Chapter 35
35.
Irina makes up a bed on the sofa, but throws me a towel. “Shower first. You smell like old cheese.” She nods at my hand. “Then I fix that mess.”
I forgot about my cut. The bandage is filthy. After my shower, Irina unwinds it and throws it away. She replaces the dressing and covers it with a fresh bandage. Then I doze for a few hours on her velour sofa. At half past six, I’m up and she makes tea. The staff at the Cottage still think I’m asleep in my bed. They won’t notice my absence until I don’t show up for breakfast. I zip the pub lady’s fleece to my neck and walk from Irina’s house back to our neighborhood. I turn onto the defunct railway lane that runs along the bottom of our garden and is now used by joggers and dog walkers.
There’s a gate in our back fence, and if you reach over the top, you can undo the bolt, something I always meant to fix. I slip on the muddy path leading up to the gate, but dust myself off and let myself in. It’s a dull, drizzly morning, and at this time of year, it’s not even fully light until half past eight at the earliest, but I crouch behind a bush anyway. Because Pete insisted that the back wall of the main living area be glass, with no blinds to spoil the look, I can see straight into the house.
Kia is sitting on the kitchen island, clad in a vest and running shorts. She’s bundled her grey-blond locks on top of her head in a messy bun. How nice of her to interrupt her morning workout to check on Pete and Stella. But the thought is gone almost as soon as it comes, because suddenly I know the truth. What other explanation can there be for her sitting on our counter—her sweaty thighs unhygienic on our food-preparation surface?
Pete, my Pete—this can’t be happening.
I feel unable to move, drained of all the energy that had driven me to escape from the Cottage and get myself here. I don’t have proof that anything has happened between them. At the same time, I know that everything has happened. You don’t sit on your coworker’s food-preparation surface in shorts otherwise. That messy bun, those little shorts—that isn’t postworkout. That is postcoital. She is more than the woman he confides in. She stayed the night.
Pete smiles as Kia offers him a piece of kale. He’s probably making one of his tofu scrambles with “secret sauce.” This is a random blend of various things in the fridge door—soy, chili, sesame oil, whatever—which always ends up being delicious. Pete will take a plate to Stella in her room, and he and Kia will have breakfast à deux: they will talk about how protein is good for muscle building, how tofu is good for the planet. Pete won’t worry about why Stella likes to gobble her meals alone.
With a shock, I see Stella is standing in her bedroom window, looking out into the garden, so very still that I haven’t noticed her. Can she see me? Is she waiting, watching for something? From this angle, she seems even bigger, even wider. A standing stone that has stood for five thousand years and will stand until the end of time.
She is the child Pete wanted now, a child I don’t understand. What if I can never get rid of Blanka? As I shiver outside my house, I realize that I can walk away right now. I can leave Stella to him. I can leave Luna too. She isn’t bonded to me yet. I can go now. I can be done with this. I can stop trying to find out what Blanka wants. I could take a train to another city, and then— But my imagination falters. I can’t envision a life without Stella. Even if she never comes out of this, I can’t leave her. My breasts prickle: my milk, at last.
···
I may as well pump at the hospital while I work out what to do next. Then they’ll have my milk to feed to Luna. I call an Uber and arrive at the hospital by eight, where I collect my wallet and keys from the front desk. Pete calls, and I let it go to voicemail. He calls twice more. Then my phone dings with one text after another.
Where are you???
I’m really worried about you. Are you OK?
The Cottage has people searching the grounds.
Please call me. I need to know you’re safe.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was his top concern. I can’t bring myself to message him. But I don’t want employees at the Cottage to spend half the day searching for me, so I leave a quick message, informing them I’m fine. They can pass on the good news to Pete.
In the NICU, Luna’s little squashed face is all pink, as if she’s holding her breath. She’s asleep as usual. There are a couple of other mothers in the ward, whispering to the nurses about how many ounces their babies have gained and when they can come out of the incubator. Luna lies with arms and legs flung wide, as if sprawled on the grass on a summer’s day. I open the porthole to her incubator and brush her cheek with my finger. She has no idea how vulnerable she is, and that makes me want to protect her.
Once out of the NICU, I sit on a chair in the corridor to make a plan. I’m still wearing the white uniform from the Cottage, and have no other clothes. I have no family members to turn to, no idea where to go now. Find a hotel?
I’ll call Pete, I think stupidly. Then I remember with a jolt.
I get a message from Emmy: U ok?
I snort. Pete obviously enlisted her in the search for me. I text back: Why are you asking? If she asks where I am, I’ll know she is trying to track me down. But she shoots back: Need to talk ASAP. It’s about Pete.
What about him?
Something he did.
Kia? I already know.
Kia?? I don’t know any Kia. When can we meet?
I’ll come to you, I write.
Hope you don’t mind mess! Emmy responds, though I know her house is perfect, because it serves as the @LittleHiccups stage set. She follows this with a winking Father Christmas emoji, and I remember with wonder that it is still the Christmas holidays.
···
Emmy’s house isn’t exactly messy, but it’s far from perfect: crumpled Christmas wrapping paper is still strewn across the living room floor. She waves a hand at it. “I had the girls for Christmas, then Nick took them on Boxing Day, and I haven’t had the energy to clear up.”
I’m confused. “Where did he take them?”
Emmy isn’t her usual perfect self either: baggy cardigan, glasses instead of contacts. She pulls her sleeves over her hands. “You haven’t heard? Nick and I are splitting up. He’s a colossal dick.”
“I’m so sorry. Are you OK?”
“I’m so tired of people asking me that. Do you want a drink?” She leads me into the kitchen, where a roasting tray sticky with meat juice sits on the draining board and a sour odor hangs in the air. “Sorry about the smell, the dishwasher isn’t working.” It’s barely lunchtime, but Emmy finds a half-full bottle of wine and waves it in my direction. “Wait, are you breastfeeding?”
“I can manage half a glass.” I forgot to pump at hospital, and I need to do so soon. Although, I now realize, my pump is at the Cottage. “Did you have something to tell me about Pete?”
Emmy fills two glasses to the brim, and we sit at her kitchen table. She pushes aside a pink plastic bowl containing a pacifier in a pool of milk, and a box of Unicorn Froot Loops. “Don’t judge me, OK?” she says.
I want to point out that she had no qualms about judging me back when she booted me out of FOMHS. But I need her to get to the point, so I just smile.
She says, “Listen, I will understand if you never want to speak to me again.”
The seat of my chair feels gritty. “Go on.”
Emmy pulls her cardigan around herself and stares into her wine. “It was right when everything was coming apart with Nick, and I was in free fall. I know that’s no excuse.”
Carefully, I stand up and brush the seat of my chair off. I sit back down and keep my voice steady. “You and Pete?”
Emmy presses her fingers to her lips for a moment and then says, “Pete kissed me. I mean, we kissed.”
It’s remarkable how I feel nothing at all. It’s less pain than a splinter in my thumb. “When?”
“Right after we took the girls to Coral Reef.”
When I ran into Emmy that day, her damp hair had that gentle wave. She wore that striped dress like an ice lolly. “You kissed him at my house,” I say slowly. “With the girls there. I can’t believe it.”
Emmy squirms. “They were playing. We were in the bathroom upstairs.”
The Unicorn Froot Loops box is open, and the cereal will get soft and damp if left like that. I roll down the top of the plastic bag and close the box.
“I’m a horrible person,” Emmy says. “I know that. I’m not going to make excuses.”
“Why are you telling me? You could have just kept quiet.”
“You deserve to know. I was going to tell you earlier, but I wanted to give Pete a chance to do it. I told him if he didn’t tell you by Christmas, then I would.”
I’m still trying to process this. “The bathroom where you kissed—was it the master bathroom? The one off our bedroom? Or Stella’s bathroom?”
Emmy closes her eyes. “It was your bathroom.” I take a big gulp of wine. How did it happen—Did he push her against the door? Did he lift her up onto the sink and kiss her while she wrapped her legs around him? In the same place where I lean when I’m taking my contacts out?
Maybe doing it in our home is part of the thrill. Grinding against another woman in the very place where I stand with my electric toothbrush, letting another woman’s bare thighs rest on the place where I cut up fruit for our child. Seeing how thin he can make the membrane between his regular life and his forbidden one.
The room lurches suddenly. That camping trip, the one where I suspected him of leaving me. I long ago accepted that was hormonal paranoia. But I only had Pete’s word that he’d been gone for forty-five minutes. I’d left my phone in the car and had no way of keeping track of time. He could have been gone for much longer.
I remember now that when I nuzzled his neck in the morning, his hair smelled of burned toast, even though we hadn’t lit a campfire the night before. And I ran into a young woman at the trailhead. I haven’t given her a single thought since, yet somehow, I can recall her perfectly now, as if my brain had stored her image away, knowing this moment would come. She had a scrubbed face and dishwater-blond hair in a ponytail and was a little on the chunky side, clad in plaid pajama bottoms and a UC Santa Cruz T-shirt. I didn’t ask her how her night had been, but she volunteered that she’d gone to bed “super early” the night before, and I thought, Why is she telling me this? “I got up super early too,” she said. “I saw the sun rise. The sunrise was inspirational.”
Then Pete came huffing out of the woods carrying a cooler, the tent, and the sleeping bags, and the two of us quickly became absorbed in the Tetris puzzle of how to get all our camping stuff back into the Prius. He didn’t even acknowledge her. But there was the smell of someone else’s campfire in his hair.
Why do I remember her so clearly? I must have suspected on some level, but also, on another level, I really and truly had no inkling. Both things are true.
I squeeze my wineglass, which I’ve emptied without noticing. I was pregnant with Stella then. Pete has been cheating on me for her whole life. Does she know? She’s so intuitive, so sensitive. She too might know and not know at the same time. Perhaps living with that contradiction was too much for her. When I read about possession, I learned about “soul wounds,” which make it easier for a spirit to enter you. Pete’s treachery could have made Stella more vulnerable to possession.
“You’re going to break that,” Emmy says, peeling my fingers away from the wineglass. My hand throbs, and I think the wound is bleeding again. “Try to breathe, sweetie.” She pats my hand over the bandage. “What happened there anyway?”
“Long story.”
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” Emmy says.
“It all seems so obvious now,” I tell her. He took his phone everywhere. He went out for bike rides at night. Took all these work trips, even on the weekend. But he was so devoted—the foot rubs, the té de California —it never occurred to me not to trust him. The only time I wavered for a moment was on Christmas Day, when Kia seemed to know too much about our life together.
“I’m really sorry,” Emmy says. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
She did a bad thing, but her apology was good. I tell her, “Coparenting with Nick for the rest of your life is probably punishment enough.”
Emmy laughs. “I’m not happy that Pete is a shit too, but at the same time, it’s nice not to be the only one in the trenches. Look, I want to help you. What can I do?”
Nothing, I think, which is why it’s so easy to ask that question, why that question is worthless. But then I think, Wait a minute. I can ask . For once, I can ask. Blanka thought she couldn’t ask, because I wouldn’t help her. But I would have helped her. So maybe Emmy will help me. “Actually,” I say, “I need to borrow a change of clothes, and maybe something to sleep in too, because I need to stay the night.”
“Stay as long as you need,” Emmy says. “Nick’s got the kids for the rest of the holidays.”
“Any chance you still have your breast pump?”
“I saw it when I was getting out the Christmas decorations,” Emmy says. “No idea why I held on to it. I guess I always thought me and that bastard would have baby number three. Glad I dodged that bullet.” Suddenly her face crumples, and she covers her eyes with her hand.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know her well enough to give her a hug. And she’s sick of people asking her if she’s OK. Then I think of something. “You’re not OK,” I say.
She stares at me, her eyes red. “What?”
“That’s what people should say to you. Not ‘Are you OK?’ but ‘You’re not OK.’ As in ‘I see it. I acknowledge it. You’re not OK.’?”
She manages a smile. “ You’re not OK, Charlotte.”
“You have no idea,” I say.
···
I take a long shower. Emmy provides me with leggings and a striped jumper dress. I pump milk and stow it in her freezer. I eat one of her gluten-free mince pies. Then I call Irina. “You again,” she says. She sounds tired. “I take care of Stella for many weeks, I help you at birth of new daughter, I drive in the middle of night to pick you up from sick-in-mind hotel in country. Now you say, help me again.”
“You’re right. But this is not about me. This is about Blanka.”
“She is dead,” Irina says. “What new thing you can tell me?”
“I think maybe I can tell you something new. Well, I need to show you.”
In the end, Irina agrees to call Pete and arrange to go over and see Stella and congratulate her on being a big sister. Pete will take the opportunity to get some work done, he tells Irina, which I now know could mean anything. Apparently, he’s got more important things to think about than tracking me down. Once Irina is sure Pete has gone, she will text me to enter via the back gate.