time there was no mistaking it: definite wary silence, and when Anita Rees spoke again, it was with a touch of frost. “I'm afraid I don't
have anything I can share about that. Good luck with your story.” The line went dead with a soft click.

Mrs. Richardson set the phone down. As a journalist, she was no stranger to being hung up on, but this time irritated her more than most. Maybe there was something here, some strange mystery waiting to be unraveled. She glanced at her monitor, where a half-drafted piece—“Should Gore Run for President? Locals Weigh In”—sat waiting.

Art collectors were often reclusive, she thought. Especially where money was involved. This Anita Rees might not even know anything about the photo, other than whatever her commission was. And who had started her down this garden path anyway? Izzy. Her harebrained live wire of a daughter, the perpetual overreactor, prone to fits of furious indignation about nothing at all.

That alone, she thought, was a sign she was headed down a rabbit hole. She turned her notebook back to the page on the vice president and began to type.

M
rs. Richardson remained annoyed with Izzy all week, though truth be told, she was usually annoyed with Izzy for some reason or another. The roots of her irritation were long and many branched and deep. It was not—as Izzy herself suspected, and as Lexie, in moments of meanness, teased her—because she had been an accident, or unwanted. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

Mrs. Richardson had always wanted a large family. Having been an only child herself, she had grown up longing for brothers and sisters, envying her friends like Maureen O'Shaughnessy who never came home to an empty house and who always seemed to have someone to talk to. “It's not so great,” Maureen assured her, “especially if you get brothers.” Maureen was the oldest at fifteen and her sister Katie was the youngest at two and in between came six boys, but Mrs. Richardson was convinced that even six brothers would be better than growing up alone. “Lots of kids,” she had said to Mr. Richardson when they'd gotten married, “at least three or four. And close together,” she'd added, thinking of the O'Shaughnessys again, how it was an off year that didn't have an O'Shaughnessy in the grade. Everyone knew them; they were a dynasty in Shaker Heights, a huge and boisterous and exceedingly handsome clan
that always seemed to be suntanned and windswept, like the Kennedys. Mr. Richardson, who had two brothers himself, agreed.

So they'd had Lexie first, in 1980, then Trip the next year and Moody the year after that, and Mrs. Richardson had secretly been proud of how fertile her body had proved, how resilient. She would push Moody in his stroller, with Lexie and Trip tagging along behind her, each clutching a handful of her skirt like baby elephants trailing their mother, and people on the street did a double take: this slender young woman couldn't possibly have borne three children, could she? “Just one more,” she'd said to her husband. They had agreed to have the children early, so that afterward Mrs. Richardson could go back to work. A part of her wanted to stay home, to simply be with her children, but her own mother had always scorned those women who didn't work. “Wasting their potential,” she had sniffed. “You've got a good brain, Elena. You're not just going to sit home and knit, are you?” A modern woman, she always implied, was capable—nay, required—to
have it all
. So after each birth, Mrs. Richardson had returned to her job, crafted the pleasant, wholesome stories her editor demanded, come home to fawn over her little ones, waited for the next baby to arrive.

It wasn't until Izzy that the charmed row of children came to an end. For starters, Mrs. Richardson had had terrible morning sickness, bouts of dizziness and vomiting that didn't end with the first trimester but continued on unabated—if anything, more vigorously—as the weeks went on. Lexie was nearly three, Trip two, Moody just one, and with three very young children at home and Mrs. Richardson incapacitated, the Richardsons found it necessary to engage a housekeeper—a luxury they would become accustomed to, and which they would continue all the way into the children's teenage years, all the way up to Mia. “It's a sign of a strong pregnancy,” the doctors assured Mrs. Richardson, but a few weeks after
hiring the housekeeper, she had begun to bleed and was placed on bed rest. Despite these precautions, Izzy had arrived precipitously soon thereafter, making her appearance—eleven weeks early—an hour after her mother arrived at the hospital.

Mrs. Richardson would remember the next few months only as a vague, terrifying haze. Of the logistical details, she remembered only a little. She remembered Izzy curled in a glass box, a net of purple veins under salmon-colored skin. She remembered watching her youngest through the portholes in the incubator, nearly pressing her nose to the glass to be sure Izzy was still breathing. She remembered shuttling back and forth between home and the hospital, whenever she could leave her oldest three in the capable hands of the housekeeper—naptime, lunchtime, an hour here and there—and, when the nurses allowed it, cradling Izzy against her: first in her two cupped hands, then in the hollow between her breasts, and finally—as Izzy grew stronger and filled out and began to look more like a baby—in her arms.

For Izzy did grow: despite her early start, she displayed a tenacity of will that even the doctors remarked upon. She tugged at her IV; she uprooted her feeding tube. When the nurses came to change her, she kicked her thumb-sized feet and hollered so loudly the babies in nearby incubators woke and joined in. “Nothing wrong with her lungs,” the doctors told the Richardsons, though they warned of a host of other problems that might arise: jaundice, anemia, vision issues, hearing loss. Mental retardation. Heart defects. Seizures. Cerebral palsy. When Izzy finally came home—two weeks after her scheduled due date—this list would be one of the few things Mrs. Richardson would recall about her time in the hospital. A list of things she would scan Izzy for over the next decade: Did Izzy simply not notice things, or was she going blind? Was she ignoring her mother out of stubbornness, or was she going deaf? Was her skin looking
a bit yellow? Was she looking a bit pale? If Izzy's hand, reaching to add a stacking ring to her toy, fumbled, Mrs. Richardson found herself clutching the arms of her chair. Was it a tremor, or just a child learning the complicated business of managing her own fingers?

Everything Mrs. Richardson had put out of her mind from the hospital stay—everything she thought she'd forgotten—her body remembered on a cellular level: the rush of anxiety, the fear that permeated her thoughts of Izzy. The microscopic focus on each thing Izzy did, turning it this way and that, scrutinizing it for signs of weakness or disaster. Was she just a poor speller, or was this a sign of mental impairment? Was her handwriting just messy, was she just bad at arithmetic, were her temper tantrums normal, or was it something worse? As time went on, the concern unhooked itself from the fear and took on a life of its own. She had learned, with Izzy's birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn't know how to unclench.

“Izzy, sit up straight,” she would say at the dinner table, thinking:
Scoliosis. Cerebral palsy.
“Izzy, calm down.” Though she would never quite articulate it this way, resentment began to sheathe concern.
ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD,
a poster in the hospital had read, but Mrs. Richardson had never noticed it; she was too busy thinking,
It wasn't supposed to happen this way.
“After all the trouble you've caused—” she would begin sometimes, when Izzy misbehaved. She never finished the sentence, even in her mind, but the old anxiety snaked through her veins. Izzy herself would remember only her mother saying,
No, no, Izzy, why can't you listen to me, Izzy, behave yourself, Izzy, for god's sakes, no, are you insane?
Drawing the boundaries over which Izzy dared to step.

Had Izzy been a different kind of child, this might have led her to be
cautious, or neurasthenic, or paranoid. Izzy, however, had been born to push buttons, and as she grew—with excellent vision and hearing, no sign of seizures or palsy, and a clearly agile mind—the more closely her mother watched her and the more she chafed at the attention. When they went to the pool, Lexie and Trip and Moody were allowed to splash in the shallow end, but Izzy—then age four—had to sit on a towel, coated in sunscreen and shaded by an umbrella. After a week of this, she jumped headfirst into the deep end and had to be rescued by the lifeguard. The following winter, when they went sledding, Lexie and Trip and Moody slid shrieking down the hill, backward and belly first and three at a time and once—in Trip's case—standing up like a surfer. Mrs. Richardson, perched atop the hill, applauded and cheered. Then Izzy went down once, tipped over halfway down, and Mrs. Richardson refused to let her get into the sled again. That evening, after everyone had gone to bed, Izzy dragged Moody's sled across the street and slid down the bank of the duck pond and out onto the frozen water four times before a neighbor noticed and called her parents. At ten, when her mother fretted about her picky eating, wondering if she might be anemic, Izzy declared herself a vegetarian. After being grounded from sleepovers—“If you can't behave at home, Izzy, we can't trust you to behave in someone else's house”—Izzy took to sneaking outside at night and returning with pinecones or a handful of crab apples or a buckeye to leave on the kitchen island. “I have no idea where that could have come from,” she would say in the morning, as her mother eyed her latest offering. The sense all the children had—including Izzy—was that she was a particular disappointment to their mother, that for reasons unclear to them, their mother resented her. Of course, the more Izzy pushed, the more anger stepped in to shield her mother's old anxiety, like a shell covering a snail. “My god, Izzy,” Mrs. Richardson said, over and over again, “what is
wrong
with you?”

Mr. Richardson was more tolerant of Izzy. It had been Mrs. Richardson who had held her, Mrs. Richardson who had heard all the doctors' prognoses, the dire warnings about what might be in store for her. Mr. Richardson, newly graduated from law school, was busy building his practice, working long hours in an attempt to make partner. To him, Izzy seemed a trifle willful, but he was glad to see her undaunted after such a terrifying start. He delighted in her intelligence, in her spirit. In fact, she reminded him of her mother, when she'd been younger: he'd been drawn to that spark, that certainty of purpose, how she always knew her mind and had a plan, how deeply concerned she was with right versus wrong—the fiery side of her that seemed, after so many safe years in the suburbs, to have cooled down to embers. “It's okay, Elena,” he would say to Mrs. Richardson. “She's fine. Let her be.” Mrs. Richardson, however, could not let Izzy be, and the feeling coalesced in all of them: Izzy pushing, her mother restraining, and after a time no one could remember how the dynamic had started, only that it had existed always.

The weekend after Thanksgiving, while Mrs. Richardson was still irked at Izzy, the Richardsons were due to attend a birthday party thrown by old family friends.

“Can Pearl come, too?” Moody asked. “The McCulloughs won't mind. They've invited everyone they know to this thing.”

“Plus she'll be one more person to gush over the baby,” Izzy said. “Which you know is the whole point of this entire party.”

Mrs. Richardson sighed. “Izzy, there are times when it's appropriate to invite one of your friends, and times when events are just for family,” she said. “This is a family event. Pearl is not part of the family.” She snapped
her purse shut and slung it over her shoulder. “You need to learn the distinction. Come on, we're late.”

So only the Richardsons went to the McCulloughs' that weekend, arriving in two cars—Lexie and Trip and Moody in one, Mr. and Mrs. Richardson in another, with a glowering Izzy in the backseat. No one could have missed the house. Vehicles filled both sides of the street—the McCulloughs had cleared the parking restrictions with the Shaker Heights Police in advance—and spilled over onto nearby South Woodland Boulevard, and an enormous bundle of pink and white balloons bobbed over the mailbox.

Inside, the house was already full to overflowing. There were mimosas and an omelet station. There were caterers offering bite-sized quiches and poached eggs in puddles of velvety hollandaise. There was a three-tiered pink-and-white cake, draped in fondant and topped with a sugar figurine of a baby holding the number 1 in its chubby hands. And everywhere pink and white streamers unfurling their triumphant way toward the kitchen table, where Mirabelle McCullough, the birthday girl, nestled in Mrs. McCullough's arms.

Mrs. Richardson had met Mirabelle before, of course, months earlier, when she'd first arrived at the McCullough household. She and Linda McCullough had grown up together—Shaker class of 1971, old friends since meeting in second grade—and there had been a lovely symmetry to their paths as they'd both gone away to school and come back and settled in Shaker into careers of their own. Only where the Richardsons had right away had Lexie, then Trip and Moody and Izzy in quick succession, Mrs. McCullough had undergone over a decade of trying before she and her husband had decided on adoption.

“It's just
providential,
as my mother used to say,” Mrs. Richardson had
told her husband on hearing the news. “There's simply no other word for it. You know what Mark and Linda have been through, all that waiting. I mean, I bet they'd have taken a crack baby, for goodness sakes. And then out of the blue the social worker calls them at ten thirty in the morning, saying there's been a little Asian baby left at a fire station, and by four o'clock in the afternoon there she is in their house.”