Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Little Fires Everywhere.
Author: Celeste Ng.
Genre: Fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2017.
Summary: In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, in the 1990s, everything is planned-from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren-an enigmatic artist and single mother-who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter, Pearl, and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, at odds with her own troubled youngest daughter who takes a liking to Mia, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs. The novel explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the ferocious pull of motherhood-and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

My rating: 6.5/10.
My review:


♥ "There. You see?" To Trip, the answer was obvious. "The only ones here were Izzy and Mom. And Mom was asleep."

"Maybe the wiring in the house shorted. Or maybe someone left the stove on."

"The firemen said there were little fires everywhere," Lexie said. "Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident."

♥ In Shaker Heights there was a plan for everything. When the city had been laid out in 1912-one of the first planned communities in the nation-schools had been situated so that all children could walk without crossing a major street; side streets fed into major boulevards, with strategically placed rapid-transit stops to ferry commuters into downtown Cleveland. In fact, the city's motto was-literally, as Lexie would have said-"Most communities just happen; the best are planned": the underlying philosophy being that everything could-and should-be planned out, and that by doing so you could avoid the unseemly, the unpleasant, and the disastrous.

♥ Mr. Yang was exactly the kind of tenant Mrs. Richardson wanted: a kind person to whom she could do a kind turn, and who would appreciate her kindness.

♥ "I've never had my own room before."

Moody turned her words over in his mind. "You mean you always had to share?" He tried to imagine a world where this was possible. He tried to imagine sharing a room with Trip, who littered the floor with dirty socks and sports magazines, whose first action when he came home was to snap the radio on-always to "Jammin" 92.3-as if without that insane bass thumping, his heart might not beat. On vacation, the Richardsons always booked three rooms: one for Mr. and Mrs. Richardson, one for Lexie and Izzy, one for Trip and Moody-and at breakfast Trip would make fun of Moody for sometimes talking in his sleep. For Pearly and her mother to have had to share a room-Moody almost could not believe that people could be so poor.

Pearl shook her head. "We've never had a house of our own before," she said, and Moody stifled the urge to tell her that this wasn't a house, it was only half a house. She traced the dips of the mattress with her fingertip, circling the buttons in each dimple.

Watching her, Moody could not see all that she was remembering: the finicky stove in Urbana, which they'd had to light with a match; the fifth-floor walk-up in Middlebury and the weed-choked garden in Ocala and the smoky apartment in Muncie, where the previous tenant had let his pet rabbit roam the living room, leaving gnawed-in holes and several questionable stains. And the sublet in Ann Arbor, years ago now, that she'd most hated to leave, because the people who'd lived there had had a daughter just a year or two older than she was, and every day of the six months she and her mother had lived there she had played with that lucky girl's collection of horse figurines and sat in her child-sized armchair and lain in her white-frosted canopy bed to sleep, and sometimes, in the middle of the night when her mother was asleep, she would turn on the bedside light and open that girl's closet and try on her dresses and her shoes, even though they were all a little too big. There had been photos of that girl everywhere in the house-on the mantel, on the end tables in the living room, in the stairwell a big, beautiful studio portrait of her with chin in hand-and it had been so easy for Pearl to pretend that this was her house and that these were her things, her room, her life. When the couple and their daughter had returned from their sabbatical, Pearl had not even been able to look at the girl, tanned and wiry and too tall now for those dresses in the closet. She had cried all the way to Lafayette, where they would stay for the next eight months, and even the prancing china palomino she had stolen from the girl's collection gave her no comfort, for though she waited nervously, there was never any complaint about the loss, and what could be less satisfying than stealing from someone so endowed that they never even noticed what you'd taken? Her mother must have understood, for they didn't sublet again. Pearl hadn't complained either, knowing now that she preferred an empty apartment to one filled with someone else's things.

"We move around a lot. Whenever my mom gets the bug." She looked at him fiercely, almost a glare, and Moody saw that her eyes, which he'd thought were hazel, were a deep jade green. At that moment Moody had a sudden clear understanding of what had already happened that morning: his life had been divided into a before and an after, and he would always be comparing the two.

♥ "There aren't any Shakers in Shaker Heights," he said. "They all died out. Didn't believe in sex. They just named the town after them."

Moody was half right, though neither he nor most of the kids in the town knew much about its history. The Shakers had indeed left the land that would become Shaker Heights long before, and by the summer of 1997 there were exactly twelve left in the world. But Shaker Heights had been founded, if not on Shaker principles, with the same idea of creating a utopia. Order-and regulation, the father of order-had been the Shakers' key to harmony. They had regulated everything: the proper time for rising in the morning, the proper color of window curtains, the proper length of a man's hair, the proper way to fold one's hands in prayer (right thumb over left). If they planned every detail, the Shakers had believed, they could create a patch of heaven on earth, a little refuge from the world, and the founders of Shaker Heights had thought the same. In advertisements they depicted Shaker Heights in the clouds, looking down upon the grimy city of Cleveland from a mountaintop at the end of a rainbow's arch. Perfection: that was the goal, and perhaps the Shakers had lived it so strongly it had seeped into the soil itself, feeding those who grew up there with a propensity to overachieve and a deep intolerance for flaws. Even the teens of Shaker Heights-whose main exposure to Shakers was singing "Simple Gifts" in music class-could feel that drive for perfection still in the air.

♥ Moody had never thought much about money, because he had never needed to. Lights went on when he flipped switches; water came out when he turned the tap. Groceries appeared in the refrigerator at regular intervals and reappeared as cooked meals on the table at mealtimes. He had had an allowance since he was ten, starting at five dollars per week and increasing steadily with inflation and age up to its current twenty dollars. Between that and birthday cards from aunts and relatives, each reliably containing a folded bill, he had enough for a used book from Mac's Backs, or the occasional CD, or new guitar strings, whatever he felt he needed.

Mia and Pearl got as much as they could used-or better yet, free. In just a few weeks, they'd learned the location of every Salvation Army store, St. Vincent de Paul's, and Goodwill in the greater Cleveland area. The week they'd arrived, Mia had gotten a job at Lucky Palace, a local Chinese restaurant; several afternoons and evenings a week, she took and packaged up takeout orders at the counter. They soon learned that for dining out, everyone in Shaker seemed to prefer Pearl of the Orient, just a few blocks away, but Lucky Palace did a good takeout business. In addition to Mia's hourly pay, the servers gave her a share of their tips, and when there was extra food, she took a few containers home-slightly stale rice, leftover sweet-and-sour pork, vegetables just past their prime-which sustained her and Perl for most of the week. They had very little, but that wasn't immediately obvious: Mia was good at repurposing. Lo mein, without its sauce, was topped with Ragú from a jar one night, reheated and topped with orange beef another. Old bedsheets, purchased for a quarter each at the thrift store, turned into curtains, a tablecloth, pillow covers. Moody thought of math class: a practical application of combinatorics. How many different ways could you combine my shu pancakes and fillings? How many different combinations could you make with rice, pork, and peppers?

"Why doesn't your mom get a real job?" Moody asked Pearl one afternoon. "I bet she could get more hours a week. Or maybe even a full-time spot at Pearl of the Orient, or some other place." He had wondered this all week, ever since he'd learned about Mia's job. If she took on more hours, he reasoned, she would make enough for them to have a real sofa, real meals, perhaps a TV.

Pearl stared, brow furrowed, as if she simply did not understand the question.

"But she has a job, she said. "She's an artist."

♥ He would crack dumb jokes and tell stories and dredge up bits if trivia, anything to make her smile. And at the same time, in his mind, he was roaming the city, searching desperately for the next place he could take her, the next wonder of suburban Cleveland he could display, because when he ran out of places to show her, he was sure, she would disappear. Already he thought he saw her growing silent over their fries, prodding the last congealed limp of cheese on the plate; already he was sure her eyes were drifting across the lake to the far shore.

This was how Moody made a decision he would question for the rest of his life. Until now he had said nothing about Pearl or her mother to his family, guarding their friendship like a dragon guards treasure: silently, greedily. Deep down he had the feeling that somehow it would change everything, the way in fairy tales magic was spoiled if you shared the secret. If he had kept her to himself, perhaps the future might have been quite different. Pearl might never have met his mother or his father, or Lexie or Trip or Izzy, or if she had, they might have been people she only greeted but didn't know. She and her mother might have stayed in Shaker forever, as they'd planned; eleven months later, the Richardson house might still have been standing. But Moody did not think of himself as interesting enough to hold her attention in his own right. Had he been a different Richardson, it might have been different; his brother and sisters never worried whether other people would like them. Lexie had her golden smile and her easy laugh, Trip had his looks and his dimples: why wouldn't people like them, why would they even ask such a thing? For Izzy, it was even simpler: she didn't care what people thought of her. But Moody did not possess Lexie's warmth, Trip's roguish charm, Izzy's self-confidence. All he had to offer her, he felt, was what his family had to offer, his family itself, and it was this that led him to say, one afternoon in late July, "Come over. You can meet my family."

♥ "You live here?" It wasn't the size-true, it was large, but so was every house on the street, and in just three weeks in Shaker she'd seen ever larger. No: it was the greenness of the lawn, the sharp lines of white mortar between the bricks, the rustle of the maple leaves in the gentle breeze, the very breeze itself. It was the soft smells of detergent and cooking and grass that mingled in the entryway, the one corner of the throw rug that flipped up like cowlick, as if someone had mussed it and forgotten to smooth it out. It was as if instead of entering a house she was entering the idea of a house, some archetype brought to life here before her. Something she'd only heard about but never seen. She could hear signs of life in far-off rooms-the low rumble of a TV commercial, the beep of a microwave running down its count-but distantly, as if in a dream.

..At the Richardson house were overstuffed sofas so deep you could sink into them as if into a bubble bath. Credenzas. Heavy sleigh beds. Once you owned an enormous chair like this, Pearl thought, you would simply have to stay put. You would have to plant roots and make the place that held this chair your home. There were ottomans and framed photographs and curio cabinets full of souvenirs, their very frivolousness reassuring. You did not bring home a carved seashell from Key West or a miniature of the CN Tower or a finger-sized bottle of sand from Martha's Vineyard unless you intended to stay. Mrs. Richardson's family, in fact, had lived in Shaker for three generations now-almost, Pearl learned, since the city had been founded. To have such a deep taproot in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn't imagine it.

♥ The Richardson children, Pearl soon learned, had their most heated discussions during Jerry Springer. "Thank god we live in Shaker," Lexie said one day during a provocative episode entitled "Stop Bringing White Girls Home to Dinner!" "I mean, we're lucky. No one sees race here."

"Everyone sees race, Lex," said Moody. "The only difference is who pretends not to."

♥ Later Lexie would apologize to Pearl in a whispered confession: she and Brian had been thinking about if for a while and tonight seemed like the night and-she didn't know, she just wanted to tell someone, she hadn't even told Serena yet, did she look any different? She would look different, to Pearl-thinner, sharper, her hair pulled back in a drooping ponytail, traces of mascara and glitter still streaked at the corners of her eyes; she could see in the faint crease just between Lexie's eyebrows what she would look like twenty years from now: something like her mother. From then on, it would seem to Pearl that everything Lexie did was tinged with sex, a kind of knowingness in her laugh and her sideways glances, in the casual way she touched everyone, on the shoulder, on the hand, on the knee. It loosened you, she would think; it lightened you. "And how about you?" Lexie would say at last, squeezing Pearl's arm. "You found your way home okay? Did you have fun?" And Pearl, with the caution of the recently singed, would simply nod.

♥ Artists, she reminded herself, didn't think like normal people, and at last she turned to Mia with curiosity. She had never before met anyone like her.

Mrs. Richardson had, her entire existence, lived an orderly and regimented life. She weighed herself once per week, and although her weight did not fluctuate more than the three pounds her doctor assured her was normal, she took pains to maintain herself. Each morning she measured exactly one half cup of Cheerios, the serving size indicated on the box, using the flowered plastic measuring cup she'd gotten from Higbee's as a new bride. Each evening, at dinner, she allowed herself one glass of wine-red, which the news said was most beneficial for your heart-a faint scratch in the wineglass marking the right level to pour. Three times weekly she took an aerobics class, checking her watch throughout to be sure her heart rate had exceeded one hundred and twenty beats per minute. She had been brought up to follow rules, to believe that the proper functioning of the world depended upon her compliance, and follow them-and believe-she did. She had had a plan, from girlhood on, and had followed it scrupulously: high school, college, boyfriend, marriage, job, mortgage, children. A matching washer and dryer. She had, in short, done everything right and she had built a good life, the kind of life she wanted, the kind of life everyone wanted. Now here was this Mia, a completely different kind of woman leading a completely different life, who seemed to make her own rules with no apologies. Like the photograph of the spider-dancer, Mrs. Richardson found this perturbing but strangely compelling. A part of her wanted to study Mia like an anthropologist, to understand why-and how-she did what she did. Another part of her-though she was only vaguely aware of it at the moment-was uneasy, wanted to keep an eye on Mia, as you might keep your eye on a dangerous beast.

♥ Their first week in Denison, he had fallen for the ardent young woman collecting signatures around campus to end the draft. By the time they graduated, he had fallen for Shaker Heights as well, the way Elena described it: the first planned community, the most progressive community, the perfect place for young idealists. In his own little hometown, they'd been suspicious of ideas: he'd grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism, though he'd been sure the world count be better. It was why he'd been so eager to leave, and why he'd been smitten as soon as they'd met. Northwestern had been his first choice; he'd been turned down, had settled for the only school that let him leave the state, but once he'd met Elena it had seemed, to him, like fate intervening. Elena was determined to return to her hometown after school, and the more she told him about it, the more willing he was. It seemed only natural to him that such a place would have formed his principled fiancée, who always strove for perfection, and he gladly followed her back to Shaker Heights after graduation.

Now almost two decades later, well settled in their careers and their family and their lives, as he filled up his BMW with premium gas, or cleaned his golf clubs, or signed a permission form for his children to go skiing, those college days seemed fuzzy and distant as old Polaroids. Elena, too, had mellowed: of course she still donated to charity and voted Democrat, but so many years of comfortable suburban living had changed both of them. Neither of them had ever been radical-even at a time of protests, sit-ins, marches, riots-but now they owned two houses, four cats, a small boat they docked at the marina downtown. They had someone to plow the snow in the winter and mow the lawn in the summer. And of course they'd had a housekeeper for years, a long string of them, and now here was the newest, this young woman in his kitchen, waiting for him to leave so she could clean his house.

♥ "Well?" said Mia. "What are you going to do about it?"

It was not a question Izzy had been asked before. Until now her life had been one of mute, futile fury. In the first week of school, after reading T.S. Eliot, she had tacked up signs on all the bulletin boards: I HAVE MEASURED OUT MY LIFE WITH COFFEE SPOONS and DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH? and DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE? The poem made her think of her mother, doling out her creamer in a precise teaspoon, flipping out about pesticides if Izzy bit into an apple without washing it, rigidly drawing restrictions around her every move-and made her think of her older siblings, too, of Lexie and Trip and everyone like them, which to Izzy felt like everyone. So concerned about wearing the right things, saying the right things, being friends with the right people. She had fantasies of students whispering in the halls-Those signs? Who put them up? What did they mean?-noticing them, thinking about them, waking up, for God's sake. But in the rush before first period everyone funneled past them up and down the stairwells, too busy passing notes and cramming for quizzes to even glance up at the bulletin boards, and after second period she found that some dour security guard had torn the signs down, no doubt perplexed by these missives, leaving only flyers for Youth Ending Hunger, Model UN, and French Club. The second week of school, when Ms. Bellamy had asked them to memorize a poem and recite it in front of the class, Izzy had selected "This Be The Verse," a poem she felt-based on her fourteen and a half years-summed up life quite accurately. She had gotten no further than "They fuck you up, your mum and dad-" before Ms. Bellamy had peremptorily told her to sit down and given her a zero.

What was she going to do about it? The very idea that she could do something stunned her.

♥ A toothpick, inserted into a standard keyhole and snapped off flush, is a marvelous thing. It causes no damage to the lock, yet it prevents the key from entering, so the door cannot be opened. It is not easily removed without a pair of needle-nosed tweezers, which are often not handy and take some time to procure. The more impatient the key wielder, the more firmly and insistently the key is jammed into the keyhole, the more tenaciously the toothpick will cling to the innards of the lock, and the longer it will take to extract it even with the right equipment. A reasonably adept teenager, working quickly, can insert a toothpick into a lock, snap it off, and walk away in approximately three seconds. Three teenagers, working in unison, can therefore immobilize an entire high school containing one hundred and twenty-six doors in less than ten minutes, quickly enough to avoid notice and settle into their usual spots in the hallway to watch what ensues.

♥ She kept thinking of Mia's smile that day in the kitchen, the capability she saw there to delight in mischief, in breaking the rules. Her own mother would have been horrified. She recognized a kindred spirit, a similar subversive spark to the one she often felt flaring inside her. Instead of shutting herself up in her room all afternoon, she began to come down when Mia arrived and linger in the kitchen while she cooked-much to her siblings' amusement. Izzy ignored them.

..Mia looked down at Izzy, this wayward, wild, fiery girl suddenly gone timid and dampened and desperate. She reminded Mia, oddly, of herself at around that age, traipsing through the neighborhood, climbing over fences and walls in search of the right photograph, defiantly spending her mother's money on film. Single-minded almost to excess. Something inside Izzy reached out to something in her and caught fire.

♥ "I don't have a plan, I'm afraid," she said, lifting the knife again. "But then, no one really does, no matter what they say."

♥ Izzy pored over the reproductions of her photographs: her favorite was a shot of a housewife and her daughter on a swing, the child kicking her legs so hard the chains bent in an arc, defying gravity, the woman's arms outstretched as if to push her child away or desperate to pull her back. The photos stirred feelings she couldn't quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art.

♥ She had never been good at wheedling-she'd always felt flattery was a form of lying-but she wanted this so badly.

♥ She became known as reliable and for turning in clean copy, if-though no one said it out loud-routine and rather pedestrian and terribly nice. Shaker Heights was dependably safe and thus the news, such as it was, was correspondingly dull. Outside in the world, volcanoes erupted, governments rose and collapsed and bartered for hostages, rockets exploded, walls fell. But in Shaker Heights, things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance. Her house was large; her children safe and happy and well educated. This was, she told herself, the broad strokes of what she had planned out all those years ago.

♥ She thought suddenly of those moments at the restaurant, after the dinner rush had ended and things were quiet, when Bebe sometimes rested her elbows on the counter and drifted away. Mia understood exactly where she drifted to. To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.

♥ That January morning, when the social worker had called to say that she'd gotten their name from one of the adoption agencies, that she had a baby who was theirs if they wanted her: it had felt like a miracle. If they wanted her! All that pain, all that guilt, those seven little ghosts-for Mrs. McCullough never forgot a single one-had, to her amazement, packed themselves into a box and whisked themselves away at the sight of baby Mirabelle: so concrete, so vivid, so inescapably present. Now, at the thought that Mirabelle might be taken as well, Mrs. McCullough realized that the box and its contents had never disappeared, that they had simply been stored away, waiting for someone to open the lid.

♥ Mrs. Richardson tipped her head to one side and studied her tenant. Hair, as always, unkempt atop her head. A loose white button-down untucked over jeans. A smudge of paint on the back of one wrist. Mia stood there with one hand on the doorway, a half smile on her face, waiting for Mrs. Richardson to respond. A sweet face. A young face, but not an innocent face. She didn't care, Mrs. Richardson realized, what people thought of her. In a way, that made her dangerous. She thought suddenly of the photograph she'd seen at Mia's house that first day, when she'd invited Mia into her home. The woman turned arachnid, all silent, stealthy arms. What kind pf person, she thought, would transform a woman into a spider? What kind of person, for that matter, saw a woman and even thought spider?

♥ By the time Mrs. Richardson's mother, Caroline, was born in 1931, things were less rural but no less idyllic. Shaker Heights was officially a city; there were nine elementary schools and a new redbrick senior high had just been completed. 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. Rules and regulation and order were necessary, the residents assured each other, in order to keep their community both unified and beautiful.

For Shaker Heights was indeed beautiful. Everywhere lawns and gardens flourished-residents promised to keep weeds pulled, to grow only flowers, never vegetables. Those who were lucky enough to live in Shaker were certain theirs was the best community in America. It was the kind of place where-as one resident discovered-if you lost you thousand-dollar diamond wedding ring shoveling the driveway, the service department would remove the entire snowbank, carry it to the city garage, and melt it under heat lamps in order to retrieve your treasure. Caroline grew up picnicking by the Shaker lakes in the summer, skating on city-flooded rinks in the winter, caroling at Christmas. She saw matinees of Song of the South and Anna and the King of Siam at the cinema at Shaker Square and on special occasions-such as her birthday-her father took her to Stouffer's Restaurant for a lobster luncheon. As a teenager, Caroline became the drum majorette for the school's marching band, went parking down by the Canoe Club with the boy who would become her husband a few years later.

It was, as far as she could imagine, a perfect life in a perfect place. Everyone in Shaker Heights felt this. So when it became obvious that the outside world was less perfect-as Brown v. Board caused an uproar and riders in Montgomery boycotted buses and the Little Rock Nine made their way into school through a storm of slurs and spit-Shaker residents, including Caroline, took it upon themselves to be better than that. After all, were they not smarter, wiser, more thoughtful and forethoughtful, the wealthiest, the most enlightened? Was it not their duty to enlighten others? Didn't the elite have a responsibility to share their well-being with those less fortunate? Caroline's own mother had always raised her to think of those in need: she had organized Christmastime toy drives, had been a member of the local Children's Guild, had even overseen the compilation of a Guilt cookbook, with all proceeds benefiting charities, and contributed her own personal recipe for molasses cookies. When the troubles of the outside world made their presence felt in Shaker Heights-a bomb at the home of a black lawyer-the community felt obliged to show that this was not the Shaker way. A neighborhood association sprang up to encourage integration in a particularly Shaker Heights manner: loans to encourage white families to move into black neighborhoods, loans to encourage black families to move into white neighborhoods, regulations forbidding FOR SALE signs in order to prevent white flight-a law that would remain in effect for decades. Caroline, by then a homeowner herself with a one-year-old-a young Mrs. Richardson-joined the integration association immediately. Some years later, she would drive five and a half hours, daughter in tow, to the great March on Washington, and Mrs. Richardson would forever remember that day, the sun forcing her eyes into a squint, the scrum of people pressed thigh to thigh, the hot fug of sweat rising from the crowd, the Washington Monument rising far off in the distance, like a spike stretching to pierce the clouds. She clamped her mother's hand in hers, terrified that her mother might be swept away. "Isn't this incredible," her mother said, without looking down at her. "Remember this moment, Elena." And Elena would remember that look on her mother's face, that longing to bring the world closer to perfection-like turning the peg of a violin and bringing the string into tune. Her conviction that it was possible if you only tried hard enough, that no work could be too messy.

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. In 1968, at fifteen, she turned on the television and watched chaos flaring up across the country like brush fires. Martin Luther King Jr., then Bobby Kennedy. Students in revolt at Columbia. Riots in Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore, D.C.-everywhere, everywhere, things were falling apart. Deep inside her a spark kindled, a spark that would flare in Izzy years later. Of course she understood why this was happening: they were fighting to right injustices. But part of her shuddered at the scenes of the television screen. Grainy scenes, but no less terrifying: grocery stores ablaze, smoke billowing from their rooftops, walls gnawed to studs by flame. The jagged edges of smashed windows like fangs in the night. Soldiers marching with rifles past drugstores and Laundromats. Jeeps blocking intersections under dead traffic lights. Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new? The carpet at her feet was soft. The sofa beneath her was patterned with roses. Outside, a mourning dove cooed from the bird feeder and a Cadillac glided to a dignified stop at the corner. She wondered which was the real world.

The following spring, when antiwar protests broke out, she did not get in her car and drive to join them. She wrote impassioned letters to the editor; she signed petitions to end the draft. She stitched a peace sign onto her knapsack. She wove flowers into her hair.

It was not that she was afraid. It was simply that Shaker Heights, despite its idealism, was a pragmatic place, and she did not know how to be anything else. A lifetime of practical and comfortable considerations settled atop the spark inside her like a thick, heavy blanket. If she ran off to Washington to join the protests, where would she sleep? How would she stay safe? What would become of her classes, would she be expelled, could she still graduate band go to college? The spring of their senior year, Jamie Reynolds had pulled her aside after history class one day. "I'm dropping out," he said. "Going to California. Come with me." She had adored Jamie since the seventh grade, when he had admired a sonnet she'd written for English. Now, at almost eighteen, he had long hair and a shaggy beard, a dislike for authority, a VW van in which, he said, they could live. "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. But how would they pay for food, where would they do their laundry, where would they bathe? What would her parents say? The neighbors, her teachers, her friends? She'd kissed Jamie on the cheek and cried when, at last, he was out of sight.

Months later, off at Denison, she sat with classmates and watched the draft lottery live on the grainy common-room television. Jamie's birthday-March 7-had come up on the second pick. So he would be among the first to be called to fight, she thought, and she wondered where he had gone, if he knew what awaited him, if he would report, or if he would run. Beside her, Billy Richardson squeezed her hand. His birthday was one of the last drawn, and anyway, as an undergraduate, he had been granted a deferral. He was safe. By the time they graduated, the war would be over and they would marry, buy a house, settle down. She had no regrets, she told herself. She'd been crazy to have considered it even for a moment. What she had felt for Jamie back then had been just a tiny, passing flame.

All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. 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.

This philosophy had carried her through life and, she had always felt, had served her quite well. Of course she'd had to give up a few things here and there. But she had a beautiful house, a steady job, a loving husband, a brood of healthy and happy children; surely that was worth the trade. Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn't you might burn the world to the ground.

♥ Stirring up trouble. Heedlessly throwing sparks. Mrs. Richardson seethed, and deep inside her, the hot speck of fury that had been carefully banked within her burst into flame. Mia did whatever she wanted, Mrs. Richardson thought, and what would result? Heartbreak for her oldest friend. Chaos for everyone. You can't just do what you want, she thought. Why should Mia get to, when no one else did?

It was only this loyalty to the McCulloughs, she would tell herself, the desire to see justice for her oldest friend, that led her to step over the line at last: as soon as she could get away, she would take a trip to Pennsylvania and visit Mia's parents. She would figure out, once and for all, who this woman was.

♥ Moody-well, there was no question of her telling Moody. For some time, Pearl had been increasingly aware that Moody's feelings toward her were different, in quality and quantity, than hers toward him. A month before, as they fought through the crowd at a movie theater-they'd gone to see Titanic at last, and the lobby was mobbed-he'd reached back and seized her hand so they wouldn't he separated, and though she was glad to have someone ferrying her through the mass of people, she had felt something in the way he'd clasped her hand, so firmly, so proprietarily, and she'd known. She'd let him keep her hand until they broke through to the door of the theater, and then gently disentangled it under the guise of reaching into her purse for some lip balm. During the movie-as Leonardo DiCaprio sketched Kate Winslet in the nude, as the camera zoomed in on a hand smudging a fogged car window-she felt Moody stiffen and glance over at her, and she dug her hand into the bag of popcorn, as if bored by the tragic spectacle onscreen. Afterward, when Moody suggested they stop off at Arabica for some coffee, she'd told him she had to get home. The next morning, at school, everything seemed back to normal, but she knew something had changed, and she held this knowledge inside her like a splinter, something she was careful not to touch.

♥ It was none of his business, he thought to himself, though for the rest of the afternoon he found himself daydreaming back to his own teenage years in Hong Kong, sneaking into the botanical gardens with Betsy Choi, those dreamlike afternoons he had never told anyone about, and had not remembered to relive, for many years. The young are the same, always and everywhere, he thought, and he shifted the car into gear and drove on.

♥ ..Mr. Avengard, the vice principal, called an assembly to address the entire grade. "I understand there are rumors flying," he said, glaring out at the crowd. The faces looked so young to him: braces, acne, retainers, the very first bristles of a beard. These children, he thought, they think it's all a joke. "No one is pregnant," he told them. "I know that none of you young ladies and gentlemen would be that irresponsible."

♥ Mrs. Richardson had planned out this beginning and trusted her instincts to lead the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go. Getting information out of interviewees, she had learned over the years, was something like walking a large, reluctant cow: you had to turn the cow onto the right path while letting the cow believe it was doing the steering.

♥ She had not told her parents she was applying to art school until the acceptance letter had arrived. It was not wholly unexpected, or should not have been. As a child she had been fascinated by things that, to her bemusement, no one else seemed to even notice. "You were such a wool-gatherer," her mother would say. "You sat in your stroller just staring out at the lawn. You'd sit in the tub and pour water back and forth from one cup to another for an hour if I'd let you." What Mia remembered of those moments was watching the blades of grass in the breeze, changing color as they went, from dark to light, like the nap of velvet when you brushed your hand over it; the way the stream of water broke itself into droplets as it splashed against the cup's rim. Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Even the two boulders in the backyard sometimes turned to silver in the early morning sunlight. In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

♥ To her parents, the photos-and Mia's work in general-were less enchanting. They did not even call what she did "work," or "art," which in their minds would have been just as bad. They were middle-class people, had lived all their married lives in a butter-colored middle-class ranch house in a stolid, middle-class town. To them, work was fixing something or making something useful; if it didn't have a use, they couldn't quite make out why you'd do it. "Art" was something that people with too much time and money on their hands did. And could you blame them? Her father was a handyman, founder and sole proprietor of Wright's Repair, one day working at the church repairing the eaves where a board had broken and a family of squirrels had wiggled their way into the nave, another day at a neighbor's house snaking the drains or replacing a U-bend under the sink that had rusted away. Her mother was a nurse at the hospital, counting pills, drawing blood, changing bedpans, no stranger to night and double shifts. They worked with their hands, they worked long hours, they saved all they could and put it into a paid-off house and two Buicks and their two children, whom they were proud to say-accurately-lacked for nothing but were never spoiled.

..How could you blame Mia's parents for not understanding? They had been born in the wartime years; they'd been raised by parents who'd come of age in the Depression, who threw nothing out, not even moldy food. They were old enough to remember when rags became felt for the war effort, when cans and scrap metal could become bullets and cans of grease explosives. Practicality was baked into their bones. They wasted nothing, especially not time.

♥ The elevator doors had opened and there she was, back in the lobby, the kindly doorman peering down at her through his glasses. Behind him a wine-colored carpet rolled all the way to the thick glass doors that sealed out Fifth Avenue. The lobby was hushed as a library, but beyond those doors, she knew, were the cracked concrete sidewalks and the rush and clamor and ruthlessness of the city.

♥ She would have preferred shouting to this protracted, knife-sharp silence.

♥ "Wait," she said. "Do you think I made a huge mistake?" She gulped. "Do you think I'm a terrible person?" She had never given much thought to Mia, but suddenly it felt crucial to know if Mia disapproved of her. In the face of Mia's kindness, she could not bear it if Mia disapproved of her.

"Oh, Lexie." Mia sat down again, still holding Lexie's hand. "You were in a very hard situation. A situation no one wants to be in."

"But what if I chose wrong?" Lexis paused, closing her eyes, trying to feel that spark of life that she'd been so certain was cartwheeling inside her before. "Maybe I should have kept it. Maybe I should have told Brian. We could have made it work."

"Would you have been ready to be a good mother?" Mia asked. "The kind of mother you'd have wanted to be? The kind of mother a child deserves?" They sat in silence for a few minutes, Mia's hand warm on Lexie's. Lexie felt an overwhelming urge to lean her head on Mia's shoulder, and after a moment, she did. For the first time, she wondered what it would have been like to grow up as Pearl, to have Mia as her mother, to have this life as her life. The thought made her a bid dizzy.

"You'll always be sad about this," Mia said softly. "But it doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. It's just something that you have to carry."

♥ "Mom," Pearl said. "Moody and I are just friends."

"But maybe someday you'll want to be more. I know how it goes-" Mia stopped. She didn't, she realized suddenly; she didn't know how it went, not at all. As a teenager she'd had plenty of friends, some of them boys-but none as close as the friendship between her daughter and Moody seemed to be. They were together constantly, it seemed; they finished each other's sentences, they talked in a patois of inside jokes and shared references that sometimes she barely understood. More than once she'd seen Pearl lean over carelessly to fix Moody's collar; just the other day, she'd seen Moody reach out to pluck a wayward leaf from Pearl's hair with such tenderness that she could call it nothing other than love. But she herself had never felt that way about anyone, not as a teenager, not in art school, not since. It occurred to her that except for her brother, when they were children, she'd never seen a man naked. More than that: she'd never touched anyone and felt warmth, that electric tension at the nearness of someone else. The only thing that had given her that feeling had been art-and then, of course, Pearl. She had nothing useful to say about this, she thought, and the silence billowed out between them.

♥ She could feel Pearl's heart, ever so faintly, beating under her palm. It had been a long time since her daughter had let her be so close. Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she'd worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she'd set her down, Pearl would cry. There'd scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother's leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there were something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia's in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia's arm pinned beneath Pearl's head, or Pearl's legs thrown across Mia's belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl's caresses had become rare-a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug-and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.

♥ "The question is whether things are still the same. Whether she should get another chance."

"And you think she should?"

Mia did not answer for a moment. Then she said, "Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you."

♥ In her month and a half of turbulent motherhood, Bebe did not once seek help from a psychologist or a doctor.

(She should have, it is true. But she had no idea where to turn. Her English was middling at best; her reading comprehension minimal. She did not know how to find the social workers who might have helped her; she did not even know they existed. She did not know how to file for welfare. She did not know that welfare was a possibility. When she looked down, she saw no safety net, only a forest of skyscrapers stabbing upward like needles upon which she would be impaled. Could you blame her for tucking her daughter onto a safe ledge while she herself plummeted?)

♥ She had been embarrassed, every month, about being behind. One month she had paid in full and then hadn't enough money for groceries and electricity: what a thing, to choose between hunger and darkness.

♥ Bebe's current job as a waitress paid her the state minimum for tipped employees: $2.35 per hour. At fifty hours per week plus tips, her average take-home pay each month was $317.50. Could she reasonably hope to support a child, and provide all its necessities, on that income? Would she not be forced to seek welfare, and food stamps, and school lunches, would she and her child not become a drain on the community's resources?

(But there would be love, too, so much love. With that you could get by with so little. It was enough for the basics: rent, food, clothes. How did you weigh a mother's love against the cost of raising a child?)

..Should custody be returned to Bebe, she would, of course, be raising her child as a single, working mother. Who would care for her child while she was at work? Would not the child be better off in a home with two parents-one of whom did not work and would be home raising her full time-rather than in a day care for the majority of the day? And would not the child be better off in a home with a mother and a father, studies showing the importance of a strong male figure in a child's life?

(It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?)

♥ "I can save you some time," said Ed Lim. "There really aren't very many. So May Ling has no dolls that look like her, and no books with pictures of people that look like her." Ed Lim paced a few more steps. Nearly two decades later, others would raise this question, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We've always known, he would think; what took you so long?

♥ "You and your husband don't speak Chinese or know much about Chinese culture or history. You haven't by your own testimony, even thought about that entire aspect of May Ling's identity. Isn't it fair to say that if May Ling stays with you and Mr. McCullough, she will effectively be divorced from her birth culture?"

At this point, Mrs. McCullough burst into tears. In those early weeks she had fed Mirabelle every four hours, held her every time she cried, and watched her grow until her heels stretched her newborn rompers almost to the breaking point. It was she who had checked Mirabelle's weight regularly, who steamed peas and sweet potatoes and fresh spinach and pureed them and fed them to Mirabelle in doll-sized spoonfuls. When Mirabelle spiked a fever, it was she who spread a cold washcloth on her forehead, who pressed her lips to that little brow to test the heat. And when an ear infection turned out to be the culprit, it was she who fed antibiotic syrup drop by drop into Mirabelle's small pink mouth and let her lap it up like a kitten. She could not, she had thought as she bent to kiss the baby's flushed cheek, have loved this child more if it had come from her own flesh. All night-because feverish Mirabelle would not sleep except in motion-she cradled Mirabelle in her arms and paced the length of the room. By morning she had walked nearly four miles. It was she who, after breakfast, before bath time, and at bed, nuzzled Mirabelle's soft belly until the baby gurgled with laughter. She was the one who had caught Mirabelle in her arms as she stumbled to stand upright; she was the one to whom Mirabelle stretched out her own arms when she was in pain, or afraid, or lonely. She would know Mirabelle in pitch dark by one cry of her voice-no, one touch of her hand. No, one breath of her smell.

"It's not a requirement," she insisted now. "It's not a requirement that we be experts in Chinese culture. The only requirement is that we love Mirabelle. And we do. We want to give her a better life."

♥ The following morning, the Plain Dealer would publish a story mentioning Ed Lim's "aggressive" tactics, how he had badgered poor Mrs. McCullough to the point of tears. Men like him, the article would suggest, weren't supposed to lose their cool-though it was never specified whether "like him" meant lawyers or something else entirely. But the truth was-as Mr. Richardson recognized-that an angry Asian man didn't fit the public's expectations, and was therefore unnerving. Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan. They were not allowed to be angry and articulate and powerful. And possibly right, Mr. Richardson thought uneasily. Once the article came out, a number of people who had been neutral threw their support behind the McCulloughs; some who had been on Bebe's side found their passions cooling.

♥ "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."

♥ 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.

♥ The girls he'd grown up with in Shaker-and the boys, too, for that matter-seemed so purposeful: they were so ambitious; they were so confident; they were so certain about everything. They were, he thought, a little like his sisters, and his mother: so convinced there was a right and a wrong to everything, so positive that they knew one from the other. Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn't know: she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces.

♥ More than anything, Moody told himself, he was disappointed in Pearl. That after all, she'd been shallow enough to pick Trip, of all people. He hadn't expected her to choose him-of course not; he, Moody, was not the kind of guy girls had crushes on. But Trip-that was unforgivable. He felt as if he'd dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you'd expected.

♥ "What happened?" she whispered, though she already knew. She had never seen an adult cry like that, with such an animal sound. Recklessly. As if there were nothing more to be lost. For years afterward, she would sometimes wake in the night, heart thumping, thinking she'd heard that agonized cry again.

.."Is she-dying?" Izzy whispered. It was a ridiculous question, but in that moment she was honestly terrified this might be true. If a soul could leave a body, she thought, this is the sound it would make: like the screech of a nail being pulled from old wood.

"She's not dying," Mia said. .."She's going to survive, if that's what you mean. ..She's going to get through this. Because she has to."

"But how?" Izzy could not believe that someone could endure this kind of pain and survive.

"I don't know, honestly. But she will. Sometimes, just when you think everything's gone, you find a way." Mia racked her mind for an explanation. "Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow." She held Izzy at arm's length, wiped her cheek with a fingertip, smoothed her hair one last time. "People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way."

♥ "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?"

♥ 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.

♥ "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.

♥ "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.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

♥ "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.

"They're not mine," Mia took her keys from the counter.

"Who else's could they be?" Pearl insisted.

"Some pictures," Mia said, "belong to the person who took them. And some belong to the person inside them."

♥ A sheet of paper sliced into strips, thin as matchsticks, woven to form a net. Suspended in its mesh: a rounded, heavy stone. The text had been sliced to unreadable bits, but Lexie recognized the pale pink of it at once-the discharge form from her visit to the clinic. On one strip ran the bottom half of her signature-no, her forged signature: Pearl's name in her own handwriting. She had left the slip atr Mia's, and Mia had transformed it for her. Lexie, touching the photo, saw that beneath the weight of the rock, the intricate net bulged but did not break. It was something she would have to carry, Mia had said to her, and for the first time, she felt that perhaps she could.

♥ This was what would haunt Mrs. McCullough most: that Mirabelle hadn't cried out when Bebe had reached into the crib and lifted her up and taken her away. Despite everything-despite the homemade food and the toys and the late nights and the love, so much love, more love than Mrs. McCullough could have imagined possible-despite it all, she still had felt Bebe's arms were a safe place, a place she belonged. This next baby, she told herself, coming from an orphanage, would never have known another mother. She would be theirs without question. Already Mrs. McCullough felt dizzy with love for this child she had yet to meet. She tried not to think about Mirabelle, the daughter they'd lost, out there somewhere living some other, foreign life.

♥ "I wish I'd had a chance to say good-bye." Pearl thought about Moody, about Lexie and Trip, the threads that still bound her to each of them in different ways. Over the years, over the course of her life, she would try repeatedly to untangle these threads, and find each time that they were hopelessly intertwined. "And Izzy. I wish I'd gotten to see her one last time."

Mia was quiet, thinking of Izzy, too. "Poor Izzy," she said at last. "She wants to get out of there so badly."

An idea began to form in Pearl's mind in wild golden loops. "We could go back and get her. I could climb up the back porch and knock on her window and-"

"My darling," Mia said, "Izzy is only fifteen. There are rules about that kind of thing."

But as the car sped down Warrensville Road and toward I-480, Mia allowed herself a brief fantasy. They would be driving down a two-lane road, some back highway, the kind Mia favored: the kind that wove its way through small towns composed of a store and a café and a gas pump. Dust would billow in the air as they went by, like golden clouds. They would come around a curve and out of that golden mist they would see a shadowy figure by the roadside, arm out, one thumb up. Mia would slow the car and as the dust settled they would see her hair first, a billow of gold on gold, recognizing that wild hair, that golden wildness, even before they saw her face, even before they could stop and fling the door wide and let her in.

♥ All up and down the street the houses looked like any others-but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors.

♥ She probably looked crazy to the neighbors, she thought, sitting out there on the steps in the dark, but for once she did not care. The anger she had stoked all day had burned away, like the heat of the afternoon burning off as evening fell, leaving her with one thought, cold and crystalline and piercing as a star: Izzy was gone. Everything that had infuriated her about Izzy, even before she'd taken her first breath, had been rooted in that one fear, that she might lose her. And now she had. A thin wail rose from he throat, sharp as the blade of a knife.

For the first time, her heart began to shatter, thinking of her child out there among the world. Izzy: that child who had caused her so much trouble, who had worried her so much, who had never stopped worrying her and worrying at her, whose restless energy had driven her, at last, to take flight. That child who she thought had been her opposite but who had, deep inside, inherited and carried and nursed that spark her mother had long ago stamped down, that same burning certainty that she knew right from wrong. She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: Was it a portrait of her, or her daughter? Was she the bird trying to batter its way free, or was she the cage?

The police would find Izzy, she told herself. They would find her and she would be able to make amends. She wasn't sure how, but she was certain she would. And if the police couldn't find her? Then she would look for Izzy herself. For as long as it took, for forever if need be. Years might pass and they might change, both of them, but she was sure she would still know her own child, just as she would know herself, no matter how long it had been. She was certain of this. She would spend months, years, the rest of her life looking for her daughter, searching the faces of every young woman she met for as long as it took, searching for a spark of familiarity in the faces of strangers.