Chapter 26
Then
26.
The next day, Pete said he’d take Stella swimming. As soon as they left, I went to Stella’s room to look for the diary. It wasn’t on the desk anymore. It wasn’t under her pillow or her mattress. I rifled through her drawers. I pulled out the books on her shelves and shook them.
I sat back on my heels. It wasn’t here, because Stella hadn’t hidden it. Pete had. I searched our room. Nothing. He’d hidden it somewhere crafty, and I wasn’t going to find it without tearing everything apart.
I went down to the kitchen, planning to make some tea, and then I thought, Cherie. If anyone would understand that I had to keep fighting for my child, it was her. She fought for Zach all the time. I texted Cherie to ask if I could drop by. OK, she texted back. One word, no smiley face. At least she answered. I picked up chocolate éclairs from one of Muswell Hill’s three patisseries.
When Cherie saw me, her gaze took in my body, and she said, “You look…”
“Haggard?” I explained about the nausea, how it made it hard to eat. Still, the baby was OK.
“You look good,” I told her. For once, Cherie’s hair was down, instead of in a ponytail. She’d colored it too, got rid of the grey.
“About before,” I continued. “When you pushed for Stella to get assessed, I got defensive. I’m sorry.” The question whether Stella should see a doctor now seemed trivial, and my apology came easily. I had much bigger problems now. “And I didn’t mean to insult Zach,” I said.
Cherie hugged me. “I’m sorry too. I pushed you too hard about Stella. That first assessment can be a psychological hurdle, especially if there’s a chance the parent is on the spectrum.”
“Wait, now I’m autistic too?” I bristled. Autism was more broadly defined now, but that didn’t mean she had the right to go around diagnosing everyone around her. But then I thought about it. “I guess I have some signs,” I said.
Cherie sighed. “Or maybe I’m a hammer, so the whole world looks like a nail, or whatever the quote is.”
“Well, right now I don’t have time to think about it,” I said. Cherie nodded. We didn’t entirely understand each other, but she was trying. I could try harder too.
She led me into the kitchen, where Zach was pounding soap in a mortar. He looked up and met my eyes. I was surprised. His were the vivid green of young ferns. I realized that even if he never responded, I could still greet him. “Hello, Zach.”
“Hello, Charlotte,” Cherie prompted.
“Hello,” said Zach. He had never spoken directly to me before. Cherie smiled to herself.
“Is that some more slime you’ve got there?” I asked.
He nodded. “I changed the activating agent, and it created a super-sticky substance, like, industrial-level sticky.”
“Amazing,” I said. It seemed poignant that someone who struggled to connect to others was so interested in sticking things together.
Cherie was glowing. She brought our tea to her living room. “We got him a social-skills therapist, and we’ve been doing these exercises.”
“I’m glad he’s doing so well.”
“How’s Stella?”
I told her how Stella had changed. Cherie was delighted. “That’s fantastic.”
I took a bite of chocolate éclair. It tasted at once too bitter and achingly sweet.
“But?” Cherie said.
My hands shook. I put down the éclair. “I’m scared. The way she’s changing—I know it sounds great, but it’s really not. I’m terrified, to be honest.”
“I don’t understand,” Cherie said. “Stella is getting dressed and going to school without complaining? I would kill for one day of that.”
I cast about for a way to explain. “I know that something is wrong. It’s like when Stella has a fever. I don’t need a thermometer—I just use my hand. I know if she’s sick. A mother’s hand knows.”
Cherie took a minute to wipe chocolate off her fingers with a paper napkin. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“It’s maternal instinct. Look at what happened when Zach was little. People said he had a mental disability because he wouldn’t talk, and you knew that wasn’t true. You alone knew what he needed.”
Cherie threw her dirty napkin on the table. She spoke slowly, emphatically. “I knew what he needed because I got Zach assessed . And this new social-skills therapist isn’t the first. I’ve read dozens of books, I’m in three different online groups. You would know all this if you ever really listened to me. It doesn’t take a mother’s hand—it takes a fucking village.”
I had a burning sensation in my throat. “So when it comes to Stella, my problem is that I don’t listen to other people. Other people know what she needs better than I do. Including you, I assume?”
“Look, forget I said anything,” Cherie backtracked. “Let’s change the subject.”
“It’s fine, really,” I said, forcing a smile. “But I don’t feel that great. I have to go anyway.”
Cherie showed me out, trilling promises we would do coffee soon. Maybe Zach was right to be hesitant about learning social skills. Too often, they meant hiding how you really felt. I’d been so sure that the bedrock of my friendship with Cherie was that we were alike: we were committed to doing whatever our unusual kids needed, regardless of what anyone else thought. But she’d been secretly judging me. And I was at fault too. She was right, I hadn’t listened closely to her. Or I would have known we weren’t alike at all.
···
When I was nearly home, my phone pinged with a message from Pete: On way home from Coral Reef Waterworld! Emmy suggested playdate so I invited them swimming.
I cringed. What was he thinking? This wasn’t just a swimming pool. There was a pirate ship and five waterslides—it was a sensory nightmare. Yet my phone pinged again, and there they were: Stella with a small smile and her hair plastered to her shoulders and, next to her, Lulu grinning toothily, with her arm around Stella. I stared at the picture, looking into Stella’s eyes. Maybe she was genuinely enjoying something that a few months ago, she would have hated. Or maybe she was just pretending, and on the inside, she was furiously composing the diary entry she’d write when she got home.
A realization started to take shape. This change in her wasn’t something imposed from outside. It didn’t happen because of Irina and the trauma of Blanka’s suicide. Stella had changed who she was, or appeared to be, through sheer force of will.
But why?
I studied the photo again. Lulu flashed teeth, but Stella’s smile was tense. Pete thought it was a real smile, but I could see that it wasn’t. She was just determined to give Daddy a great photo, to show Daddy that she was having a good time. Maybe that was why she suddenly loved going to the pool too: Pete wanted her to become a strong swimmer. She’d humiliated Pete at her birthday party, and now she behaved beautifully around his friends. The last time she’d gone into freak-out mode, Pete had stormed out of the house, and now she’d dropped it for good.
It was so obvious that I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t seen it before. Stella longed to please Pete, become his true north again. She was pretending to be the daughter that she thought Pete wanted. The diary was the one clue that inwardly she still seethed with thought.
···
When I got home, Emmy was coming down our front path with Lulu. Pete stood on our front step with Stella, waving goodbye.
Emmy looked surprised to see me. Her striped dress today had thick bands of color—raspberry red, orange, and lemon yellow—and reminded me of a fruit ice lolly. Damp, her hair had a gentle wave, and this made her look softer and younger. “Hello, Charlotte!” she said. “I’m not really here. It was a long drive home, so Lulu and I popped in to use the loo. The girls had a fabulous time.”
Pete stood in the doorway waving to Emmy and Lulu. His curls were wet, close to his head, and behind his glasses, his eyes looked very blue, like they used to do when he surfed. He held Stella’s hand as she waved goodbye too.
Once Emmy and Lulu had gone, we went inside. “We had an amazing time,” Pete said, his face alight. “Stella was great.”
“Really?”
“She didn’t even mind the wave machine. She was so brave. She put her head underwater. She’s totally mastered blowing bubbles through her nose. She loves it down there. She hardly even came up for air.”
He wasn’t giving her a chance to talk. “Did you have fun, my sweet?” I asked Stella. I studied her face closely for signs of strain.
“Oh yes. The water is nice,” Stella said.
“Was nice,” I said sharply. “You mean, it was nice. You’re not in the water anymore.” I looked deep into her eyes, trying to catch a flicker of her old self.
“I’m going to my room,” she said, and I was sure she wanted to get away from Pete. This charade must be exhausting.
···
Pete got Thai takeout—he’d found a place where they put the food into the containers he brought from home—and Stella took hers to her room.
“Does it bother you that Stella still won’t eat with us?” I asked as he lit candles. “She’s been like this for months.”
“She’s eaten with us a few times,” Pete said. “When Irina was—” He stopped. We both understood that in marriage, you had to understand when to drop it. Irina wasn’t coming back.
“She’s eating proper food at least,” I said.
Pete took my hand and kissed it. “Are you feeling better? How was Cherie?”
“Great,” I said. “She—never mind.” I didn’t want to rehash my conversation with Cherie, because then Pete would know she agreed with him about Stella. That I stood on my own.
“The green papaya salad is so good,” Pete said, tucking in. Then he noticed that I was only toying with my food. “Feeling sick again?”
“I don’t have an appetite,” I told him.
“Poor baby,” Pete said, gazing at me with concern. To make him feel better, I spooned some more papaya salad onto my plate. He was so tender, so loving. I could see how Stella yearned to please him too. I just had to make her understand that changing her entire personality was not the right way.
···
“Bedtime, honey,” I told Stella after we’d all finished eating.
“Will you read to me?”
I was surprised. I’d given up reading to her years earlier, at her request. Now she got into bed and actually scooted over to make room for me. Once, she would have felt suffocated having me in her bed. I would have rumpled the cover in a way that was unacceptable, or accidentally sat on a fold of her pajamas, or read too slowly, or too fast. Once I would have given anything to have had this coziness with her.
She chose a book from when she was a toddler: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble , a book about a donkey that finds a wishing pebble and foolishly wishes he were a rock. He drops the pebble and he’s stuck: a rock forever. Eventually he escapes from his predicament, but I’d almost never been able to read to the end, so I was surprised by her choice now. The description of the poor donkey rock, alone in the snow, subsiding into endless sleep, had brought Stella to tears every time.
Now Stella listened without comment.
The poster of California birds on Stella’s wall caught my eye. Flight: The Complete History of Aviation , the book I’d bought for her, still sat on her desk, untouched. She was obsessed with flight until just a few months ago. When she found that gannet on the beach, she’d been so thrilled. At last, a chance to strip a bird’s wings down and study the biomechanics of flight like her hero, Otto Lilienthal.
Then I had an idea. I didn’t need to crack the diary to find out what was really going on inside my daughter. There was another way to tempt the real Stella out.
I spent a couple of hours looking online and finally posted an ad on what seemed like a suitable site. It seemed right, a way to go back to when this all started and take a different path.
Late that night I checked the site, and I had an offer. It was bigger than I needed, and I wasn’t entirely sure it was legal, but this was an emergency.