Chapter 36
36.
When Irina texts me, I enter the house through the French doors. I catch my breath when I see her, my darling, my honeysuckle girl, my secret sweetness at the heart of it all. She barely seems to recognize me. Her face is blank, exhausted. She no longer has the sunny, confident manner of a rich white child born into privilege. She seems bloated too. I picture her scoffing food in her room while Pete is with Kia downstairs. I imagine sharp crumbs falling into her sheets, her bed full of tiny daggers, nobody noticing, and as Blanka, she will never complain.
Even though I don’t know if Stella herself can hear me, I speak to her. “My darling, I’m sorry I had to leave you.” I gaze into her eyes, searching for some glimmer of my daughter. But it’s like staring into a well.
“Now,” says Irina, “what do you want to tell me? On phone, you have something special to tell me about Blanka.” I realize she is excited, hoping I’ve found some new tidbit of information about her daughter. It doesn’t matter what, just that it is something she didn’t know before. Then, for a second, it will be like Blanka is alive again, because she learned something new about her.
“Wait a moment.” I run up to our bedroom, where even though my super-sensitive smell has gone, I can still smell Pete: the citrus zest, the sharpened pencils, a hint of beard balm. I can’t be sure, without my pregnant power of smell, but I think I smell something fresh, sporty, and feminine too. But I have to focus on Stella. The diary is where it was before, Pete didn’t bother to move it. I bring it downstairs. I show Irina that this is the same notebook that she saw a page of on my phone. I hate that man I hate that man I hate that man.
“Now,” I ask Stella. “This is your diary, your handwriting, right?” A nod. “And this is your language,” I say.
Stella mumbles something I can’t understand. It isn’t English. She looks at Irina, and Irina’s whole face changes. The lines melt away. Her eyes shine. She looks almost beautiful. “Blanka jan?” she breathes. “Im gandz.”
“What is that?” I ask sharply. “What are you saying to her?” I longed for Irina to see that Blanka is in Stella, but now that she seems to finally see it, I’m afraid.
“Pet name,” Irina murmurs. Then she speaks in a gentle voice I’ve never heard before, a mother’s lullaby voice, the voice you use when no one is listening but the one who loves you most. “Iskape?s da du yes.”
“Yes yem.” Stella is completely focused on Irina, and when she speaks, her voice doesn’t sound like a child’s voice anymore. “Mamia, yes yem.”
Irina’s face glows with wonder, like she too tastes the secret sweetness at the heart of everything. She seizes Stella and presses her close and murmurs strange words into her hair, the same phrase over and over. I don’t need to understand it to know what she is saying: “My baby, my baby, my baby.”
I back away a little. It feels wrong to watch. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t want to sit, so I edge over to the corner of the room and stand there. I am the outsider now. Irina is the one who still has her child. I feel sick. I haven’t thought beyond convincing Irina that Blanka is in Stella. I’ve been a fool. I never stopped to ask myself why Irina would want to banish her own daughter, right after getting her back.
Irina will never let go of Blanka. And why should she? It isn’t fair for her daughter to take my daughter’s body. But it also isn’t fair that Blanka lost her father and her home, ending up in a place where she never fit in. Here is a way for life to be a little fairer: we can have the flesh of my child, the soul of hers.
I back farther away, towards the French doors, as Irina continues to murmur to Stella and hug her. She keeps pulling away to look at her face, then hugging her again, as if she can’t decide which pleasure is sweeter.
I slip out through the French doors. “I cannot come anymore,” I think. They don’t come after me to question why. They let me go, as if I never existed.
···
Once back on the old railway line, a cramp buckles my stomach, a feeling of my uterus being folded and folded into an ever-tighter package, no longer needed, and I hunch over. Stella is more lost to me now than ever. I’d been so sure that once I convinced Irina, she would become my ally. But of course, it is Blanka she wants to help.
I make myself walk to the Tube station, put one foot in front of the other. I will get to the hospital and feed Luna, a simple thing that only I can do. I can get a cup of tea and a sandwich there. I have to eat so I can make milk for Luna. I watched Irina crochet her way out of her grief over Blanka: one stitch and then another stitch. I can do the same, focus on the next thing and the next.
When I go to the front desk of the NICU, the receptionist is new. She frowns when I try to sign in. “And you are?”
“Luna’s mother,” I tell her.
She raises her eyebrows. “That’s odd. It says here that Luna’s mother has checked in.” She scans her computer screen, but I rush to the viewing window of the NICU. Another woman sits in the glider next to Luna’s incubator, gently rocking. Her grey-blond hair hangs loose over her toned shoulders, and because they keep the room warm, she wears a sleeveless yoga top with elaborately crisscrossing straps. Out of context, it takes me a second to recognize Kia. She’s got Luna in the snuggle hold. Adrenaline floods my veins. She took my husband. How dare she touch my child, the child I’ve barely held myself?
She doesn’t look like she’s worried about a child’s ecological impact now. Then it hits me: she isn’t responsible for this child’s carbon emissions. She didn’t bring Luna into the world. With Luna, Kia can have a child without the guilt of creating one.
I ignore the receptionist’s protests, push past a nurse, and rush into the NICU. “Give me my baby.”
“Charlotte?” Kia’s voice is uncertain. Should she continue with her California niceness, or should she treat me with caution? She adjusts Luna’s position on her shoulder as if contemplating using her as a shield.
I see the nurse with the reindeer-antler headband: “Hey! This woman should not be in here. I’m the mother. She’s got my baby!”
The nurse looks shocked. “Give me the baby,” she tells Kia. “You shouldn’t be in here.” She takes Luna, but instead of giving her to me, she puts her back in the incubator. Does she think I would hurt my own baby?
Two other nurses appear by my side, and they escort me out of the NICU, one with a hand on the small of my back, the other with a hand on my shoulder. “Why are you treating me like the crazy person?” I snap. “She’s the one who lied to you. She’s not Luna’s mother.”
Outside, Pete strides towards us, and when I turn, Kia is right behind me. With the two nurses flanking me, I am surrounded.
“Let’s all take a breath now,” Kia says. “Let’s calm down.”
I once made a “calm-down jar” for Stella, which some mommy blogger recommended as a surefire cure for tantrums: ultrafine glitter in a glue-and-water solution. All my life I’ve kept calm, but now I think Stella had the right idea when she smashed that jar against the wall. I break free of the nurses and lunge towards Kia. “Stay away from my baby, you fucking bitch.”
Kia gasps and steps backwards, and then a woman in a grey trouser suit and hospital lanyard appears. “I want to apologize for the misunderstanding about who is allowed in the NICU,” she says.
“It’s my fault,” says Pete. “I may have given the receptionist the wrong impression. I apologize.”
I take a deep breath. The hospital isn’t the enemy here. “It’s fine,” I tell the trouser-suited woman. “Just a misunderstanding. We’ll go to the machine down the hall, have a cup of tea, and get it sorted out.” I have no intention of following through on this, but the woman is satisfied, and she retreats, along with the other hospital staff. I turn to Kia. “I know about you two.” I stab a finger towards Pete’s chest. “I also know about you and Emmy.”
Kia gives a little laugh of disbelief. “Who’s Emmy?”
Pete scratches his beard. “Charlotte, you need to take a breath. You’ve had a hard time. You’re not well.”
“Are you going to try to have me committed again? I’ll be happy to tell them how you stuck me in a loony bin so you could shack up with your mistress.”
“Who’s Emmy?” Kia repeats.
Pete takes Kia’s shoulder, and I can still read the language of his eyes: “Ignore her, she’s paranoid.” He turns back to me, and gestures at a row of chairs against the wall of the corridor. “Let’s sit down, the two of us, and talk. It was a good idea of yours to get a tea or something. Kia, will you?”
“I’m not going to sit down,” I tell him after Kia has headed to the drinks machine.
“I’m sorry—” Pete begins, but I interrupt.
“Save it. It’s not just one mistake, Pete, or two. I know about that woman in Humboldt when I was pregnant with Stella. You’ve been cheating on me all along.”
Pete shakes his head. “I loved you, Charlotte. I never even looked at anyone else until you got pregnant. Then you became so anxious about the pregnancy. And when she was born, that was it: you shut me out.”
“Sorry you had to share my attention,” I spit.
“I thought things would get better as she got older. I thought you’d get back to your old self. But no. You used to be the one who got everyone to come over and party. You became this person who stays up late online shopping for the perfect kiddie pajamas.”
“I became a mother .”
“You expected me to carry you,” Pete says. “It was you looking after Stella, and me looking after you. I needed an outlet.”
“That’s one hell of a rationalization,” I say.
He turns towards me, hands open on his knees. “I was always careful not to let you find out.”
“And that’s a point in your favor?” Of course he didn’t slip up: he’s so good at keeping on top of details while seeing the big picture.
Suddenly I realize something. He put me in the Cottage because he saw the big picture. When it comes to deciding custody, he wants to be able to say, “My wife has been in an inpatient psychiatric facility and is mentally unfit to take care of the children.”
“You want the kids,” I say. “You planned this.”
“I’m sorry, baby,” Pete says. “I have to do what’s best for them. I don’t think it’s safe for them to be around you right now.” The expression on his face is so earnest, his eyes so blue, so serious. He actually believes that I am bad for them. I am wrong: putting me in the Cottage wasn’t him playing the long game, at least not consciously. He really has convinced himself that I am mentally ill. In his mind, whatever is convenient for him becomes the truth.
Down the hall, Kia is stretching her quads as she waits for the machine to make drinks. I can imagine his conversation with her: “Poor Charlotte. She’s got postpartum psychosis. Paranoid delusions. Hormone issues, like her mother. This same thing happened after she had Stella, there was a disastrous camping trip, she thought I sneaked into someone else’s tent. This Emmy thing is nonsense. Charlotte’s convinced I managed to make out with this random woman, the mother of one of Stella’s friends, while Stella and the other kid were in the house. I barely have time to take a leak when I’m looking after Stella.” And Kia: “Oh, poor Charlotte. She needs help.”
Kia returns from the machine and holds out a cappuccino. “Pete likes oat milk, and it just occurred to me that maybe you do too, so I could go back if you prefer that. Careful, it’s super hot.” She won’t meet my eye, but she still wants everything to be nice, a conscious uncoupling, even though she knows my husband’s coffee preference. But here we are, in a land far beyond niceness, beyond etiquette. There is no “Charlotte Says” for this situation.
“Just tell it like it is,” the trolls always said.
“I don’t want you here,” I say. “I don’t want your coffee. I don’t like you.”
“I understand you have a lot of feelings,” Kia says, in a way that makes it clear she’s spent time in therapy .
“He’ll cheat on you too,” I tell her, feeling something boiling up inside. When I was young, I always let my mother be the one to lose her temper. When she shut me outside in the snow, when she threw flour at me, I stood there and took it. I let my feet get numb, my nose fill with choking particles. I retreated from the edges of my body and went deep inside myself. But not anymore. “He’s a colossal shit,” I tell Kia.
Pete shakes his head. “You’re not well, Charlotte.”
“Take the coffee, please,” Kia says. “We can talk.” She holds it out, too near my face. I hate it when people invade my personal space. I stand up and slap the drink away, and it cascades onto Kia’s running tights. She screams, plucking at the fabric. “Fuck, fuck! Pete, help me!”
Pete grabs my shoulders and pushes me away from Kia. Hospital security and yet more nurses appear, and I quickly scream, “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” as loud as I can. The security guards decide it is Pete they want to show out, not a hysterical, lactating mother. Kia limps after them.
A kind older nurse takes me to the hospital cafeteria and gets me a cup of tea with sugar. I am shaking. I look at the plastic stirrer she brought me, the single-use plastic Pete hates so much. Pete talked about making plant-based coffee stirrers at some point, but the real solution is to go back to using spoons. Or have your tea and coffee at home. But there’s no profit for entrepreneurs in that.
The tea is terrible, and I remember the tang of lemon peel, the warmth of cinnamon on our honeymoon. I feel a rush of grief.