Chapter 22
22.
Iwent by Irina’s after school drop-off the next morning—of course English children didn’t have the day off—to tell her we’d keep the wedding dress. She just nodded, like it had been a done deal all along.
“You stay for tea,” Irina said, and disappeared into the kitchen. As I sat down, I wondered what on earth we were going to talk about. Other than Stella, we had no interests in common. I contemplated Blanka’s school photo, in which she smiled stiffly.
Returning with the tray, Irina caught me looking at the photo, and I felt I was expected to say something about Blanka. “They grow up so fast,” I offered.
“Not Blanka.”
I nodded. So maybe she did want to talk about Blanka. I’d been so desperate for her help, so ill, that I’d never realized. But here was a chance.
“What was she like as a child?”
“Blanka takes long time to grow up,” Irina said. She poured tea from a hideous monkey teapot. The monkey’s tail was the handle and its head, resting on the lid, was the knob on top. “She does not—have blood, you know.”
“Blood?” I was startled.
“Menstruation,” Irina said.
“Right,” I said. I’d been expecting to hear about Blanka’s first day at school, about the one-eared bear she took everywhere, or about their happy hours crocheting together. Not this.
“No menstruation, her whole life,” Irina continued. “We do not know why. But for years, no blood.”
I was uncomfortable. I would never have talked to Blanka about this when she was alive, and it seemed like the dead deserved their privacy even more.
“She didn’t menstruate,” I repeated, falling back on my mirroring technique. But she was in her thirties, a grown woman. “Did you not go to the doctor?”
Irina shook her head. “I ask, but she say no, no, no, is OK.”
This seemed strange to me, but then Blanka was a quiet woman whose English wasn’t fluent even after nearly two decades in this country. She was so secretive, so private. Perhaps she didn’t want to talk to a doctor about something so intimate or, god forbid, remove her long skirt and oversized hoodie and submit to a physical examination.
“But then,” Irina said, cradling her teacup, “four days before she die, she is woman.”
“Blood? I mean, she was menstruating?”
Irina nodded. The jam seemed very red as she spooned more of it into her tea. I didn’t know what to say. All through my teens, I’d never mentioned the word period in front of my mother. She replenished the supplies under the sink without comment. It was strange to hear Irina talking about the topic so frankly.
I felt sad for Blanka, not menstruating for years and not knowing why. It was tragic that she couldn’t do what a privileged, rich person would do, what I had done for Stella (although it hadn’t worked): march straight into the doctor’s office and demand to know what the matter was.
“Blanka told you about it?” I said.
“I find blood in her underwear when I am washing clothes.”
I shifted uneasily. Wasn’t it strange that Blanka hadn’t told her mother that, finally, her period had started?
Irina was looking at me, like she wanted something more from me. Maybe she simply wanted someone else to know about this tragic irony: Blanka had in a sense grown up right before she died. Maybe it was enough to share this information with me. Or perhaps she felt guilty that she had not watched over Blanka closely enough. “Do you think there could have been a connection with her heart condition?” I asked.
Irina looked blank. “What condition?”
“The one that, you know…killed her.”
“Charlotte,” Irina said. “She kills herself.”
Blood roared in my ears like waves, pounding and crashing. “No, she had a heart attack. That’s what you told me. In the hot tub.”
She shook her head. “Neighbor has bad back. Blanka is house-sitting. She takes all his muscle relaxants, then gets into hot tub, drinks whole bottle of vodka.”
“But you said it was a heart condition.”
“She has sickness here,” Irina said, placing a fist over her breastbone. “I tell you this. She pass out. She go under. All this I tell you. You hear something else.”
“Oh god,” I said, thinking she must have thought that my reaction was lacking. She must have thought me callous, shallow. “I’m sorry. That day you took me to the hot tub, I didn’t realize what you were saying. I thought it was an accident. I didn’t realize she killed herself. I am so sorry, I didn’t realize the—the level of tragedy, if that makes sense.”
Irina bent over her crochet work, lips pursed. Maybe this was a way to survive: you focused on the next stitch, then the next. That way you could tell someone that your daughter killed herself, and not fall down on the ground and tear your own heart out.
···
I was too upset to go home. I needed to move. I went to Alexandra Park, where Blanka and Stella had once spent so much time. I walked round and round the duck pond, where brown algae partly covered the oily water. It was cold, the sky grey and low. I found myself at these concrete cylinders of varying heights that were big enough to climb inside. Stella called them the soup pots. Once, I got home and Blanka and Stella were still out. It was past the time that Blanka was supposed to stop work, so I’d run to the park and found them here. Stella crouched inside one of them, and Blanka was making stirring motions with her hand and calling, “And now I put in parsley, chop, chop, chop! Salt and pepper! I am heating up water and boiling you!” Stella was laughing hysterically as she scrambled out and ran away.
Was Blanka depressed the whole time she took care of Stella, for four years, getting worse and worse? But why didn’t she tell me? If Blanka felt so bad that she killed herself, why did she never ask me for help? We weren’t close, we barely knew each other, but I would have helped her if she’d ever asked. I replayed the last few months that I’d known her, the last few months of her life, trying to find a clue in her behavior.
She became sloppier in that time. She took Stella to the park without taking her sunscreen or hat, even though I left the go bag packed and ready by the door. I frequently reminded her to put a drop of bleach solution inside Stella’s bath toys to prevent mold growth, but when I squeezed Stella’s little blue whale, black gunk shot out.
Still, I wasn’t about to look for someone else. Stella was happy with Blanka, and Blanka, in turn, stayed calm whatever Stella did.
The last day she worked for us, I had a deadline and worked late. I emerged from my home office and found Blanka tied to a dining chair. Stella had used loops of masking tape and several colors of ribbon from my gift-wrapping station. Wrapped around her middle was a rope made out of a couple of my bras and a few pairs of tights.
I could never tell if Blanka was brilliant at playing or incredibly apathetic. But I was tired, twelve weeks pregnant, and feeling very sick. I didn’t want to deal with this situation. I wanted Blanka to do the job I’d paid her to do. Stella’s cheeks were flushed, her breath smelled like chocolate. Blanka had let her plunder my secret stash. I felt a headache coming. “Has she had dinner at least?” I asked.
“She does not want,” Blanka said, and I thought, No kidding, why would she bother with vegetables after eating a bar of Green & Black’s Salted Caramel?
To be fair, I did tell Blanka not to force Stella to eat. But I also instructed her to put a proper balanced meal in front of Stella each night—whether she consumed it or not—and I saw no sign of cooking.
“Why aren’t you in bed, darling?” I asked Stella.
“We’re playing Houdini,” Stella explained. “Blanka has to escape.”
Looking closer, I saw there were knots upon knots upon knots: wool from a pompom-making project in which Stella had lost interest, even the bungee cords Pete used to secure his bike on the car.
I felt hungry but sick at the same time. I found my super-sharp fabric scissors. “I’ll have to cut you out,” I said. I started at the bottom. Her ankles were tied to the chair legs with kitchen twine. As I slid the scissors inside a loop of twine, Stella said, “No, Mommy! You’re ruining the game.”
Snip.
“I worked really hard on this,” Stella wailed.
Snip. At this rate it could take forty-five minutes to get Blanka free. Stella wouldn’t be in bed until close to eleven. Late bedtime meant freak-out mode tomorrow, and I would do anything to avoid that. “Blanka, I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait.”
“Oh yes,” said Blanka.
“Do you want your phone?” I said. Slight head shake. Why wouldn’t the woman ever accept anything from me? I would feel better if she would allow me to make her comfortable. “Glass of water? A snack? Wine?”
Blanka nodded at her bound wrists, and I realized, obviously, she couldn’t eat or drink. But she didn’t seem to mind the prospect of sitting there doing nothing. It was like Blanka had pared down the things she was willing to do until nothing was left except simply exist.
When I came downstairs after putting Stella to bed, I cut her out as quickly as I could, feeling horribly guilty that she’d had to wait, even though she was the one who’d allowed Stella to put her in this situation.
When I finally freed her, Blanka didn’t get up right away, not until I prompted her: “Thank you, you can go home now.” She gathered her things while I knelt and picked up tangles of wool and twine. Finally, she trudged to the door and paused on the threshold. There was that moment then when I could have asked her how she was, how she really spent her time, because nobody could spend every weekend doing “not much.” I should have known that if a person is content to sit alone, bound hand and foot, there is something wrong. Maybe if I’d done something, I could have stopped her: it took so little to stop a person from killing themselves. I’d read that all you had to do was smile at someone as they made their way to the Golden Gate Bridge, and that could be enough to make them turn back.
But I was too tired to smile. She turned as she walked down the path and waved, always that same wave for hello and goodbye, with a circular motion of her hand, as if wiping clean an invisible pane.
She came back two days later, even though it was a Sunday, because she wanted to collect her pay cheque, which she’d forgotten. She often forgot to take it—Was that her excuse to come back on days she didn’t work? Did she need us, was she asking for something? But the day she came back for her pay cheque, I was at a prenatal yoga class, and Pete was home with Stella.
And the next day, “I cannot come anymore.”
I hated myself for not realizing that Blanka was so depressed. But Irina lived with her and still didn’t realize. Maybe depression wasn’t always obvious, but Irina knew that Blanka had no periods. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Irina should have pushed Blanka to see a doctor, even if this was uncomfortable. Who knew, Blanka could have had a hormonal imbalance, which could also have caused her depression. She could have got treatment. I thought of Blanka’s school photo: her hair had been in braids then, and she’d had the same hairstyle until she died. Perhaps Irina liked having an adult daughter who was like a child, who would never grow up and leave home.
Maybe Irina wasn’t the mother I’d thought.