Little Fires Everywhere (12 page)

She had gone over the very next day to meet the baby and in between cooing over the child heard Linda recount the story—how she'd gotten the call and had driven directly to Babies “R” Us, buying everything from a complete wardrobe to a crib to six months' supply of diapers. “Maxed out the Visa,” Linda McCullough had said with a laugh. “Mark was still putting the crib together when the social worker pulled up with her. But look at her. Just look at her. Can you believe this?” She had bent over the infant cradled against her, with a look of pure astonishment.

That had been ten months earlier, and the adoption process was well underway now. They hoped to have it finalized in a month or two, Mrs. McCullough told Mrs. Richardson as she handed her a mimosa. Little Mirabelle was a darling thing: a fuzz of dark hair topped by a pink ribbon headband, a round pert face with two enormous brown eyes staring out at the crowd, Mrs. McCullough's beaded necklace clenched in her fingers.

“Oh, she looks like a little doll,” gasped Lexie. Mirabelle turned her face away and buried it in Mrs. McCullough's sweater.

“This is the first big party we've had since she came to us,” Mrs. McCullough said, running a hand over the girl's dark head. “She's not used to having so many people around. Are you, Mimi?” She kissed the baby's palm. “But we couldn't let her first birthday go by without a celebration.”

“How can you know it's her birthday?” Izzy asked. “If she was abandoned and all.”

“She wasn't abandoned, Izzy,” Mrs. Richardson said. “She was left at a
fire station where someone would find her safely. It's a very different thing. It's brought her to this very good home.”

“But you don't know her real birthday, then, do you?” Izzy said. “Did you just pick some random day?”

Mrs. McCullough adjusted the baby in her arms. “The social workers estimated she was two months old when she came to us, give or take a couple of weeks. That was January thirtieth. So we decided we'd celebrate November thirtieth as her birthday.” She gave Izzy a tight smile. “We think we're very lucky, to be able to give her a birthday. It's the same as Winston Churchill's. And Mark Twain's.”

“Is her name really Mirabelle?” Izzy asked.

Mrs. McCullough stiffened. “Her full name will be Mirabelle Rose McCullough, once the paperwork goes through,” she said.

“But she must have had a name before,” Izzy said. “Don't you know what it is?”

As a matter of fact, Mrs. McCullough did know. The baby had been tucked in a cardboard box, wearing several sets of clothing and cocooned in blankets against the January cold. There had been a note in the box, too, which Mrs. McCullough had eventually convinced the social worker to let her read:
This baby name May Ling. Please take this baby and give her a better life.
That first night, when the baby had finally fallen asleep in their laps, Mr. and Mrs. McCullough spent two hours flipping through the name dictionary. It had not occurred to them, then or at any point until now, to regret the loss of her old name.

“We felt it was more appropriate to give her a new name to celebrate the start of her new life,” she said. “Mirabelle means ‘wonderful beauty.' Isn't that lovely?” Indeed, staring down that night at the baby's long lashes, the little rosebud mouth half open in deep and contented slumber, she and her husband had felt nothing could be more appropriate.

“When we got our cat from the shelter, we kept her name,” said Izzy. She turned to her mother. “Remember? Miss Purrty? Lexie said it was lame but you said we couldn't change it, it would be too confusing to her.”

“Izzy,” Mrs. Richardson said. “Behave yourself.” She turned to Mrs. McCullough. “Mirabelle has grown
so
much over the past few months. I wouldn't recognize her. So skinny before, and now look at her, she's chubby and glowing. Oh, Lexie, look at those little cheeks.”

“Can I hold her?” Lexie asked. With Mrs. McCullough's help, she settled the baby against her shoulder. “Oh, look at her skin. Just like café au lait.” Mirabelle reached out and laced her fingers into Lexie's long hair, and Izzy drifted sullenly away.

“I do
not
get the obsession,” Moody murmured to Trip, in the corner behind the kitchen island, where they had retreated with paper plates of quiche and pastries. “They eat. They sleep. They poop. They cry. I'd rather have a dog.”

“But girls love them,” said Trip. “I bet if Pearl were here she'd be all over that baby.”

Moody could not tell whether Trip was mocking him or simply thinking about Pearl himself. He wasn't sure which possibility bothered him more.

“You were listening in health class when they talked about precautions, right?” he asked. “Otherwise there are going to be dozens of girls running around with baby Trips. Horrific thought.”

“Ha ha.” Trip forked a piece of egg into his mouth. “You just worry about yourself. Oh wait, in order to knock someone up, someone has to actually sleep with you.” He tossed his empty plate into the garbage can and went off in search of a drink, leaving Moody alone with the last few bites of his quiche, now gone cold.

At Lexie's request, Mrs. McCullough took her for a tour of Mirabelle's room: decorated in pink and pale green, with a hand-stitched banner above the crib spelling out her name. “She loves this rug,” Mrs. McCullough said, patting the sheepskin on the floor. “We put her down after her bath and she rolls around and just laughs and laughs.” Then there was Mirabelle's playroom, a whole enormous bedroom devoted to her toys: wooden blocks in all colors of the rainbow, a rocking elephant made from velvet, an entire shelf of dolls. “The room at the front of the house is bigger,” explained Mrs. McCullough. “But this room gets the best sun—all morning and most of the afternoon. So we made the other into the guest room and kept this one as a place for Mirabelle to play.”

When they returned downstairs, even more guests had arrived, and Lexie reluctantly relinquished Mirabelle to the newcomers. By cake-cutting time, the birthday girl, worn out from all the socializing, had to be whisked away for a bottle and put down for a nap, and to Lexie's great disappointment she was still asleep at the end of the party, when the Richardsons headed home.

“I wanted to hold her again,” she complained as they made their way back to their cars.

“She's a baby, not a toy, Lex,” Moody put in.

“I'm sure Mrs. McCullough would love it if you'd offer to babysit,” Mrs. Richardson said. “Drive carefully, Lexie. We'll see you at home.” She nudged Izzy toward the other car by one shoulder. “And
you
need to be less rude next time we go to a party, or you can just stay home. Linda McCullough babysat
you
when you were little, you know. She changed your diapers and took you to the park. You think about that the next time you see her.”

“I will,” said Izzy, and slammed her car door.

Lexie could talk of nothing else but Mirabelle McCullough for the next few days. “Baby fever,” Trip said, and nudged Brian. “Watch out, dude.” Brian laughed uneasily. Trip was right, though: Lexie was suddenly, furiously interested in all things baby, even going to Dillard's to buy a frilly and thoroughly impractical lavender dress as a present for Mirabelle.

“My god, Lexie, I don't remember you being so excited about babies when Moody and Izzy were little,” her mother said. “Or dolls for that matter. In fact—” Mrs. Richardson cast her mind back. “Once you actually shut Moody in the pots and pans cupboard.”

Lexie rolled her eyes. “I was
three,”
she said. She was still talking about the baby on Monday, and when Mia arrived in the kitchen that afternoon, Lexie was delighted to have a fresh audience.

“Her hair is so gorgeous,” she gushed. “I've never seen so much hair on a little baby. So silky. And she has the biggest eyes—they just take everything in. She's so alert. They found her at a fire station, can you believe that? Someone literally just left her there.”

Across the room, Mia, who had been wiping the countertops, froze.

“A fire station?” she said. “A fire station where?”

Lexie waved a hand. “I don't know. Somewhere in East Cleveland, I think.” The details had been less important to her than the tragic romance of it all.

“And when did this happen?”

“January. Something like that. Mrs. McCullough said that one of the firemen came out for a smoke and found her there in a cardboard box.” Lexie shook her head. “Like she was a puppy someone didn't want.”

“And now the McCulloughs plan to keep her?”

“I think so.” Lexie opened the cupboard and helped herself to a
Nutri-Grain bar. “They've wanted a baby forever and then Mirabelle appeared. Like a miracle. And they've been trying to adopt for so long. They'll be such devoted parents.” She peeled the wrapper from the granola bar and popped it into the garbage can and went upstairs, leaving Mia deep in thought.

Mia's arrangement with Mrs. Richardson paid for their rent, but she and Pearl still needed money for groceries and the power bill and gas, so she had kept a few shifts per week at Lucky Palace, which between wages and leftover food was just enough to keep them supplied. Lucky Palace had a cook, a prep cook, a busboy, and one full-time waitress, Bebe, who had started a few months before Mia. Bebe had come over from Canton two years earlier, and although her English was rather choppy, she liked to talk with Mia, finding her a sympathetic listener who never corrected her grammar or seemed to have trouble understanding her. While they rolled plastic silverware in napkins for the dinner takeout orders, Bebe had told Mia quite a lot about her life. Mia shared very little in return, but she'd learned over the years that people seldom noticed this, if you were a good listener—which meant you kept the other person talking about herself. Over the course of the past six months she'd learned nearly all of Bebe's life story, and it was because of this that Lexie's account of the party had caught her attention.

For Bebe, a year earlier, had had a baby. “I so scared then,” she told Mia, fingers working the soft paper of the napkin. “I have nobody to help me. I cannot go to work. I cannot sleep. All day long I just hold the baby and cry.”

“Where was the baby's father?” Mia had asked, and Bebe had said, gone. “I tell him I having a baby, two weeks later he disappear. Somebody told me he move back to Guangdong. I move here for him, you know that? Before that we living in San Francisco, I am work in dentist's office
as a receptionist, I get good money, really nice boss. He get a job here in the car plant, he say, Cleveland is nice, Cleveland is cheap, San Francisco so expensive, we move to Cleveland, we can buy a house, have a yard. So I follow him here and then—”

She was silent for a moment, then dropped a neat rolled-up napkin onto the pile, chopsticks, fork, and knife all swaddled together inside. “Here nobody speak Chinese,” she said. “I interview for receptionist, they tell me my English not good enough. Nowhere I can find work. Nobody to watch the baby.” She had probably had postpartum depression at the very least, Mia realized, perhaps even a postpartum psychotic break. The baby wouldn't nurse, and her milk had dried up. She had lost her job—a minimum-wage post packing Styrofoam cups into cartons—when she'd gone into the hospital to have the baby, and had no money for formula. At last—and this was the part that Mia felt could not be a coincidence—she had, in desperation, gone to a fire station and left her baby on the doorstep.

Two policemen had found Bebe several days later, lying under a park bench, unconscious from dehydration and hunger. They'd brought her to a shelter, where she'd been showered, fed, prescribed antidepressants, and released three weeks later. But by then no one could tell her what had happened to her baby. A fire station, she had insisted, she'd left the baby at a fire station. No, she couldn't remember which. She had walked with the baby in her arms, round and round the city, trying to figure out what to do, and at last she'd passed a station, the windows glowing warm against the dark night, and she'd made up her mind. How many fire stations could there be? But no one would help her. When you left her, you terminated your rights, the police told her. Sorry. We can't give you any more information.

Bebe, Mia knew, was desperate to find her daughter again, had been
searching for her for many months now, ever since she'd gotten herself back together. She had a job now, a steady if low-paying one; she'd found a new apartment; her mood had stabilized. But she hadn't been able to find out where her baby had gone. It was as if her child had simply disappeared. “Sometimes,” she told Mia, “I wonder if I am dreaming. But which one is the dream?” She dabbed her eyes with the back of her cuff. “That I can't find my baby? Or that I have the baby at all?”

In all her years of itinerant living, Mia had developed one rule: Don't get attached. To any place, to any apartment, to anything. To anyone. Since Pearl had been born they'd lived, by Mia's count, in forty-six different towns, keeping their possessions to what would fit in a Volkswagen—in other words, to a bare minimum. They seldom stayed long enough to make friends anywhere, and in the few cases where they had, they'd moved on with no forwarding address and lost contact. At each move, they discarded everything they could leave behind, and sent off Mia's art to Anita to be sold, which meant they'd never see it again.