Chapter 8
then
8.
The day I pushed Cherie, Pete didn’t come home until after I was in bed. I didn’t get a chance to tell him about it until the following morning. It was the first day of school, so I delivered breakfast to Stella’s room bright and early. While she was getting ready, I found Pete in our bathroom, shaving, and gave him the bare outline of what happened. He wiped the foam off his face. “It’s not like you attacked her. Just explain it was an accident.”
“It’s going to take more than that,” I said. “Maybe I’ll get her some flowers.”
“This is the last thing you need when you’re feeling so unwell.” Pete dried his face and moved towards me. He knew instinctively when to stop problem-solving and just give me a hug. But the urge to throw up came on suddenly, and I pushed him aside and dropped to my knees in front of the toilet.
Pete rubbed my back as I retched. “It sucks that you’re the one who has to go through this. I wish I could take the pregnancy. Give you a break.”
“Like a seahorse,” I murmured. The female puts her eggs in the male’s pouch. The three of us had seen an exhibit at the London Aquarium when Stella was four, just after we’d moved back to the UK.
“That was a good day, wasn’t it?” Pete said. Stella melted down because the aquarium was too crowded, but outside, we bought fries and ate them as we walked along the Thames, making plans for when parenting got easier. We’d heard that between five and ten were the golden years.
I couldn’t throw up. I flopped back against the tub, and Pete said, “Go back to bed. I’ll take Stella to school.” He paused. “You need to let me do more, when I’m around.”
I took his hand. “Will you check in with Mr. McNaughton? Make sure he’s ready for her.” I’d written Stella’s teacher several panicked emails over the summer, explaining that school was challenging for her. In year two, Stella showed kids how to fashion an ultrafast paper airplane called “the Hammer,” and one of them hit the teacher in the eye. In year three, Stella had told the other kids that when slugs mated, the male’s penis sometimes got stuck, and the female consumed it because it was high in protein. After that, the kids had follow-up questions for the teacher, and the teacher had a talk with me about how very bright children could turn to manipulation if they were bored.
I asked the teachers in years two and three to provide extra work for Stella, but they said they had to focus on the less-high-achieving students. Fair enough. Stella had to be content with reading furiously during breaks and when she got home. She would have been happier at home, but she needed social skills as well as academic ones, so she went to school with other eight-year-olds, normal kids who weren’t sure if the Earth circled the sun or the other way around.
I went back to bed, but I was too worried to sleep. I wished I could at least make Stella look like the other girls, but with her issues, it was impossible. By pickup time, her hair looked like a troll doll’s, and her nonchafing elastic-waist trousers were slipping down her narrow waist. Her school polo shirt was three sizes too big (she hated anything that clung around her neck). I had to pick my battles, and the battle I had to win was getting her to school. If she insisted on looking like an orphan from Annie , there was nothing I could do about it.
Finally, I dragged myself out of bed and, hand under my nose, went to another Muswell Hill boutique and bought a decorative crystal diffuser and some Diptyque Fleur D’Oranger room fragrance, an impersonal gift, but I didn’t care. I sat on a bench to write a proper apology note. But then I remembered how Cherie had told me to let Stella go into freak-out mode to “release tension,” like she knew what Stella needed better than me. In the end, I just scrawled, Sorry about yesterday. That would have to cover everything. I left the gold gift bag and card on her doorstep, along with her special scissors, and scuttled away.
···
I thought I might get a quick text from Cherie before school pickup, but nothing. The year five classroom had a different entrance, so I didn’t have a chance to run into her and confirm she’d received the gift. Then, to my surprise, Stella emerged from the classroom talking to Lulu. That was a change. Even more surprising, Mr. McNaughton gave me a covert thumbs-up. I wanted to debrief with him, but Stella tugged on my hand, eager to get moving.
···
Around six, Pete surprised us by coming home early again. “Look what I got for Stella.” He grinned and held up a child-sized boogie board designed to look like a blue fish with yellow stripes. “What’s a way to get rid of fear of the sea and for Stella and I to spend time together?”
“It’s a nice idea,” I said. “But Stella can barely swim.”
Pete looked crushed, and I felt bad. Pete’s dad had taken him backpacking in the wilderness from the age of six. His vision of fatherhood included lots of outdoor activity, and he was stuck with a child who couldn’t stand the feel of grass under her bare feet.
Pete’s phone dinged. “Sorry, baby,” he said. Nathan, the needy CEO, bombarded him with Slack messages. He’d said Pete didn’t have to answer them instantly, but it was easier to deal with them as they came in; otherwise Nathan spiraled. Pete tapped out a response and sighed. “I have to run back into work later,” he said. “I thought this boogie board would be a nice surprise.”
“I’m sorry. Just—one step at a time, OK? She had a good day at school.”
“That’s great news.” But Pete’s gaze went to the pale patch on the floor he’d made when cleaning up after Stella’s birthday party. I could have told him not to use bleach on the old wood, but he didn’t stop to consult me.
With a start I realized that Stella was standing in the kitchen doorway, wearing one of Pete’s white button-down shirts, with only two buttons done up. How long had she been there? “Hey, Stella Bella,” Pete said. “Congratulations on getting through your first day of year four. Did you miss me? Is that why you’re wearing my shirt?”
“It’s my science outfit,” Stella said. She began pushing a chair to the freezer, legs scraping the floor. “I need my bird.”
“Um, sweetheart? I might have thrown it away,” said Pete. Stella froze. I glared at Pete, and he muttered, “I thought she’d forget about it.”
The color drained from Stella’s face. She looked small and helpless suddenly, swallowed up by Pete’s shirt. “But it was my bird. I found it.” She turned to me. “Mommy, could you please get it out of the bin?” I jumped up, but Pete laid a hand on my arm.
“It’s in the green bin outside,” he said.
“I can get it back then,” I twittered. I went to the sink for my rubber gloves.
“It’s under two days’ worth of kitchen compost now. Leave it.”
I tried to take a deep breath, but felt like my lungs wouldn’t inflate. Pete had no idea what he was in for. I knelt down to get my rubber gloves from their hook. “Stella, stay calm, I’ll get your bird,” I panted.
“Sweetheart,” Pete said. I turned around. He was holding the gloves: I must have left them beside the sink. “This has got to stop.” He balled the gloves up and stuffed them in his pocket.
Stella began to scream.
Pete had once suggested I try a mantra on Stella: “Screaming doesn’t get you what you want.” That was the time she screamed so hard I took her to the emergency room. I’d seen other kids have tantrums: they jumped up and down, emitted high shrieks, then melted themselves onto the floor. Stella wrung her hands and keened like she was a mother whose only child had just been blown to bits.
Inside thirty seconds, I felt I’d do anything to make her stop. I’d comb the beach for another dead bird. I’d do it right now.
Pete said something, possibly, “Screaming doesn’t get what you want.” But her screaming was so loud I couldn’t hear. I stood on tiptoe and spoke directly into his ear: “She’s going to make herself ill. She’s going to damage her vocal cords. Give me the gloves. I’m going outside to the bin.”
Pete backed away from me. I had no chance of getting the gloves off him if he didn’t want me to have them. I grabbed my phone and started googling to see if I could get a dead bird online, but it was illegal to sell wild birds in the UK. I could drive to the beach, though. If necessary, I would catch a bird and wring its neck with my bare hands.
Pete kept repeating the mantra. When I tried the mantra, I maxed out around thirty or forty times. I swear Pete only got to about fifteen before he was on his knees, crooning her name and trying to take her in his arms. “Stella, honey, it’s OK, baby, it’s OK.”
Stella screamed louder and flailed her arms about.
I began to shake, and Stella shook too, her eyes black hollows, mouth twisted out of shape. Her grief seemed existential and entirely justified. She knew the truth: we’re all trapped in our own heads, incapable of communicating, alone.
Pete gave up trying to hug Stella and started to pace. It had taken me so long to accept that Stella did not like to be physically comforted. I told myself that it was merely a personal preference, like disliking raw tomatoes. It didn’t mean anything. But whenever she began screaming, I was afraid this said something deeper about her. If a child didn’t like to be nuzzled, did that mean she didn’t like being loved? If she didn’t want to nestle in my arms, did that mean she wasn’t capable of giving love? Maybe she had inherited that gene from my mother.
Stella was now crouched on the floor, rocking, and I sank to the floor too. I could bear it if Stella didn’t love me. But I couldn’t bear what it meant for her. She had something essential missing. She’d always be alone, never have—
“Shut up!” Pete yelled. “You shut up right now!” He bent down and grabbed Stella’s shoulders. Her little arm flew up and whacked him in the face, knocking his glasses to the floor. He snatched them up: one of the lenses was shattered. “I don’t have a spare pair. How am I supposed to go back to work tonight? Fuck. Fuck!” He punched the fridge so that a carelessly sealed bag of muesli fell off the top and spilled all over the floor. Then he stormed out of the room, and the front door slammed.
Stella took great, ragged breaths. She wasn’t screaming anymore, at least. I was having trouble catching my breath too. I was shocked that Pete had lost his temper like that. He almost never lost control. I ached to cradle Stella in my arms, but all I could offer was some pretzels, which she refused. She let me dab her swollen eyes with a cool washcloth.
Now that she wasn’t screaming, I felt shaky, as if I’d had the flu for a week. I started to make some jacket potatoes with cheese for dinner. The storm had retreated as suddenly as it came. Stella now seemed perfectly fine. Pete texted, I feel awful. Walking about trying to get my head together. You guys OK?
Much better, I type, feeling sorry for him. Hope you can see OK with only one lens.
When the potatoes were ready, she asked if she could eat in her room, and when I checked on her, she was forking up mouthfuls of food. She didn’t say anything more about her bird.
After Stella was in bed, I sat alone at the dining table with a glass of water. Overhead hung the light fixture Pete had made after we moved in together in San Francisco, an old California railroad tie suspended from the ceiling on chains, with pendant lights, the effect both delicate and imposing. I would never have imagined I could make my own light fixture, but Pete took a class in metalworking and figured out how to do it. I felt bad now, thinking of that hopeful Pete, who’d had the time and imagination for such projects.
But Stella wasn’t a project. There was no class that could teach you how to deal with freak-out mode. Now, at least, he understood that it wasn’t merely a tantrum. I didn’t know what to do about it, but I did know that until we understood it better, the only thing you could really do was be there by her side. She didn’t need professional help. She needed two parents who would let her be her weird, unique self and try their best to understand her.
Pete came back about half an hour after Stella had gone to sleep. When had those grooves appeared, going from his nose to the corners of his mouth? He pulled me into his arms. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I snapped. I understand now why you took her to the emergency room. You didn’t know what else to do.”
I led him to the sofa. “Freak-out mode fries your brain.”
Pete nodded. “I should be able to comfort my own daughter. We don’t spend enough time together. I’ve put way too much into Mycoship. You and Stella are what really matter.”
I stroked his hair, feeling generous, because at last, someone else understood the terror of freak-out mode. “Stella knows you love her.” When Stella was born, Pete held her skin to skin under his shirt, her bud mouth suctioned around his little finger. The day she lost Sunny, the plush sunfish she’d had since she was a baby, he’d combed the Internet until he found an identical replacement (not that Stella was fooled). When we had friends or family over and she felt overwhelmed, Stella liked to hide on the bottom shelf of our pantry, which she called her alone-time cupboard. Pete never insisted she come out. He installed a light in there, as well as a handle on the inside of the door.
It was only when school started and she still shrank from playdates that he balked at how much time she spent in there. And then he insisted that she have a party for her eighth birthday.
I’d wanted to take Stella to the science museum or the aquarium. But Pete said that his friends had invited her to their kids’ birthday parties, and now it was time for us to reciprocate. He booked an animal entertainer, who brought along a pile of cages. Stella kept shooting desperate looks at me as the man brought out one panicky ball of fur after another. The pièce de résistance was an enormous snake the thickness of a fire hose and the color of a rotten banana. After some encouragement, the other kids had groped the snake while Stella covered her eyes, the only one to empathize with the reptile.
“I should never have organized that birthday party,” Pete said now. “I feel like it was all my fault. I could see she didn’t like the animal entertainer. I should have put a stop to it. Then maybe she wouldn’t have—”
“I’m sorry too,” I interrupted. I wasn’t apologizing for anything in particular, but there was no need to rehash what happened next.
I laid my head on his chest. It took guts to apologize and even more to delve into why you’d erred. In my etiquette column, I’d talked about a shallow versus a deep apology. In a shallow apology, you enumerated what you’d done wrong and apologized. In a deep apology, you talked about why you had done something. A shallow apology was fine if you didn’t know the other person and the wrong done was small. But if it was someone you cared about, someone you loved, and the wrong was tremendous, only a deep apology would suffice.
“You’ve been under a lot of stress,” I said. “It’s not easy being responsible for all these other people.” The employees at Mycoship were making token salaries, gambling on it being successful. In California, Pete had worked for CannaGauge, his parents’ cannabis-testing equipment company, and he’d grown it until it was big enough to support us comfortably, as well as his parents. He could afford to pour his soul into Mycoship. But it was stressful for the others who worked there, unable to put anything into retirement or savings. Pete felt he owed it to them to make Mycoship succeed.
Still, maybe he was overdoing it. I saw my opportunity. “Maybe you could establish some boundaries with Nathan, like it’s OK to contact you on weeknights, but weekends are for family.”
Pete tensed: I could feel it in his chest, in his arms around me. “We’re so close to making it, you know? I feel like we’re right on the verge of all our hard work paying off. If we could just get one or two big-box retailers to take a gamble on us.” At the moment, Mycoship’s clients were small luxury businesses with an ecological bent, companies that made artisanal gin or beeswax candles. Pete wanted mycelium packaging—which actually enriched the soil when discarded—to be as commonplace as Styrofoam. “Tell you what, we’ll have one family day every weekend. Will that work?”
“It’s a good start.” As I hugged him, I kneaded his back with my knuckles, smelling his familiar, comforting smell of citrus zest and freshly sharpened pencils. “Maybe you can teach Stella to surf,” I murmured, catching sight of the new boogie board. “You managed to teach me.”
Pete chuckled. “You weren’t that bad.”
Pete had persuaded me to try surfing after we’d been dating for a month. “Catching a wave is like flying. You’re going to love it.”
But no matter how many times I got it right on land, I couldn’t “pop up”—move from lying on the board to standing—in the water. I fell off my board again and again.
One afternoon, when we were in the ocean, paddling back out to the lineup after I’d wiped out yet again, Pete said, “You’ve just got to believe in yourself,” and I snapped.
“Could you sound any more Californian? You also have to know when to give up. This just isn’t for me.”
I braced for Pete to lose his temper. But he just nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter if you never catch a wave. I’m happy just being in the ocean with you.” He reached out for my hand, and my whole body relaxed. We lay on our boards, feeling the ocean’s rise and fall. A pelican skimmed low over the water. Then a wave moved towards us, and I knew I could catch it. I leaped to my feet in one fluid motion and rode nearly to the shore. Pete leaped off his board beside me, his face alight, and at our knees, the surf fizzed like champagne.