Chapter 23
23.
“Yoo-hoo! Charlotte!” Emmy came over at pickup time, pushing Madeleine in the stroller. Lulu and Stella were nearby. It was No Uniform Day (a FOMHS fundraising scheme, all the parents donated a pound so their kids could go to school in their own clothes), and Emmy and Lulu wore matching mother-daughter outfits: navy-and-white striped dresses, their hair in ballerina buns. Cherie walked by with Zach in tow and fluttered her fingers at me, and I felt a pang.
“You look great,” Emmy said, surveying my figure. “How do you stay so skinny? You barely even look pregnant.”
“Hm,” I said, thinking that with talk like that, Lulu would be anorexic before she hit puberty.
“Lulu and I are going to try out the new patisserie,” Emmy continued. “I know, I know, like Muswell Hill needs another patisserie! But I’ve heard their gluten-free raspberry croissants are really good. Do you want to come?”
“Thanks, but we really should get back.” I didn’t want to go to the patisserie with Emmy and make superficial conversation. It was nearly two weeks since Irina had told me about Blanka’s suicide, but the last time I’d seen Blanka still played on a loop in my head. If only I’d smiled. If only I’d said something.
But Stella was already nodding, letting Lulu drag her along.
“Looks like the girls have already decided,” Emmy said, and I had no choice but to follow. When we found a table, Emmy went to order, leaving Madeleine with us in the stroller. Lulu whispered to Stella, and Stella nodded and began to murmur something under her breath. Stella’s hair hung in skimpy plaits, secured with the plastic bobbles. Lulu listened intently. I caught phrases here and there. “Her little old father and her little old mother…” Stella continued to mutter under her breath. Then Lulu gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth. A nervous giggle erupted.
“No way. An oven! How did they fit him in?”
My stomach clenched tight, the baby a little fist.
“That’s enough,” I told Stella. “Not another word.” She clamped her lips shut obediently.
“But how—” asked Lulu.
“It’s a fairy tale, it doesn’t have to make sense,” I snapped.
“What’s going on?” said Emmy, returning with our order, and I managed to distract everyone by babbling about Lulu’s gluten-free croissant. “It’s amazing how it looks identical to the normal kind. Same color, same flakiness. It must be really hard for them to tell the difference. Do you think they ever get them mixed up?”
This caused consternation, and by the time it was resolved, Lulu had forgotten about hearing the rest of Stella’s story.
···
On the way home, I asked Stella, “I heard you telling Lulu how Blanka’s father died. How do you know about that?”
“Irina told me.”
“Irina?” I was stunned. How could she think the pogrom was appropriate information for an eight-year-old?
“I know what happened to Blanka too,” Stella remarked. “She took too much medicine on purpose, so she would fall asleep and drown.” She fell silent and trudged along.
My head throbbed. Now that Stella knew these terrible things, she seemed sullied somehow, no longer a child. She spoke of the horror so casually, as if she felt nothing. She was like a disaster survivor who was still in shock. It hit me that of course Stella was in shock. She’d shut down because Irina had told her about the worst things humans could do. This was why she barely spoke—to me, at any rate—and dragged herself about, why her mind worked at a fraction of its usual speed.
I had to get rid of Irina. No haggling over how many pickups we’d each do. I had to get rid of her for good.
···
It was Irina’s turn to collect Stella the following day. When they got home, she went into the kitchen and began unpacking Stella’s lunchbox, something Blanka never did. I turned to Stella: “Can you go to your room? Take a snack from the kitchen.”
“Oh yes.” She went.
“I need to speak to you,” I told Irina.
She nodded, but began filling her black stewpot with water so I had to raise my voice over the sound of the tap. “You shouldn’t have told Stella all those terrible things,” I said.
She hefted the pot onto the stove. “Children need truth.”
“But not the entire truth, Irina. She’s not old enough for that. Can you not see how much she’s changed? You’ve traumatized her.”
Irina nodded, like I was just telling her we’d run out of bin bags, and turned the gas on under her pot. I turned it off, placed myself between her and the stove.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable with you taking care of Stella.”
Irina took an onion from the basket she kept on the countertop, determined not to hear me. I stood there, hesitating. With my columns, there was always one troll who said, “Just tell it like it is.” If your dinner party guests stay too late, if someone serves you a food you hate, if a friend asks if they can come to your birthday party when you didn’t invite them, tell the truth. I want you to go now. I don’t like this food. I didn’t invite you because I don’t like you.
But I couldn’t “tell it like it is” to Irina. I couldn’t “tell it like it is” to anyone, let alone her. I could not say, “Get out of my house. I don’t trust you to take care of my daughter, because you failed your own daughter.”
She was watching me, shoulders hunched, eyes sunken. I couldn’t just “tell it like it is,” because she’d suffered too much.
We stood there, frozen, for a moment. Then I emptied the stewpot and thrust it into her arms. I walked to the front door, opened it wide, and stood there. She would have to go eventually, and then all I had to do was not let her back in.
Irina moved towards the door finally, her lips so tightly pressed they were almost folded inwards. It was raining outside. She surveyed my bump. “You have baby in hospital?”
“Probably,” I said, wrong-footed by this new tack.
“Bad idea. Very dangerous.”
“Hospitals in this country are pretty safe,” I said.
“In my country, I help with many, many babies at home,” Irina said. “All I need is old shower curtain and scissors.” She snipped with two fingers and smiled. “I boil. Good for Stella too. She can help.”
“I don’t think so.” I went upstairs to tell Stella that Irina was leaving. “She has to go away for a while,” I said, lacking the energy for a proper explanation. At the door, Stella flung her arms around Irina. “Goodbye, Little Wolf,” Irina said. When she left, Stella didn’t protest, and this made me more certain I was doing the right thing. Something was very wrong if she could no longer cry or scream.
After Irina was gone, I got a plastic bag and swept through the house, purging it of the afghan, the ceramic spoon rest, the tea caddy, the sticky pot of jam, the packets of herbs and spices. I tied the bag and threw it in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d drop it all by Irina’s house at some point. For now, I wanted to get it out of my sight.
I went to the powder room and took my time washing my hands. When I returned to the kitchen area, the cross was back. It wasn’t on top of the patch where I’d removed the paint, but higher up. Stella would have had to climb on a chair to draw it. I thought she’d been in her room the whole time, but obviously she’d sneaked out while I was washing my hands. I called her, and she shuffled down the stairs—shuffled, when she used to spring and prance. “I see you’ve drawn another cross on the wall, even though I asked you not to,” I said. “Why did you do that?”
“I did not,” said Stella. “I was upstairs.”
“Stella, you know all those things Irina told you? How Blanka died, and how Blanka’s father died. Pretty upsetting things. Do you want to talk about it?”
She shrugged. “I’m not dead.” Again, that puzzling phrase, the one that sounded so callous but surely betrayed a depth of repressed feeling. Unless she really wasn’t capable of feeling things, but I pushed that thought away.
I pointed at the cross. “Is this your way of trying to tell me something?”
“Oh yes.” Stella dragged over a stool from the breakfast bar. She clambered atop the stool.
“That’s not safe,” I told her, but she rose to her tiptoes, her nose resting against the cross. “Stop that,” I said sharply.
She meekly climbed down, but I didn’t tell her to clean the wall. I decided not to clean it myself either. It was clear that whatever I said to her, the cross was going to come back. Maybe she was doing it as a cry for help. Really, that was the only explanation that made sense. In that case, the only way to stop it from reappearing was to actually help her.
···
Pete got home when I was putting Stella to bed, and when I came out of her room, he was in the garden, on the phone. He was crouched on his heels, digging a dandelion out of the lawn with a weed puller—he refused to use pesticides. While he worked, he murmured into the phone. Nathan was incapable of solving any problem on his own. When he saw me, he ended the call and stood up. He put his arms around me. “What’s the matter, baby?”
“I had to get rid of Irina,” I confessed.
Pete recoiled. “What? Why on earth would you do that? After all she’s been through?”
“She told Stella that Blanka killed herself.”
“Poor Blanka,” Pete said. I’d told him about Blanka’s suicide.
“She also told Stella about the pogrom.”
“That is a lot for her to process,” Pete said carefully. “But Stella seems OK.”
I cast about for a way to convince him I’d done the right thing. “Irina asked about our birth plans. She said I had to have the baby at home.”
“You do hate doctors.”
“She offered to be the midwife.”
“That’s so generous.”
“It’s weird, Pete! And she said Stella could help. That does not sound psychologically healthy.”
A vein showed in Pete’s forehead. “You know I sometimes get home from work before Irina leaves. Every time, Stella stands in the window and waves until she’s out of sight. Have you noticed that?”
“Well, she won’t be doing that anymore.” I suddenly realized that I didn’t like beards, not that I would ever tell Pete that.
“At Thanksgiving, Nick said he couldn’t believe how much she’s changed. So neat and well-behaved.”
I felt like trampling over his careful vegetable bed. “Nick’s sexist, have you looked at his tweets? I don’t want a well-behaved little girl who’s all sugar and spice.”
“You don’t want her to behave?”
“I’m telling you, Irina has damaged her.”
“Jesus, Charlotte. Have you thought about how this will affect Stella?”
“I saw how it affected her,” I said. “She was there when I threw Irina out. She didn’t react at all. No emotion. Does that sound like our daughter to you?”
Pete was silent, and I pressed my advantage. “I want to find a therapist for her. She needs to talk to someone. She needs support to process all the horror that woman has fed her.”
Pete scratched his beard.
“A few months ago, you wanted to get her professional help. It couldn’t hurt,” I said.
“I don’t agree,” he said. “If she talks to a shrink about it, that could make her think it’s a big deal. That could be traumatic in itself. It’s like when she was little and she fell over. If you picked her up and said, ‘Oops-a-daisy,’ she was fine. But if you sprinted over and said, ‘Oh my god, you poor baby,’ she screamed her head off.”
I said nothing. I wished I could make him understand how I felt about Irina and particularly about her nutso offer to serve as my midwife. It was as if, not content with messing up both her daughter and mine, Irina wanted to preside over my baby’s birth and reach right up inside me where I was most vulnerable.
···
Later, when Pete was dealing with work email, I pulled up the Google Doc he’d shared with me, back when he was pushing to take her to get assessed. I found the tab for child psychotherapists, and I felt a stab of misgiving.
When we’d lived in California, everyone seemed to go to therapy, often for the low-grade malaise that was part of life—this person loved his spouse but wasn’t “in love” with her, or that person, although a successful doctor, felt she wasn’t “passionate” enough about her job. Therapy seemed to be cleansing in a way that wasn’t really necessary, like colonic irrigation. In my case, I couldn’t see the point of rehashing my childhood after I’d launched myself more or less successfully into adult life.
But Stella was suffering from something much bigger than low-grade malaise. I clicked through therapist web pages, disqualifying anyone who seemed unserious. One woman smiled too widely, flashing teeth I thought had been straightened. A man mentioned “perfectionism” as one of the issues he helped to address—when every job interviewee knows that this is only a pretend flaw.
Wesley Bachman was a fortysomething balding man with a gentle face. He was highly educated, with a lot of letters after his name. He specialized in trauma. He was serious. Over the phone the next day, I told Wesley I believed that the shock of learning about Blanka’s suicide, and about Blanka’s father’s murder, had caused behavior changes in Stella. “I can’t get her to talk about it. All she says is ‘Oh yes’ and ‘I’m not dead.’ She acts like it’s not a big deal, but I know it is. And she’ll only eat at the table if Blanka’s mother is present; otherwise she eats in her room. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“Sometimes children don’t have the language to tell us how they’re feeling, so they use the tools at their disposal, the few things they have power over, such as where and when they eat.”
“Well, I’m hoping you can get her to talk about how she’s feeling.”
“How old is she?” Wesley said, and when I told him, he continued: “Children don’t do well in talk therapy at that age, so I’ll mostly be observing her play.”
“Stella’s a very unusual child. She’s hyperverbal.” Then I corrected myself: “She used to be.”
Wesley made sympathetic noises. “Especially for a sensitive kid, the loss of a babysitter to suicide could constitute a crisis.” Wesley told me about a boy he’d treated who’d once been class president, confident, outgoing. But then he was so severely bullied at school that he stayed home and reenacted World War II online all day, obsessed with finding a different outcome. “Trauma can cause a complete personality change,” Wesley said. “It can feel like you don’t even recognize your child.”
Finally, someone who understood.