Chapter 37
37.
On the Tube, my phone pings with a text from Irina: Blanka is not happy. My heart lightens: maybe, just maybe, Irina will help me after all. I arrange to meet her at a café in Muswell Hill.
She orders tea but doesn’t drink it. She’s lost the beauty she had yesterday. She looks tired, her face worn. She doesn’t bother with any preamble. “Yesterday, I have many questions for Blanka. ‘What is happening to you, my darling? How is this happening?’ But Blanka will not talk to me. That first time is the only time. No more.” She shakes her head, staring out the café window. “When Blanka is little girl, she goes quiet when angry. Very, very quiet. Is just like that now. She does not like this.” She waves her hands. “This situation. She wants to go.”
I lean forward. “You’ll help me?”
Irina purses her lips. “I help Blanka.”
“OK,” I say, feeling my determination ignite again. I can still save Stella. “We’ll find out what’s made her so angry. Any ideas?”
Irina taps her fingers on the table. “I am thinking about Blanka getting menstruation. Before, I think, why does she want to give up on life when she gets menstruation at last?”
“Right, her menstruation.” I cringed when Irina wanted to discuss Blanka’s period weeks ago. It seemed so inappropriate. But now that I’ve given birth in front of Irina, now she’s seen me splayed and oozing, we can talk about anything.
“Now I think maybe this blood, is not menstruation,” Irina says carefully.
“What else could it be?”
Irina stares at me. “First time sex, you bleed.”
“You think she lost her virginity?” I whisper, my heart aching for her. “Who could it have been? Not your neighbor? Who else did she know?”
“No friends, never had boyfriend in her life,” Irina says. “She goes to work, supermarket, home only. I am asking myself this. Now look.” She pulls out a battered phone—Blanka’s—and taps in a passcode. She pulls up the messages between me and Blanka. They are innocuous messages about what time she was coming and what Stella could have for dinner. Could they be at home by 4:00 p.m. because someone was coming to fix the fridge. Still, I feel something approaching terror as Irina scrolls through the messages. Finally, she shows me one from Blanka: OK if I come to get cheque today.
Sure, I texted. I have a yoga class but Pete will give it to you. It made no sense, but I feel a pang for that ignorant time, when I had no idea Pete was betraying me and Blanka was suicidally depressed.
“Same day as blood,” Irina says. “Four days before she die.”
My mind stutters, trying to make sense of this. “What does it mean?”
“Fish stinks from the head,” Irina says impatiently.
“The head…the head of the family? No way,” I say. But Maureen told me about my mother’s depression, and I didn’t want to hear it. I won’t take the easy way now. I will pay attention.
Of course, he made a move on our babysitter. It didn’t matter that Blanka wasn’t sexy. What mattered was the thrill of being able to do it in our perfect home, risking everything.
Stella was at her swim lesson, I’d arranged for Emmy to pick her up because Lulu went to the same class. Pete had to work.
I feel sick with rage at Pete.
What was in it for Blanka, though? Maybe she was in love with him. If nobody had ever tried to seduce her before, she could have mistaken this for love. Could that be why she can’t leave—a lovelorn spirit, unable to forsake Pete’s chiseled cheekbones and ice-blue eyes? But that is ridiculous. You wouldn’t choose that person’s daughter as your vessel—that would guarantee you’d never have any sexual contact.
“He hurt my daughter,” Irina says, spitting the words out. “?‘I hate that man. I hate that man.’ He is man.”
“But how? By rejecting her?”
“We must talk to Blanka.”
“She’s hard to talk to,” I say, afraid of what we might learn. But we have to overcome her reticence. Maybe between the two of us we can make it work.
When I get to Emmy’s, she has a glass of wine ready as soon as I get in the door. “What did that bastard say?” She has crudités and dips waiting on the coffee table. She pats the sofa. “Sit down. Tell me everything.” She sips her wine, eyes glittering. She enjoys my suffering a little bit. She admitted it last time I saw her: “It’s nice not to be the only one in the trenches.” But she also truly wants to help. I don’t mind if her feelings about me are complicated, because she doesn’t hide them. Unlike Cherie.
“He has a girlfriend,” I say. “I think he’s going to try for custody of the kids with his girlfriend. And a divorce, I assume.” We didn’t even get around to mentioning that.
“Shit,” says Emmy. “I’ve always thought he seemed too nice. This is how he gets his kicks. I read an article about sociopaths—I thought Nick might be one. They have a lower resting heart rate, so the theory is they have to break rules and take risks to get stimulation, to feel something.” She pauses. “You don’t seem that bothered.”
“I’m not interested in psychoanalyzing Pete. I’ve got other problems.”
“Bigger than this?” She stares at me. “I thought Luna’s OK. You’re not ill, are you?”
“Actually, it’s something I can’t really talk about.”
Emmy’s face closes. I’ve broken a tacit pact. She will help me to the best of her ability, but in exchange, we’ll feast on each other’s stories. We’ll hold nothing back. I’ve never been good at this sort of thing.
But she confessed to kissing Pete, even though she didn’t have to. She’s letting me stay and doing her best to help me. For once, she’s not trying to hide what her life is really like. So maybe I dare to tell her what my life is like too. But not yet.
“Look, Emmy, I’ll tell you someday,” I say. “OK? We’ll have wine and I’ll tell you the whole story. You won’t believe it.”
“I look forward to that,” she says.