“Not exactly,” Mr. Wright said after a moment. “But we haven’t spoken with her since shortly after Warren died.”
“How sad,” Mrs. Richardson said. “That happens quite a lot, one family member taking a loss very hard. Dropping out of contact.”
“But what happened with Mia had nothing to do with what happened to Warren,” Mrs. Wright broke in. “What happened with Warren was an accident. Teenage boys being reckless. Or maybe just the snow. Mia—well, that’s a different story. She was an adult. She made her own choices. George and I—” Mrs. Wright’s eyes welled up.
“We didn’t part on the best terms,” put in Mr. Wright.
“That’s terrible.” Mrs. Richardson leaned closer. “That must have been so hard for you both. To lose both of your children at once, in a way.”
“What choice did she give us?” Mrs. Wright burst out. “Showing up in that state.”
“Regina,” Mr. Wright said, but Mrs. Wright did not stop.
“I told her, I didn’t care how nice these Ryan people were, I didn’t approve of it. I didn’t think it was right to sell your own child.”
Mrs. Richardson’s pencil froze in midair. “Pardon?”
Mrs. Wright shook her head. “She thought she could just give it up and go on with her life. Like nothing had happened. I had two children, you know. I knew what I was talking about. Even before we lost Warren.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, as if there were a mark there that she wanted to rub out. “You don’t ever get over that, saying good-bye to a child. No matter how it happens. That’s your flesh and blood.”
Mrs. Richardson’s head was spinning. She set her pencil down. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said. “Mia was pregnant and was planning to let this couple—the Ryans—adopt her baby?”
Mr. and Mrs. Wright exchanged looks again, but this time the look between them said: in for a penny. It was clear, to Mrs. Richardson’s practiced eye, that they wanted to talk about it, that perhaps they had been waiting to talk to someone about it for a long, long time.
“Not exactly,” Mr. Wright said. There was a long pause. Then: “It was their baby, too. They couldn’t have their own. She was carrying it for them.”
13
In the fall of 1980, Mia Wright, just turned eighteen, left the little yellow house in Bethel Park for the New York School of Fine Arts. She had never been outside of Pennsylvania before, and she left home with two suitcases and her brother’s love and without her parents’ blessing.
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 woolgatherer,” 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.
Only her brother, Warren, seemed to understand the hidden layer she saw in things, but then they had always had an understanding, since before he had been born. “My baby,” Mia would say to anyone who would listen, tapping her mother’s belly with a finger, and infallibly Warren would kick in reply. “My baby. In there,” she informed strangers in the grocery store, pointing. When they’d brought him home from the hospital, she had immediately claimed him as her own.
“My Wren,” she’d called him, not only because Warren had been too long to pronounce, but because it suited him. Even in those early days, he’d looked like a vigilant chick, head tipped to one side, two impossibly bright and focused eyes, searching the room for her. When he cried, she knew which toy would calm him. When he wouldn’t nap, Mia lay next to him in the center of their parents’ bed, blankets heaped around them in a chenille nest, singing him songs and patting his cheek until he dozed. When he fell skinning the cat on the monkey bars, it was Mia he ran crying for, and Mia who dabbed the gash on his temple with iodine and stuck a bandage across it.
“You’d think she was the mother,” their mother had said once, half in tones of complaint, half in admiration.
They had their own words for things, a jargon of obscure origin: for reasons even they had forgotten, they referred to butter as cheese; they called the grackles that perched in the treetops icklebirds. It was a circle they drew around the two of them like a canopy. “Don’t tell anyone from France,” Mia would begin, before whispering a secret, and Warren’s reply was always, “Wild giraffes couldn’t drag it out of me.”
And then, at eleven—almost twelve—Mia discovered photography.
Warren, just turned ten, had himself discovered not only sports but that he was good at them. Baseball in the summer, football in the fall, hockey in the winter, basketball in all the spaces in between. He and Mia were still close, but there were long afternoons at the baseball diamond in the park, long hours practicing passes and practicing layups. So it was natural that Mia, too, would find a passion of her own.