Pearl, on the other hand, focused on the photograph itself. There was her mother, looking a bit younger, a bit thinner, but with the same waifish build, the same high cheekbones and pointed chin. There was the tiny mole just underneath her eye, the scar that slashed like a white thread through her left eyebrow. There were her mother’s slender arms, which looked so fragile and birdlike, as if they might snap under too great a weight, but which could carry more than any woman Pearl had ever seen. Even her hair was the same: piled in the same careless bundle right at the crown of her head. Beauty rolled off her in waves, like heat; the very image of her in the photograph seemed to glow. She wasn’t looking at the camera; she was focused, totally and utterly absorbed, on the infant before her. On me, Pearl thought. She was sure it was her in the photo. What other baby would her mother be holding? There were no photos of herself as an infant, but she recognized herself in this child, in the bridge of the nose and the corners of the eyes, in the tight balled fists she had continued to make into toddlerhood and childhood, which in her concentration, without realizing it, she was making even now. Where had this photo come from? The gray-scale sofa on which her mother sat might be tan, or pale blue, or even canary; the window behind her looked out onto a blurred view of tall buildings. The person who’d taken it had been mere feet away, as if seated on an armchair just beside the couch. Who had it been?
“Miss Warren,” Mrs. Jacoby said behind her. “Mr. Richardson.” Pearl and Moody spun around, their faces prickling with heat. “If you are both ready to move on, the entire class is waiting for you.”
And indeed, the entire class was gathered outside, notebooks closed now, dutifully chaperoned by the docent, giggling and whispering as Moody and Pearl emerged.
On the bus ride back home, jokes began to circulate about what Moody and Pearl had been doing. Moody turned a deep crimson and slouched down in his seat, pretending not to hear. Pearl gazed out the window, oblivious. She said nothing at all until the bus reached the oval around the school and the students began to file out. “I want to go back,” she said to Moody as they stepped off the bus.
And they did, that afternoon after school, persuading Lexie to drive them because there was no good way to get there otherwise, and letting Izzy tag along because the moment she heard Mia and photograph, she insisted on coming with them. Moody, who had done the persuading, hadn’t told Lexie what they wanted to see, and when they stepped into the gallery her mouth fell open.
“Wow,” she said. “Pearl—that’s your mom.”
The four of them surveyed the photograph: Lexie from the middle of the room, as if she needed distance for a better view; Moody nearly smudging it with his nose, as if he might find the answer between the pixels, and leaning so close that he set off a warning alarm. Pearl simply stared. And Izzy stood transfixed by the image of Mia. In the photo, she was as luminous as the full moon on a clear night. Virgin and Child #1, she read on the placard, and she allowed herself to imagine for a moment that the child in Mia’s arms was her.
“That’s so crazy,” Lexie said at last. “God, that’s so crazy. What’s your mom doing in a photo in an art museum? Is she secretly famous?”
“The people in photos aren’t famous,” Moody put in. “The people who take them are.”
“Maybe she was some famous artist’s muse. Like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Or Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol.” Lexie had taken an art history class at the museum the previous summer. She straightened up. “Well, let’s ask her,” she said. “We’ll just ask her.”
And they did as soon as they got home, trooping into the Richardson kitchen, where Mia had just finished dressing a chicken for dinner.
“Where have you all been?” she said as they came in. “I got here at five and no one was home.”
“We went to the art museum,” Pearl began, and then hesitated. Something about this didn’t feel right to her, the same uneasy feeling you had when you set your foot on a wobbly step, just before it dipped beneath you. Moody and Izzy and Lexie clustered around her, and she saw how they must look to her mother, flushed and wide-eyed and curious.
Lexie nudged her in the back. “Ask her.”
“Ask me what?” Mia set the chicken into a casserole dish and went to the sink to wash her hands, and Pearl, with the feeling of stepping off a very high diving board, plunged ahead.
“There’s a photo of you,” she blurted out. “At the art museum. A photo of you on a couch holding a baby.”
Mia’s back was still to them, the water rushing over her hands, but all four of the children saw it: a slight stiffening of her posture, as if a string had been tightened. She did not turn around but kept on scrubbing at the gaps between her fingers.
“A photo of me, Pearl? In an art museum?” she said. “You just mean someone who looks like me.”
“It was you,” Lexie said. “It was definitely you. With that little dot under your eye and the scar on your eyebrow and everything.”
Mia touched a knuckle to her brow, as if she’d forgotten the scar existed, and a drop of warm sudsy water ran down her temple. Then she rinsed her hands and shut off the faucet.
“I suppose it could have been me,” she said. She turned around and began to dry her hands briskly on the dish towel, and to Pearl’s chagrin her mother’s face was suddenly stiff and closed in. It was disorienting, like seeing a door that had always been open suddenly shut. For a moment, Mia did not look like her mother at all. “You know, photographers are always looking for models. Lots of the art students did it.”
“But you’d remember,” Lexie insisted. “You were sitting on a couch in a nice apartment. And Pearl was on your lap. The photographer was—” She turned to Moody. “What’s her name?”
“Hawthorne. Pauline Hawthorne.”
“Pauline Hawthorne,” Lexie repeated, as if Mia might not have heard. “You must remember it.”
Mia shook the dish towel out with a quick snap of her wrist. “Lexie, I really can’t remember all the odd jobs I’ve done,” she said. “You know, when you’re hard up, you do a lot of things just to try and make ends meet. I wonder if you can imagine what that’s like.”
She turned back to the sink and hung the towel to dry, and Pearl realized she’d gone about this all wrong. She should never have asked her mother like this, in the Richardson kitchen with its granite countertops and its stainless-steel fridge and its Italian terra-cotta tiles, in front of the Richardson kids in their bright, buoyant North Face jackets, especially in front of Lexie, who still had the keys to her Explorer dangling from one hand. If she’d waited until they were alone, back at home in the dim little kitchen in their half a house on Winslow Road, perched on their mismatched chairs at the one remaining leaf of their salvaged table, perhaps her mother would have told her. Already she saw her mistake: this was a private thing, something that should have been kept between them, and by including the Richardsons she had breached a barrier that should not have been broken. Now, looking at her mother’s set jaw and flat eyes, she knew there was no sense in asking any more questions.