Chapter 27
27.
The box took five days to arrive, because the Christmas delivery rush was beginning. Luckily, the box was insulated. When it finally showed up, Pete wasn’t home from work yet. “Why don’t you go and have your bath, honey?” I told Stella, and she went. Once she wouldn’t have been content until I’d showed her what was in the box straightaway.
I grabbed a kitchen knife and took the box to her room. I put it on her bed and slit it open. First, I had to pull out blocks of Styrofoam. It was ironic that the packaging used to send a dead seabird was exactly the sort that choked seabirds—although maybe it wasn’t that ironic.
The bird was much bigger than I expected. It was frozen but emitted an eye-watering smell: salty, gamy. It had slate-grey feathers, with a white neck and breast, a yellow beak with the characteristic red spot—a breeding adult—and pink legs, neatly folded underneath. The one eye I could see, red-rimmed in life, was sunken and yellow. I wondered what had killed it. I couldn’t see any obvious wounds. The seller had said it was a great black-backed gull that had died “of natural causes,” and I didn’t want to inquire further.
I’d thought of the bird as a scientific specimen, something for Stella to dissect, as she had longed to with the gannet. I’d say it was a present from both of us, and she would understand that this present meant we accepted who she was, no matter how hard that was for other people. We supported her fierce curiosity, which could seem ghoulish to others. We accepted that we had a daughter for whom a small corpse was a better present than a jewelry-making set.
But as I stared at the bird, sadness filled me. This was a wild thing that had once been alive, strutting along the shore, soaring on updrafts. There were gulls everywhere when Stella and I went to the beach in Mendocino, one day about a year ago. The waves broke in creamy, shallow swathes of surf, and when we stood in it, feeling the water tug at our ankles, it felt as if we were standing ankle-deep in shining waterlilies.
Stella ran around in circles, shouting quotes from The Art of War , which she had insisted on reading, at the gulls. “Know thyself, know thy enemy!” “Warriors win first and then go to war!” “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat!” Whenever one came near our backpack, as it always did if we strayed too far away, Stella raced towards it, waving her arms and shouting. There were other kids on the beach, building sandcastles, playing volleyball, or running in circles. But Stella was happy being Stella that day, and I was happy with her.
I wanted that girl back.
I pulled the bird out and arranged it on her bed, and then I stuffed the packaging back into the box and hid the whole thing in her wardrobe. I’d have to get rid of it later, without Pete seeing the Styrofoam. Then I went down to the living room and found my coloring book. I tried to lose myself in completing a mandala. Her bathroom door shut and the landing creaked. She was going into her room. I felt fluttery with anticipation.
A little noise of surprise came from upstairs. “Oh!” Then silence.
Was that happy surprise? I galloped to her room. But she was backed into the corner, her hands pressed over her face. Oh no. She didn’t like it. How could she not like it? Only three months ago, she went into freak-out mode because her father composted her dead gannet. Now here was a bigger prize, and in better condition too.
“Stella, baby. It’s OK. It’s a present,” I said. Obviously, surprising her had been a mistake. I knelt before her and held her shoulders. “I bought it so you could use it for science.”
But she wouldn’t take her hands away from her face. She really was terrified, not excited, not curious. I felt sick. Where did my weird, brave scientific daughter go? I pressed my face into her solid, unyielding chest. “Stella, Stella, my Stella. What’s happening to you?” I moaned.
“Jesus fucking Christ! How did that get in here?” Pete was home, standing over the bed.
I leaped to my feet. “It’s OK, it’s fine. Don’t use that language in front of her.” I was trembling. I wiped my tears away. “I bought it. I put it here. I thought Stella would like it.” I turned back to her, sniffing. “Darling, don’t you remember the gannet? This is a replacement. It’s even bigger, it’s better.”
But she shrank away from me. Maybe it had to be a bird she found herself, in its natural environment. Maybe there was something wrong, suspicious, about a dead bird in a box—How did it die really? But then I remembered how excited she’d been about the gannet.
“Daddy?” said Stella in a small voice.
“Stella, my love,” I said. “Don’t look at Daddy, look at me. You don’t have to pretend to be someone else. I know you’re in there. Moo, I’m a cockatoo. What do you say? Please, Stella, please. Moo, I’m a cockatoo. And you say?” Nothing. “Please, Stella,” I begged, but Stella just stared at me.
Her eyes were different. The irises seemed darker, the eyes themselves narrower. I saw, clearly, that she wasn’t pretending to be someone else for her father’s sake. She was someone else. But that wasn’t possible. I sank down onto her rug.
“Stella?” Pete took her hand. “Go downstairs until I can clear this up. Look, I’ll take you.” He returned wearing the rubber gloves and put the bird in a bin bag. I picked myself up off the rug. He started stripping her bed, his face drawn. When he’d got all her sheets in a bundle, he said, “Can you at least explain to me why you thought she’d be happy to find a dead bird in her bed?”
“On her bed, not in it,” I said. “And obviously, I got it because she loves that kind of thing. You saw what happened when you threw away the gannet. I was trying to make up for that.”
Pete picked up the bundle of sheets and then the bin bag with the bird in it. “Look, go and lie down or something. I’ll come and talk to you in a minute.”
In our room, I got into bed with my clothes on and tried to close my eyes and shut everything out. But our sheets were bamboo twill, supposed to be both sustainable and soft, but I felt every diagonal rib abrading me. When Pete came in, he said, “I’m really worried about you. You’re so hostile to Stella. To me too. You correct her grammar, you said nothing about her swimming or about me taking her all day or dealing with dinner. Then this bird. What the fuck.”
“Great black-backed gull.” I felt like it was disrespectful to its wild, beautiful life to call it “this bird.” Like none of that ever happened. “Anyway, I didn’t realize taking care of Stella was such a chore.”
“Well, it’s tiring, however much we love her. Eight-year-olds are tiring. Emmy and I were talking about how hard it is.”
I stared. Why was he lumping her in with other kids? Why was he confiding in Emmy? I wondered if he knew about @LittleHiccups, where there were in fact no hiccups whatsoever. Emmy had once rescheduled Lulu’s birthday party at the last minute because the light that day wasn’t conducive to photography.
I pulled the sheet over my head and curled up, cradling my stomach, wondering how the child inside me could survive this. Maybe the stress would cause me to miscarry again. That might be a good thing. How I could mother a second child feeling that I had lost my first?
The bed creaked as Pete sat down. He squeezed my shoulder through the sheet. “Would you really want to go back to fighting with her over baths and putting on her pajamas? Getting called into school twice a week? Taking her to the emergency room because she’s screaming so much?”
“Yes, I would,” I mumbled. “She’s changed too much.”
He cracked his knuckles, a bad habit I thought he’d quit. “From where I’m standing, you’re the one who’s changed.”
He had it all wrong. I sat up and climbed out of bed, pulling a hoodie from my dresser. “I need some air.” Pete nodded, even though it was dark and raining. It was like he was relieved that he and Stella could get a break from me.
Outside, Christmas trees twinkled in people’s front windows. One in particular caught my eye, over the top with garish tinsel, multicolored fairy lights, and presents piled high. I’d ordered Stella’s presents early, as I always did, and they were waiting on the top shelf of my wardrobe: a biography of Earhart, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras , a copy of a 1940s Spitfire manual, a pocket compass. All gifts for who Stella used to be. I’d had such fun choosing them, imagining her delight. The fairy lights blurred as my tears fell.
···
Irina gave me a hard stare when she opened the door. “You look terrible.”
“I know.” It was raining and my hair hung in rattails. Irina’s hair was scraped back, but there seemed to be much less of it: she wasn’t wearing the hairpiece with which she usually bulked out her bun. “You’re not looking your best either,” I found myself saying.
Irina shrugged and patted her hair. “So far, this is terrible apology.”
“Look, it’s really cold out here.” I’d tried talking to Cherie and failed. Irina was the only person I had left, even if she hated me.
She led me into the kitchen, which smelled somewhere between stale gingerbread and the back of an old cupboard. “Well?” she said.
The kitchen had unpleasant fluorescent lighting. “You’re not to blame for what’s happening to Stella,” I admitted. “I shouldn’t have thrown you out like that.”
Irina’s shoulders relaxed a little. She gestured for me to sit at the kitchen table, covered with an embroidered cloth. Before, she’d taken me into the living room. This was where she ate her meals. I felt a tiny spark in my chest. Maybe I wasn’t a guest now, to be treated formally. We knew each other better than that.
“I’m worried that something’s happening to me,” I said. “Pete thinks—” I tried for a laugh. “He thinks I’m going a bit mad.”
Irina nodded. “You are—what is word—too tight?”
“Uptight.” The lighting was giving me a headache. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. When Blanka was a baby, or maybe even when you were pregnant, did you ever feel like you were going crazy?”
Irina snorted. “Many time.” I waited warily for Irina to say something about how many women had trouble after giving birth, and she soon felt better. Instead, she said, “My mother’s mother says bad spirit gets inside.”
“A bad spirit.” I nodded. This sounded like a way of describing depression, but I preferred the sound of it. If there’s a bad spirit inside you, then you are not the problem, and all you need to do is get it out, like a tapeworm. “How did you get rid of it?”
“I show you,” says Irina, and I nod, my heart lifting. I still thought Stella was the one with the tapeworm, but there seemed no harm in this, and I would try anything.
Irina picked up an ornate brass salt cellar from the table, unscrewed the lid, and dumped out the salt. “You sit right there,” she said. I had no idea what she was up to, but I felt relief at putting myself into her hands. Next to the salt, she set a glass of water. “This is not holy, but maybe works anyway.”
Her eyes glinted as she traced something in the salt: a cross. She stood and sprinkled water in my hair, making me flinch. She took a pinch of salt, closed her hand, circled it above my head, and muttered something. It was another language. “Is that Russian?”
“Armenian.”
“I thought when the Soviets controlled Azerbaijan, they made everyone speak Russian.” I’d gathered this from my research after the Thanksgiving dinner.
“We don’t forget our own language,” Irina snapped. “Besides, after Azerbaijan, Blanka and I live in Armenia for many years.”
“I’m sorry, I’ll be quiet.”
She dusted her hands off. “Doesn’t matter, it is finished.”
I shook salt from my hair. “That’s it? That got rid of the—the bad spirit?”
Irina chuckled, her eyes cold. “Of course not. I’m just—what’s the word—”
“Messing with me,” I said, to stop her from saying something worse. She’d let some of the salt fall down inside my shirt, and every grain stung.
“You took my wedding dress,” Irina spat. “Then like that!” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that, I’m not good enough.”
“I admitted I shouldn’t have thrown you out of my house.”
“Words,” she scoffed. “And now I throw you out of my house.”
As I got up, something stuck to her fridge caught my eye: some kind of list. The writing was familiar. It didn’t look like the English alphabet. “Who wrote that?”
Irina snatched it before I could get a closer look. “Who do you think? Old shopping list, but I cannot throw away.” She clasped the paper to her chest, as if it were infinitely precious. My heart filled with dread. The round loops. The careful spacing. I recognized that handwriting. I thought I recognized those symbols too.