“Do you? Or is that just what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”
Mia flushed. “If May Ling could choose, don’t you think she’d choose to stay with her real mother? The mother who gave birth to her?”
“Maybe.” Mrs. Richardson looked at Mia closely. “The Ryans are rich. They wanted a baby so desperately. They’d have given her a wonderful life. If Pearl had gotten to choose, do you think she’d have chosen to stay with you? To live like a vagabond?”
“It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Mia said suddenly. “I think you can’t imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you’ve got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you’d choose.” Now it was her turn to study Mrs. Richardson, as if the key to understanding her were coded into her face. “It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn’t know you wanted.” A sharp, pitying smile pinched the corners of her lips. “What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life?”
Mrs. Richardson shuffled the snippets of Mia’s photographs on the table. Under her hands pieces of dog and pieces of man separated and mingled and re-formed.
“I think it’s time you moved on,” she said. With one hand she lifted Izzy’s jacket from the chair and dusted it, as if it were soiled. “By tomorrow.” She set a folded hundred-dollar bill on the counter. “This should more than make up for the rent for the month. We’ll call it even.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Mrs. Richardson headed for the door. “Ask your daughter,” she said, and the door shut behind her.
19
Friday afternoon, when the bell rang at just after one, Pearl settled herself into seventh period and set her bag beside her chair. She was going to meet Trip at his car after school; he had put a note into her locker that morning. Lexie had left another after lunch: Movie tonight? Deep Impact? It was almost enough to make her forget that she and Moody were no longer friends. Every day they still saw each other in class, but most days he jumped up as soon as the bell rang and bolted out the door before she’d even had a chance to close her binder. Now there he was across the aisle, bent over his copy of Othello. She wondered if they’d ever get back to normal, if things would ever be the same between them. Sex changed things, she realized—not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone.
She was still turning this insight over in her mind when the classroom phone rang. It was usually a question from the main office about something—a misplaced attendance sheet, an excuse for a tardy student—so she paid no attention until Mrs. Thomas hung up and came to crouch by her desk.
“Pearl,” she said softly, “the office says your mother’s here to pick you up. Take your things with you, they said.” She went back to the board, where she was outlining the third act of the play, and Pearl puzzled over this as she packed her books away. Was there an appointment she’d forgotten? Was there some kind of emergency? Out of instinct, she shot a quick look at Moody in the next seat—the closest they’d come to a conversation in weeks. But Moody seemed as clueless as she was, and the last thing she remembered as she left the classroom was his face, their shared moment of confusion.
She came out of the science wing door and saw her mother parked by the curb, leaning back against the little tan Rabbit, waiting for her.
“There you are,” Mia said.
“Mom. What are you doing here?” Pearl glanced over her shoulder, in the universal reaction of all teenagers confronted by their parents in a public place.
“Do you have anything important in your locker?” Mia unzipped Pearl’s bag and peeked inside. “Your wallet? Any papers? Okay, let’s go.” She turned back toward the car, and Pearl jerked herself free.
“Mom. I can’t. I have a biology quiz next period. And I’m meeting—I’m meeting somebody after school. I’ll just see you at home, okay?”
“That’s not what I mean,” said Mia, and Pearl noticed the wrinkle between her mother’s eyebrows that meant she was deeply worried. “I mean we have to go. Today.”
“What?” Pearl glanced around. The oval lay quiet and green before them. Everyone was inside, in class, except for a few students clustered—just off school grounds—at the nearby traffic triangle, smoking. Everything seemed so normal. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I know, my darling. But we have to.”
Every time before, when her mother had decided to leave, Pearl had felt at most a twinge of regret—always over the minor things: a boy she’d admired from afar, a certain park bench or quiet corner or library book she hated to leave behind. Mostly, however, she had felt relief: that she could slide out of this life and begin anew, like a snake shedding its skin. This time all that welled up inside her was a mixture of grief and rage.
“You promised we would stay,” she said, her voice thickening. “Mom. I have friends here. I have—” She looked around, as if one of the Richardson children might appear. But Lexie was off in the Social Room finishing her lunch. Moody was back in English class discussing Othello. And Trip—Trip would be waiting for her after school on the other side of the oval. When she didn’t appear, he would drive away. She had a wild thought: if she could only run to the Richardson house, she would be safe. Mrs. Richardson would help her, she was sure. The Richardsons would take her in. The Richardsons would never let her go. “Please. Mom. Please. Please don’t make us go.”
“I don’t want to. But we have to.” Mia held out her hand. Pearl, for a moment, imagined herself transforming into a tree. Rooting herself so deeply on that spot that nothing could displace her.
“Pearl, my darling,” her mother said. “I’m so sorry. It’s time to go.” She took Mia’s hand, and Pearl, uprooted, came free and followed her mother back to the car.
When they got back to the house on Winslow, a few belongings were already packed: the couch had been stripped of its blanket and disassembled into a stack of pillows; the various prints Mia had tacked to the wall had been boxed. Mia was a fast packer, good at squeezing an improbably large number of things into a tight space. In their year in Shaker, however, they’d acquired more things than they’d ever had before, and this time many more things would need to be left behind.
“I thought I’d be finished by now,” Mia admitted, setting her keys down on the table. “But I had to finish something. Fold up your clothes. Whatever will fit in your duffel bag.”
“You promised,” Pearl said. In the safe cocoon of their home—their real home, as she’d begun to think of it—the tears began to flow, along with a choking rush of fury. “You said we were staying put. You said this was it.”
Mia stopped and put an arm around Pearl. “I know I did,” she said. “I promised. And I’m sorry. Something’s happened—”
“I’m not going.” Pearl kicked her shoes onto the floor and stomped into the living room. Mia heard the door to her room slam. Sighing, she picked up Pearl’s sneakers by the heels and went down the hallway. Pearl had flopped on her bed, math book spread in front of her, jerking a notebook from her bookbag. A furious charade.
“It’s time.”
“I have to do my homework.”
“We have to pack.” Mia gently closed the textbook. “And then we have to leave.”
Pearl snatched the textbook from her mother’s hands and threw it across the room, where it left a black smudge on the wall. Next went her notebook, her ballpoint, her history book, a stack of note cards, until her bookbag lay crumpled on the floor like a shed skin and everything that had been inside it had scattered. Mia sat quietly beside her, waiting. Pearl was no longer crying. Her tears had been replaced by a cold, blank face and a set jaw.
“I thought we could stay, too,” Mia said at last.
“Why?” Pearl pulled her knees to her
chest and wrapped her arms around them and glared at her mother. “I’m not going until you tell me why.”
“That’s fair.” Mia sighed. She sat down beside Pearl on the bed and smoothed the bedspread beneath them. It was afternoon. It was sunny. Outside, a mourning dove cooed, the low hum of a lawn mower rose, a passing cloud cast them into shadow for a moment, then drifted away. As if it were simply an ordinary day. “I’ve been thinking about how to tell you for a long time. Longer than you can imagine.”
Pearl had gone very still now, her eyes fixed on her mother, waiting patiently, aware she was about to learn something very important. Mia thought of Joseph Ryan, sitting across the table from her that night at dinner, waiting to learn her answer.
“Let me tell you first,” she said, taking a deep breath, “about your Uncle Warren.”
When Mia had finished, Pearl sat quietly, tracing the lines of quilting that spiraled across the bedspread. She had told Pearl the outline of everything, though they both knew all the details would be a long time in coming. They would trickle out in dribs and drabs, memories surfacing suddenly, prompted by the merest thread, the way memories often do. For years afterward, Mia would spot a yellow house as they drove by, or a battered repair truck, or see two children climbing up a hillside, and would say, “Did I ever tell you—” and Pearl would snap to attention, ready to gather another small glittering shard of her history. Everything, she had come to understand, was something like infinity. They might never come close, but they could approach a point where, for all intents and purposes, she knew all that she needed to know. It would simply take time, and patience. For now, she knew enough.
“Why are you telling me this?” she had asked her mother. “I mean, why are you telling me this now?”
Mia had taken a deep breath. How did you explain to someone—how did you explain to a child, a child you loved—that someone they adored was not to be trusted? She tried. She did her best to explain, and she had watched confusion wash over Pearl’s face, then pain. Pearl could not understand it: Mrs. Richardson, who had always been so kind to her, who had said so many nice things about her. Whose shining, polished surface had entranced Pearl with her own reflection.
“She’s right, though,” Mia said at last. “The Ryans would have given you a wonderful life. They’d have loved you. And Mr. Ryan is your father.” She had never said those words aloud, had never even allowed herself to think them, and they tasted strange on her tongue. She said it again: “Your father.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Pearl mouthing the words to herself, as if trying them out. “Do you want to meet them?” Mia asked. “We can drive to New York. They won’t be hard to find.”
Pearl thought about this for a long time.
“Not right now,” she said. “Maybe one day. But not right now.” She leaned into her mother’s arms, the way she had when she was a child, tucking herself neatly under her mother’s chin. “And what about your parents?” she said after a moment.
“My parents?”
“Are they still out there? Do you know where they are?”
Mia hesitated. “Yes,” she said, “I believe I do. Do you want to meet them?”
Pearl tipped her head to one side, in a gesture that reminded Mia so strongly of Warren it made her catch her breath. “Someday,” she said. “Someday maybe we could go and see them together.”
Mia held her for a moment, buried her nose in the part of Pearl’s hair. Every time she did this, she was comforted by how Pearl smelled exactly the same. She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her.
“And now we’d better pack,” she said. It was three thirty. School was out, Pearl thought as she began to roll up her clothing. Moody would just be getting home. Trip would have given up on her by now—or would he be waiting for her still? When she didn’t show up, would he come looking for her? She hadn’t yet told her mother about Trip; she wasn’t sure, yet, if she ever would.
There was a knock at the side door. To Pearl, it was as if she’d summoned Trip with her mind, and she turned to Mia, wide-eyed.
“I’ll go and see who it is,” Mia said. “You stay up here. Keep packing.” If it was Mrs. Richardson, she thought—but no, it was Izzy, standing bewildered in the driveway.
“Why is the door locked?” she said. For months she’d been coming to help Mia every afternoon, and the side door had never before been locked. It had been open to her—to all the Richardson children, it occurred to her now—at any moment of the day, no matter what her trouble.
“I was—I was taking care of something.” Mia had forgotten all about Izzy, and she tried to think of a plausible excuse.
“Is Bebe still here?” This was the only thing Izzy could think of that might make Mia shut her out and send her away.
“No, she’s gone home. I just—I was busy.”
“Okay.” Izzy took a half step back from the doorway, and the storm door, which she’d been holding open with her foot, gave a faint shriek. “Well, is Pearl here? I—I wanted to tell her something.” She had been trying to catch Pearl all day; in fact, she had tried to call Pearl the previous night—but had gotten only a busy signal: Mia, while comforting Bebe, had taken the phone off the hook, and had forgotten to put it back on. She’d tried over and over, until past midnight, deciding at last that she’d find Pearl at school in the morning. Pearl, she felt, ought to know what Moody had said about her, that her mother knew about Trip. But she didn’t know which routes Pearl might take from class to class—would she take the main stairwell, with its crush of students, or the back one that led down to the English wing? Would she eat in the cafeteria, or in the Egress downstairs, or perhaps out on the lawn somewhere? Each time she guessed wrong, and Izzy was frustrated at missing Pearl again and again, even more frustrated at how poorly she seemed to know Pearl. Right after school, she promised herself, she would find Pearl and tell her everything.
Now, face-to-face with Mia, she could tell something was wrong, but wasn’t sure what. Did Mia already know? Was Pearl in trouble? Was Mia, for some reason, angry at her, too?
Mia looked down at Izzy’s anxious face and could not tell whether lying or telling the truth would hurt her more. She decided to do neither.
“I’ll tell her you came by, okay?” she said.
“Okay,” Izzy said again. With one hand on the doorknob she peeked up at Mia through her hair. Had she done something wrong, she wondered. Had she made Mia angry? Izzy, Lexie had always said, had no poker face, and it was true: Izzy never bothered to hide her feelings, didn’t even know how. She looked so young at that moment, so confused and vulnerable and lonely, and this, more than anything, made Mia feel she’d failed her.
“Remember what I said the other day?” she said. “About the prairie fires? About how sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over?” Izzy nodded. “Well,” Mia said. A long moment unraveled between them. She could not think of a way to say good-bye. “Just remember that,” she finished. “Sometimes you need to start over from scratch. Can you understand that?” Izzy wasn’t sure she did, but she nodded again.
“See you tomorrow?” she said, and Mia’s heart cracked. Instead of answering, she pulled Izzy into her arms and kissed her on the top of her head, the same place where she often kissed Pearl. “See you soon,” she said.
Pearl heard the door close, but it was a few minutes before Mia came back upstairs, her feet slow and heavy on the steps.
“Who was it?” she asked, though she had a good idea by now.
“Izzy,” Mia said, “but she’s gone,” and she turned into her bedroom to pack.
They had done this so many times before: two glasses stacked, their handful of silverware corralled inside, glasses nested into bowls, bowls nested into pot, pot nested into frying pan, the whole thing wrapped in a paper grocery sa
ck and cushioned with whatever food would keep—a sleeve of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, half a loaf of bread. Another bag held shampoo, a bar of soap, a tube of toothpaste. Mia wedged their duffel bags into the footwells and laid a stack of blankets on top. Her cameras and her supplies went into the trunk, along with the dishes and toiletries. Everything else—the gateleg table they’d painted blue, the mismatched chairs, Pearl’s bed and Mia’s mattress and the tussock of pillows they’d called a couch—would be left behind.
It was almost dark by the time they’d finished, and Pearl kept thinking about Trip and Lexie and Moody and Izzy. They would be home now, in their beautiful house. Trip would be wondering why she hadn’t come to meet him. She would never get to see him again, she thought, and her throat burned. Lexie would be perched at the counter, twirling a lock of hair around her finger, wondering where she was. And Moody—they would never have the chance to make up.
“It isn’t fair,” she said as her mother put the last of their things in a paper grocery bag.
“No,” Mia agreed. “It’s not.” Pearl waited for a parental platitude to follow: Life isn’t fair, or Fair doesn’t always mean right. Instead Mia held her close for a moment, kissed her on the side of the head, then handed her the grocery sack. “Go put this in the car.”
When Pearl returned, she found her mother in the kitchen setting a plain manila envelope on the kitchen counter.
“What’s that?” Pearl asked, interested in spite of herself.
“Something for the Richardsons,” Mia said. “A good-bye, I guess.”
“A letter? Can I read it?”
“No. Some photographs.”
“You’re just leaving them here?” Pearl had never known her mother to leave any of her work behind. When they left an apartment, they took everything that was truly theirs with them—and Mia’s photos were the most important. Once, when they hadn’t had enough space in the trunk of the Rabbit, Mia had jettisoned half of her clothing to make room.