Chapter 39
39.
Phil, the mediator, is an older man with grey hair. His office is in an Edwardian terraced house on the fringe of Muswell Hill. “You’re a couple of minutes early,” he says with a touch of reproach. Once I would have apologized, but now I say nothing and follow him inside. It is obviously his home, though he’s removed personal belongings from the hallway and the doors are closed. He leads us through to a glass-roofed extension off the kitchen. The kitchen has also been depersonalized, no magnets on the fridge or remnants of cooking, though the scent of Heinz baked beans hangs in the air. In the extension stands a circular white table with a small bowl in the center that looks as if it contains fluffy pompoms of moss. Even his potted plants are nonthreatening.
I can’t help thinking that if your office space is your kitchen and dining room, then you clearly live alone, and if that is the case, what does that say about your ability to negotiate with your own family members?
On the wall hangs a portrait of three Victorian rabbits. Or rather, they are three people, a mother, father, and child, the father in a dark suit, the mother and child in long, dark dresses, and they wear rabbit masks. White cardboard muzzles, perky brown cardboard ears. Maybe they remind him of the happy animal families depicted in children’s books. But the picture makes you wonder why these solemn people are wearing rabbit masks and apparently not having any fun.
The doorbell rings, and my heart flutters, not because I am nervous about seeing Pete, but at the thought of what I have to do. Pete is freshly showered and shaven, wearing a soft, expensive-looking T-shirt and jeans. He is so sure he’ll get what he wants that he hasn’t troubled to dress up.
“Tea, anyone?” Phil says. “Coffee?” We both shake our heads, united in our desire to get this over with. We sit down, and Phil shuffles papers and drones on about sustainable outcomes and respectful processes. He explains, “The goal is to be ‘amicable, equitable, and expedient,’ or as I like to say, ‘friendly, fair, and fast.’?” He twinkles: apparently this amounts to a humorous quip in the world of mediation.
I don’t twinkle. There is nothing friendly or fair about what I am about to do. Pete asks if he can speak first, and I say yes. I am in the mood to be generous. He launches into his litany of grievances: the dead bird “in” Stella’s bed, the night I “abandoned her” in the park, my “obsession” with reading her diary.
“Charlotte, would you like to contribute?” Phil says when Pete is finished.
“Where so much is wrong, there’s no purchase for disagreement,” I say. “It’s like trying to argue with someone who thinks school shootings are faked by crisis actors.”
Pete doesn’t flinch. “The stress of miscarriages, hereditary depression, and a difficult birth have pushed Charlotte into florid postpartum psychosis. Unless she seeks aggressive treatment, she should not be allowed near my daughters.”
Phil looks at us, clearly wondering why we thought we could find common ground in mediation. “Florid psychosis?” Phil ventures.
“She suffers from Capgras delusion,” Pete says. “The belief that a loved one has been replaced by an exact duplicate.”
“That is a misrepresentation,” I say.
Phil looks alarmed. “This is more confrontational than I expected,” he murmurs.
“Isn’t your job dealing with confrontation?” Pete snaps.
Then Phil takes a deep breath and says, “Pete, assuming what you’re saying is accurate—we all know there’s more than one side of a story in divorce—”
“I can get a letter from a medical professional at her psychiatric facility attesting that my wife left against medical advice,” Pete says.
“If Charlotte does have medical issues that prevent her from caring for your daughters—and that would need to be verified by a professional—you’ll need to seek primary custody and Charlotte will need to seek treatment—” Here Phil looks at me as if expecting me to wave a rotting seagull in his face. “She will need treatment at once.”
“That’s exactly what I think,” Pete says, brightening. “I’ll pay for it. I have no ill will towards Charlotte, I want her to get well.”
It is so transparent, really, what he is doing: focusing all the attention on my mental health to distract from his own monstrous behavior. I wait for my turn to speak. When Pete has said his piece, I say, “My husband sexually assaulted our babysitter, Blanka Hakobyan. Four days later, she took her own life.”
Pete’s eyes widen. I have to hand it to him: he looks genuinely shocked. “That is a complete fabrication. I reject that absolutely.”
Phil looks grey-faced. “Let’s listen to Charlotte speak now.”
“I have proof,” I say. “She wrote about it in her diary. Her mother recently discovered it and showed it to me.”
Pete blusters. “This is absurd! What did she say exactly? It was probably just a fantasy, poor girl—I mean, woman.”
“It says that you assaulted her. I can show it to you.” I’m bluffing, but it works.
Pete massages his temples. “OK, OK. We did have a quick thing, which I’m not proud of, but it was just a one-off, it meant nothing. It was a mistake.”
“A ‘quick thing’? You assaulted her,” I say, feeling a little wrong-footed by his self-belief. He isn’t lying. He really believes that it was consensual. How can two people see the truth so differently? And it isn’t his word against hers. All I have is the testimony of a ghost.
Pete frowns. “She showed up when I was alone at home. I thought she’d done that on purpose.”
“She came to collect her cheque,” I say.
“Go on,” says Phil.
“She’d been kind of giving me the eye,” Pete says. “I’d picked up on a vibe from her. When she showed up, I thought I knew the reason.”
“There was no way she would ever have looked at you flirtatiously,” I say. But I remember the expression on her face when she recounted their first kiss. Maybe she did look at him. But that didn’t entitle him to do whatever he wanted to her.
“How did it happen?” At least he can’t accuse her of dressing suggestively.
Pete sits up a little straighter, glad to get a chance to tell the truth, or, rather, his truth. “I said something about her eyes, some throwaway comment, and she really glowed. I’d never seen her smile. She actually did look kind of pretty and I said so. A harmless compliment.”
“You’re married,” I say. “You were her employer.”
“I regret the circumstances,” Pete says.
“So why did you do it?”
Pete looks at his hands. “I thought it would be a confidence boost, a nice thing for her.”
“Being raped would be a confidence boost?”
Pete shakes his head furiously. “No! God, no. This is insane. I kissed her and she kissed me back. She wanted me. Not once did she say no or stop.”
“She never had a boyfriend. Did you know that?” I ask. “She had no experience, no idea how to say no.”
Pete shakes his head. “She wanted to kiss me. She was totally into it. And—the rest. She was a little passive, it’s true, but I thought she wanted it that way. She wanted to have me make it all happen. I was there, you weren’t. I’m not going to let you twist the truth.”
“This is not my truth, this is Blanka’s,” I say.
“Look, maybe she thought it meant more than it did, and then afterwards, when I made it clear it was a one-off, she was upset, and she rewrote the whole incident in her diary. But I know it was consensual, because she never once said the word no .”
“If you knew her, if you paid any attention to her, you would know that she would never have the confidence to say that word.”
Pete rubs his temples. “I am truly sorry that after the fact, she came to view it as a bad experience. But I’m not a mind reader. She didn’t say no, she went along with it, so I could only assume she liked it.”
“But why—why her? You could have other women. For all I know, you were already with Kia then.”
“Look, I was a little buzzed, OK? It was the day after the—the birthday party. I was feeling low. I had a couple of whiskeys; then Blanka showed up. The opportunity was there.”
I am sickened. This makes her sound like an open bag of cheese-and-onion crisps.
“That was inappropriate,” Phil says. He swipes his brow with the back of his hand. He’s sweating. “More than inappropriate.”
I turn to Pete. “You’re not fit to take care of children. I want full custody. Furthermore, I don’t want to see you again, and I don’t want you to see the girls.”
“You are not taking my children away. I will fight this tooth and nail.”
Phil holds up a hand. He looks clammy. “I think we should take a fifteen-minute break here. Get some fresh air.”
“We’re fine,” says Pete, and then he changes tack. “Look, I’m sorry I fell for Kia, I can only apologize.”
“When you preface ‘I apologize’ with the phrase ‘all I can do is,’ you negate the apology.”
“I love you, Charlotte. Those other women—I’m really just trying to find you again. You used to sparkle.”
“I thought all the cheating was because you ‘need an outlet,’?” I say. “Wasn’t that what you said at the hospital?”
“I really think we should take a break,” says Phil.
But Pete is on a roll, and it seems that he actually believes what he’s saying. “Kia, Emmy, whoever—none of them actually mean anything.”
“And that woman on the camping trip in Humboldt,” I say. “Yes, I figured that one out too. And Blanka. And those are only the ones I know about.”
Then I see the pattern: he chooses the women who think they’re not good enough for him. He might think he chose me because I sparkled, but he also saw my loneliness.
“You chose me because you thought you could control me,” I say.
“I loved you. I loved our life. But after Stella—”
“You couldn’t control her, and you couldn’t stand that. So you took it out on Blanka.”
“Charlotte, please. I’ve fucked up, I admit it, OK? But I don’t deserve to lose my children.”
“You know who didn’t get what she deserved? Blanka.”
“Let’s focus on I statements and on next steps,” says Phil, who looks greenish.
“Phil,” I say. “Could we have a moment? And maybe you should have a drink of water. Or put your head between your knees.”
Phil tugs at his collar. “I really need to be here to keep things amicable, equitable—”
“Just give us some space, OK?” barks Pete. Phil starts to his feet and weaves towards the kitchen door.
“I’m sorry, but we need you to actually go to another part of the house,” I tell him. Phil nods, looking dazed, and we hear his feet on the stairs. For a moment, I feel like we’re his parents and have sent him to his room. I remember what it was like to be on the same team. But only for a moment.
“You’re right. I lied about the diary,” I say. “She didn’t write about being raped in her diary. She confessed directly to me.”
“Before she died? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I want you to watch something.” I take out my phone and click to the recording of Blanka-in-Stella speaking at the soup pots. I’ve edited it so it is just the salient bits.
“I try his whiskey,” Stella says. “Then he puts his tongue in my mouth. He grabs me, squeezes. I do not like.”
Pete stares. “Why is she talking like that? Is this some kind of game—did you put her up to this? Did you feed her these lines? This is sick.”
I hit pause. “I think you know that nobody can feed Stella lines,” I say. Then I press play again.
Stella says, “Daddy does not listen, forces me to floor, brings up my skirt, opens my knees. All the time, talking, how pretty I am. He pushes inside me and it hurts….” She covers her eyes.
As Pete watches it, he rubs his eyes and face and pushes his flesh around so vigorously that it feels as if when he takes his hands away, there will be an eye on his chin, another at the level of his hairline, nose and mouth mashed together. “It’s not possible. You faked this. This is not Stella.”
“It is Stella,” I say. “But it’s also Blanka.”
“This is fucking insane,” says Pete, and I realize that even if he still loved me and trusted me, he will never be able to understand that Blanka is in Stella. He has many talents, but he lacks imagination. “You know I’d never lay a finger on Stella,” he says. “I never fucking would.”
I shrug. “The police don’t know that. Child protective services don’t know that. They will watch this video and see your eight-year-old saying that you assaulted her.”
Pete looks sick. “You won’t be able to get this performance out of her under questioning. One recording isn’t enough evidence.”
Maybe he’s right: the video won’t be enough. The authorities will want to talk to Stella directly. Maybe they’ll give her one of those anatomically correct dolls and ask her to show them what happened. Blanka will have to relive her shame in front of strangers, in a strange place. I don’t know for certain that she will tell her story again.
But I can’t let him see my doubts.
“I’ll show it to the authorities, and I guess we’ll see what happens,” I say.
“You cold bitch,” Pete says. I shrug. A family is not happy, playful rabbit people. It is people in masks whom you can never understand.
“Or I can take the girls and go,” I say. “I don’t want the house. I don’t want half of everything. I just want enough money for us to live on.”
Pete rubs his eyes, and I realize he is crying, properly crying, for the first time since his dad died. Whatever else he’s done, he’s also the man who took such good care of me, who held Stella skin to skin when she was born. “Luna. My baby,” Pete sobs out.
I would feel sorry for him if he were crying for both girls.