“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 that 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.
“Mom.” In the dark Mia couldn’t tell if Pearl was serious or smiling. “You don’t need to worry. I promise. There’s nothing between Moody and me.” She rolled over onto her side, away from Mia, the pillow now muffling her voice. “And I got an A in health class. I know all this stuff.” It was the truth, she told herself; not a single word she’d said had been a lie. Omission, Pearl decided, was not the same as lying. She felt Mia begin to rub her back again, the same gentle caress that, as a child, had told her she was not alone, that her mother was there, which meant that everything was all right. As it had all those years ago, it put her to sleep almost at once.
After Pearl had begun to snore softly, Mia kept her hand in place, as if she were a sculptor shaping Pearl’s shoulder blades. 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.
After Pearl went to school, Lexie stayed at the house on Winslow all morning. She lay across the bed and drifted off to sleep, and was still asleep when Mia came home from the restaurant with two foam containers of leftover noodles and a new idea. When the phone rang at two o’clock, waking Lexie at last, Mia was back at the table sketching with a pencil on a scratch piece of paper.
“I know, Bebe,” Mia was saying into the receiver as Lexie came into the living room. “But you can’t let it get to you. The hearing is going to be even worse. This is only the tip of the iceberg.” She glanced at Lexie, then turned back to the phone. “It’s going to be okay. Take a deep breath. I’ll call you later.”
“Was that—Mirabelle’s mother?” Lexie asked, when Mia had hung up the phone. To her embarrassment, she could not remember the baby’s birth name.
“She’s a friend of mine.” Mia settled herself back at the table and Lexie pulled up a chair alongside her. “There was an article today in the paper that said some unkind things about her. It suggested she was an unfit mother.” She glanced at Lexie. “Maybe you knew that already. With your father representing the McCulloughs, of course.”
Lexie flushed. Her father had been very busy lately—staying late at his office in preparation for the hearing, which was fast approaching—but she had been too preoccupied with Brian, with college, with the visit to the clinic and everything leading up to it, to pay much attention. “I didn’t know anything,” she said stiffly. Then: “Is she? An unfit mother, I mean.”
Mia picked up her pencil and turned to her sketch again. A net, Lexie thought—no, perhaps it was a cage. “Was she before? Maybe. She was in a bad situation.”
“But she abandoned her baby.” This was something Lexie had heard her mother say enough times—into the telephone to Mrs. McCullough, anytime the case came up—to engrave it in her mind as fact.
“I think she was trying to do what was best for the baby. She knew she couldn’t handle things.” Mia scribbled a hasty note in the corner of her drawing. “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.”
Lexie fell silent. Unconsciously, one hand crept down to her belly, where an ache was beginning to blossom.
“I’d better go home,” she said at last. “School’s almost over, and my mom will probably be back now.”
Mia swept crumbs of eraser dust from the table and stood up. “Are you ready?” she said, with a gentleness that made Lexie ache.
“No,” Lexie said. She laughed nervously. “But am I ever going to be?” She stood up. “Thanks for—well. Thanks.”
“Are you going to tell her?” Mia asked, as Lexie gathered her things.
Lexie considered. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “Maybe. Not now. But maybe one day.” She pulled her car keys from her pocket and lifted her purse. Beneath it was the pink discharge slip from the clinic. She paused, then crumpled it into a wad and tossed it into the garbage can, and then she was gone.
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