Chapter 21
21.
Pete’s timer rang. “OK, rub for three minutes and leave,” he said. He was kneeling in the middle of the kitchen floor holding a cloth, which he’d been rubbing at the pale blot left after Stella’s birthday party. He squinted at the spot. It was barely visible now—a mark you could see only in the right light, if you knew what you were looking for. “Thank god for the Internet,” he said in triumph. “I should have done this ages ago.” He held up a spray bottle: mineral spirits. “I got the odorless variety on purpose so as not to bother you.”
“The mark looks better already,” I said.
“So listen, you won’t have to do a thing,” Pete said. “I’ve invited people for Thanksgiving.” Even though the mineral spirits were supposedly odorless, they reeked like paint thinner. I breathed through my mouth as Pete explained he’d invited people over from work on impulse, but it would be OK because it was a potluck, people were bringing dishes, and so really, I wouldn’t have to lift a finger.
“How could you invite people without asking me?” I said. “It’s our last Thanksgiving just the three of us. Maybe it would be nice to keep it just us this year.”
His face fell. “I thought you’d be pleased it was all taken care of. You love Thanksgiving.”
True, I treasured the tradition of spending the entire day cooking and eating with family and friends, and we’d kept it up even after moving to the UK.
“Thanksgiving dinner with three people is a little sad,” I admitted. And I did have more energy, now I was eating from the nonbread food groups.
“Yes! This is going to be so great. The Brits at the company will get to experience a real Thanksgiving. It’ll be a celebration of the Home Depot deal. A celebration of how well Stella’s doing too. Thank you, baby.” He gave me a smacking kiss on the lips. “Oh, and I’ve invited Irina. It will make Stella happy if she’s there.”
This was true. Stella had been sulky when I told her Irina would only be picking her up twice a week. And she didn’t seem to be getting much benefit from me doing the other three pickups. I’d thought that if I spent more time with her, she’d get back to her true self. She’d insist we race paper planes, or talk my ear off explaining why a stork’s wing was the most aerodynamic. Instead, she just crocheted, or cradled Stick Thing, the doll she’d made with Irina, and sang incomprehensible lullabies under her breath.
···
As I was finishing the Thanksgiving table decorations ten days later, tying the napkins with rustic twine, Stella clattered down the stairs with Irina behind her.
“What do you think?” Irina said proudly. “She look nice for dinner.” I stared, stunned: her hair was in two plaits. Stella had never let anyone touch her hair but me, and she’d never even allowed me to do a ponytail. But Irina had somehow subdued that abundant hair into two skimpy plaits, finished with elastic holders decorated with pink plastic bobbles.
Surely not the same ones that had belonged to Blanka?
“Beautiful, darling,” I said stiffly.
We had eight guests, including five from Mycoship: Nathan, the CEO; Kia, who did biz dev—she was American like Pete; and three younger employees. Pete had also invited Nick and Emmy to stop everyone from talking shop all evening (they were leaving their kids with a babysitter). And of course, there was Irina, who bustled around heating up the various things people had brought, even though Pete kept telling her to relax. The collective odor was almost too much. It smelled like a year’s worth of leftover school dinners, scraped off plates and boiled down to a concentrate.
Kia’s cranberry sauce was the one dish that tempted me, with its waft of orange zest—her mother’s recipe, she said. She was muscular from her triathlon training, and her long blond hair was greying naturally. “Your hair is lovely,” I said.
Kia tossed her head. “Who has time to get their hair colored, right? I’d rather go for a bike ride.” She smelled of magnesium muscle soak and sports deodorant, not unpleasant. “You must be so excited about the baby.”
I smiled. “Please. You think we should be paying a carbon tax.” Kia had once confided in me that she couldn’t have kids because of premature ovarian failure, but at the same time, she’d realized she didn’t want them for environmental reasons. “I’m not judging if other people have kids, but for me, the climate crisis is a reason to feel good about not having them,” she’d said.
Kia turned to Stella, who was standing at the edge of the kitchen. “Do you remember me? We met a couple of years ago, you were five or six. Are you still interested in disasters? You told me all about the Titanic .”
“I don’t remember,” Stella said. How could she not remember? She remembered how many people survived and how many dogs, even the breeds (two Pomeranians and a Pekinese).
Kia smiled. “Are you excited about your little brother or sister?”
“Oh yes,” Stella said. I flinched. Was there any way I could reasonably ask her to stop saying two of the most common words in the English language? Pete joined us, putting his arm around me. He wore a crisp shirt instead of his usual California-casual T-shirt. His beard looked more neatly shaped. He’d put some stuff on it, beard balm. I could smell it, fresh and clean like a snowy morning.
“Any names picked out?” Kia asked Pete.
“Whatever it is, it’s got to be something I can make into a tattoo. I already have a star for Stella.” He rolled up his sleeve and showed the black-and-white nautical star, in the style of a compass rose, adorning his bicep. “I apologize for how cheesy this sounds, but she guides me home. My true north.”
My heart squeezed. He hadn’t shown anyone that tattoo since the birthday party. Pete picked Stella up, but instead of clinging to him, she just hung there, a deadweight, and he put her down again. “Stella Bella Banana. You’re getting bigger. I’m so proud of how well you’ve been doing at school. Want to go swimming together on Saturday?” She nodded.
I stared. Really? She was suddenly OK with splashing and jostling? What if she found a Band-Aid floating in the water?
Then Emmy came up to us and twirled one of Stella’s plaits. “Gorgeous hairdo!”
“Doesn’t she look cute?” Pete agreed.
Emmy’s gaze flicked to the pristine floor for a moment, and I wondered if she was remembering. She’d been right there when it happened.
At Stella’s birthday party, when she’d finally had enough of the animal entertainer tormenting small creatures and the noisy strangers crowding her house, she went into her bedroom and removed her underwear. Then she walked into the kitchen, where the biggest concentration of guests could be found, squatted down, and she—she—well, right in the middle of the floor.
I was in the powder room at the time, splashing cold water on my face. I heard the gasps and rushed into the kitchen. The area emptied in a flash. I took Stella upstairs while Pete pretended to be jolly. He whisked the mess away and cleaned up. But the guests left without singing “Happy Birthday.” As they shuffled out the door, Pete told everyone she had an upset tummy. Everyone kept saying they totally understood, it was normal for kids to have accidents, who hadn’t been there?
But this wasn’t a three-year-old who was poorly potty-trained. This was a child of eight. And this wasn’t loss of control of her bodily functions. Stella had shown consummate command of her body, and this was the most disturbing part of it. She wasn’t the least bit upset or embarrassed. Her bearing was regal as she stood in the center of the kitchen after this very deliberate act.
Pete knew and I knew that Stella would become the story other parents told themselves to make themselves feel better: “Cyrus might be terrified of movie trailers and have a rash because of his compulsive chin-licking—but he would never take a dump in the middle of his own birthday party.” The same people probably got a kick out of saying that she was—literally—a party pooper.
But now Pete was beaming. We were having people over again, and Stella was behaving beautifully, sitting at the table and eating everything on her plate, instead of guzzling the meal in her room. But only because Irina was here. Was this why Pete invited her?
Nathan turned his focus on me. “Pete says you used to write an etiquette column. What is that, like what fork to use?”
“Not at all,” Pete said. “It wasn’t stuffy. Charlotte was very funny.”
I offered, “Thank-you notes shouldn’t begin with the words thank you because—”
“Thank-you notes?” One of the younger employees, the one with a tongue stud, spoke. “We’re way too lazy for those nowadays. I send a text. Or, you know, just say thank you at the time.”
“The world is falling apart,” Nathan pronounced gloomily. “Eventually all politeness will vanish and we’ll all be shooting each other over the last patch of inhabitable earth.” He paused. “So, what are you passionate about, Charlotte?”
“I never said I wasn’t passionate about etiquette,” I said. “Won’t we need it even more when we’re all fighting disaster?”
“Sure,” said Nathan. “But seriously. What are you really passionate about?”
“Dude, I thought British people didn’t ask each other that kind of question,” Kia said. She winked at me. “Isn’t that like asking each other how much money you earn?”
I smiled at Kia. “What are you passionate about, Nathan?” Let him feel what it was like to be put on the spot.
“Mushrooms,” Nathan said firmly. “They’re gonna save the world.” The conversation moved on to mushrooms’ recycling powers—there were even some that could eat plastic—and I sat there, crumbling a piece of cornbread.
Pete stood up and tapped his knife on his glass. “Thanksgiving is traditionally a time to give thanks, so I want to say I’m thankful for my beautiful wife, my incredible daughter, and my second child on the way. I’m grateful for new friends and old ones.” He raised his glass. “I’m grateful for all you guys. And I’m grateful I get to be part of Mycoship, this amazing company that’s doing some good in the world.”
I clinked glasses with the others and took a token sip of champagne. Stella took no notice of Pete. She wolfed her food, and then I let her have her dessert right away so she could go to her room.
“It’s fucking great to have a home-cooked meal,” Nathan announced. “I’ve barely had time to boil water for ramen since Home Depot got on board.” The employees murmured their agreement.
When the rest of us had our pumpkin pie, Kia turned to Irina, who hadn’t joined in with the conversation so far. “So, Irina, tell us about yourself. Where are you from?”
“Azerbaijan,” Irina said. There was silence as everyone racked their brains for one scrap of information about this faraway country and came up with nothing.
I’d been wrong: not Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan, not that I knew any more about those places. I felt ashamed that I didn’t know. I vowed to look up Azerbaijan later.
“And what brought you over to England?” Kia asked.
“Pogrom,” Irina said.
Kia took a minute to swallow her mouthful and then said the only thing you could say: “I’m so sorry. That must have been awful.”
Emmy ventured, “Wasn’t that back in the nineties, Irene? The Russians…” She trailed off, having reached the limits of her knowledge.
“Soviet Union collapse,” Irina said. “We Armenians live in Azerbaijan many years. We think maybe will be OK, then Azerbaijanis start killing us. They kill Blanka’s father.”
The railroad-tie light fixture—I’d never noticed how heavy it was before. I felt it was about to come crashing down on our beeswax candles, our handcrafted dishes. “That’s terrible, Irina,” Pete said. “You don’t have to talk about this. We can stop talking about it.”
Was Pete respecting her silence or trying to get his dinner party back on track?
“What happened to him?” I asked, sure that she was not finished. I’d always assumed he’d died of something quotidian, like a heart attack. Too much meat stew.
“They shut him in oven,” Irina said. “They burn him.”
I clapped my hand over my mouth, feeling like it was all going to come back up, the little I had eaten.
Everyone murmured how sorry they were. There was a long pause, during which people gulped wine. Then Nathan said, “But how do you shut someone in an oven?”
“How?” Irina looked at him, coming back from far away.
“It’s too small, isn’t it?”
“What do you know about ovens?” one of the twentysomethings said.
Kia nodded. “Right? I doubt he’s ever even turned his on.”
I glared at Nathan, though I understood why he’d asked the question. The cryptic way she talked. The little house in the forest. The husband shut in the oven. Like something out of a fairy story.
“It is bread oven,” Irina said firmly. “Plenty of room.”
“And then what happened?” Kia asked.
Irina sat up straight, dignified. “Then I walk over mountains with Blanka, with my daughter. She is three years old. I carry nothing but wedding dress and often Blanka too. For three days, with nothing to eat but dandelion.”
“Well, I’m grateful that you are here tonight,” Kia said to Irina. “Where is your daughter now?”
“She passed away,” Emmy whispered loudly, at the same time as Irina said, “Dead.”
Kia placed her hand over Irina’s. To her credit, she didn’t try to make it any better. I felt awful. I’d judged Irina for being a no-neck seagull. I’d tried to push her away. I’d had no idea of the depth of her suffering.
···
The guests left soon after dessert, and I slipped up to Stella’s room to check on her. Her light was off. I listened for the sound of her breathing, and instead I heard a busy little sound. Scritch scratch. Scritch scratch. A mouse? I snapped the light on and caught Stella scrambling to put something under her pillow. I was sure it was the diary. I could see her pen on the nightstand.
“You don’t have to write in the dark, honey,” I said. “Don’t you want your nightlight on?” She’d always hated complete darkness. She shook her head. “Without your nightlight, it’s dark-dark,” I said.
“I like the dark-dark,” she said.
Another change, I thought. “Night night, my precious.” She let me kiss her, and I recoiled a little: even though she hadn’t been swimming for a few days and had since bathed daily without fail, she smelled faintly of chlorine.
Pete insisted on doing all the clearing up, so I lay on the sofa. I found myself googling “Azerbaijan bread ovens” and learned they made their bread in giant clay pots, with a fire at the bottom. The bakers leaned in to slap the bread to the walls. The ovens didn’t look big enough to fit a person. Maybe they cut him in pieces first, but this wasn’t a Grimms’ fairy tale. That kind of thing didn’t happen in real life. Then I read a little about the Baku pogrom and dropped my phone, nauseated.
Irina surely still thought about his death. Now she had to think about Blanka’s death too. But she kept on going. How weak I was by contrast. I doubtless seemed absurd to her, too much of a delicate flower to get out of bed some days, stressing because my daughter was only reading at her own age level, because I didn’t like her hair in plaits. I should be so grateful for what I had. My child was alive. I fell asleep determined to be nicer to Irina. I could let her be a family member of sorts. You could still set boundaries with family members after all.
In the small hours, I heard a little sound, faint but persistent. I crept to our bedroom door and listened. Silence. I went back to bed and drifted off. In my dreams, I kept hearing that sound: scritch scratch , as if some creature were busy in the wall, making its home inside ours.