Little Fires Everywhere: Chapters 9–11

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.

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.

Mrs. Richardson would remember the next few months only as a vague, terrifying haze. Of the logistical details, she remembered only a little.

For Izzy did grow: despite her early start, she displayed a tenacity of will that even the doctors remarked upon.

“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.

To him, Izzy seemed a trifle willful, but he was glad to see her undaunted after such a terrifying start.

To him, Izzy seemed a trifle willful, but he was glad to see her undaunted after such a terrifying start.

“It’s just providential, as my mother used to say,” Mrs. Richardson had told her husband on hearing the news.

Mirabelle reached out and laced her fingers into Lexie’s long hair, and Izzy drifted sullenly away.

At that moment Pearl came into the kitchen in search of a drink and Mia wrapped her arms around her daughter quickly, as if she were on the edge of a precipice, and held her so long and so tightly that Pearl finally said, “Mom. Are you okay?”

Pearl did not realize, nor would she for a while yet, how unusually self-possessed her mother was for someone her age, how savvy and seasoned.

If they had, they might have notified their mother, who was hammering out a story on a proposed school levy and would not be home to watch the news—or to alert Mrs. McCullough.

Only two and a half seconds of footage, but it was enough: the slender white woman at the door of her imposing brick Shaker house, looking angry and afraid, clutching the screaming Asian baby in her arms.

With a vague sense of foreboding, Mrs. McCullough checked the clock.

Mrs. McCullough pushed the door open and then, as the pregnant woman came up behind, let it shut in the woman’s face, and Mr. McCullough, turning back to take his wife’s arm, for a moment could not recognize this woman, so callous, so different from the endlessly maternal woman he’d always known.

Supporters were emerging on both sides, and by Saturday afternoon, a local lawyer, Ed Lim, had offered to represent Bebe Chow, gratis, and sue the state for custody of her daughter.

She thought again of Mia’s disaffection when she’d offered to buy one of Mia’s photos, of Mia’s reticence about her past.

How hypocritical of Mia, with her stubborn privacy, to insert herself into places where she didn’t belong.

But that was Mia, wasn’t it? A woman who took an almost perverse pleasure in flaunting the normal order.

But Mrs. Richardson managed to learn, through some artful questioning, that the address on file for Mia Wright had been a local one, with no parents listed.

But Lexie’s eyes were already alight, Lexie was already chattering about where she wanted to go, and it was too late to say no.

At a carving station, a burly man in a white apron sliced roast beef from an enormous rare haunch.

She began with that trusty topic, the weather: she hoped it wouldn’t be too cold for Lexie in New Haven; they would have to order her a warmer coat from L.L. Bean, a new pair of duck boots, a down duvet.

Mrs. Richardson refilled Pearl’s glass from the carafe of juice on the table.

It took several days, but by dint of careful reporting skills and copious phone calls, Mrs. Richardson finally found the key she had been looking for.

It took several days, but by dint of careful reporting skills and copious phone calls, Mrs. Richardson finally found the key she had been looking for.

Nearly every evening there was at least an update on the case—which, as of yet, had only recently been assigned a hearing date for March and entered into the docket as Chow v. Cuyahoga County.

Serena Wong’s own mother happened to be shopping at the Asian grocery that morning and—to Serena’s simultaneous pride and mortification—had spoken quite forcefully on the subject.

“To pretend that this baby is just a baby—to pretend like there’s no race issue here—is disingenuous,” Dr. Wong had snapped, while Serena fidgeted at the edge of the shot.

His mother had interrupted his father’s tirade—something she did often, but never with such vehemence.

His mother had interrupted his father’s tirade—something she did often, but never with such vehemence.

Her grandfather had grown up in downtown Cleveland on what they called Millionaires’ Row, his family’s crenellated wedding cake of a house tucked beside the Rockefellers and the telegraph magnate and President McKinley’s secretary of state.

By the time Mrs. Richardson’s mother, Caroline, was born in 1931, things were less rural but no less idyllic.

New and regal houses were springing up all over town, each following strict style regulations and a color code, and bound by a ninety-nine-year covenant forbidding resale to anyone not approved by the neighborhood.

But three generations of Shaker reverence for order and rules and decorum would stay with Elena, too, and she would never quite be able to bring those two ideas into balance.

She wrote impassioned letters to the editor; she signed petitions to end the draft.

It was simply that Shaker Heights, despite its idealism, was a pragmatic place, and she did not know how to be anything else.

“Like camping out,” he’d said, “except we can go anywhere,” and she had wanted so badly to go with him, anywhere, to kiss that crooked, bashful smile.

Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.

And yet here was Mia, causing poor Linda such trauma, as if she hadn’t been through enough, as if Mia were any kind of example of how to mother. Dragging her fatherless child from place to place, scraping by on menial jobs, justifying it by insisting to herself—by insisting to everyone—she was making Art.