Chapter 5
5.
The day after my conversation with Irina, I went to the fanciest boutique in Muswell Hill and sifted through gift options while Stella read in the corner of the shop. I settled on an expensive blanket of soft grey recycled wool. On second thoughts, I put it back and bought the larger size.
I dropped Stella off with my friend Cherie, another mom from Stella’s primary school. Her nine-year-old, Zach, was in the year above Stella, though he often refused to go to school. He was an expert on the chemistry of slime but needed a thirteen-point checklist to brush his teeth. When Cherie and I hung out, we didn’t expect the kids to do normal kid things. Stella usually read some hefty tome while Zach stirred non-Newtonian fluids in various mixing bowls.
Then I walked to Blanka and Irina’s place. There was an ache in my low belly that I tried to ignore. It was hunger, I told myself. Or nerves.
They occupied the bottom half of a terraced house. The North Circular roared two streets over. A half-dead purple-leaf plum tree strewed dark leaves outside their front window.
I gave a start. A woman sat inside, so colorless and still that I hadn’t immediately spotted her. She wore a grey cardigan, and her greying hair was pulled back in a bun. She sat in a big armchair, staring at nothing.
I raised a hand, but she didn’t react. Still, I was almost certain she’d seen me, and I had no choice but to walk up the front path. I ventured a tentative wave. She rose and stared at me through the glass.
Then she tottered off, and I waited. Nothing. I was just deciding that she couldn’t face visitors when the door opened. She had Blanka’s olive skin and round cheeks. Her face was weathered, her gaze startling in its frank misery. I wanted to turn and run away. But I couldn’t stand the thought that I’d done something wrong without even realizing it. If an apology was needed, I was determined to deliver one.
“I’m Charlotte, Stella’s mother? I came to say how sorry I am and…”
Irina stared at me, and I thought she was going to berate me for daring to show my face. She’d ended our phone conversation on such a hostile note.
But she just opened the front door wide, and waited.
My insides clenched tight. If I was going to lose this pregnancy too, I didn’t want to do it in a stranger’s house. But I could see that the pale garment I’d taken for a skirt was actually a nightgown, and the cardigan over it was wrongly buttoned up. She was a wreck: I couldn’t refuse her.
Inside, the squat, dark furniture was too big for the tiny front room. Every surface was covered with an embroidered cloth or crocheted doily, and every shelf was laden with painted figurines, dolls and carved animals. I proffered the blanket, tied with a grey silk ribbon. Its luxe minimalism was out of place here, and instead it looked drab and utilitarian. Irina nodded but didn’t take it.
A black-and-white photo of Blanka in a silver frame stood atop a bureau. She looked about eighteen. She was smiling weakly. The photo made me feel sad. Someone should have told her the thing to do in photos is flash your teeth, Strictly Come Dancing– style. That way you look happy and no one can tell the difference.
Irina cleared a mess of wool and needles off the sofa. “I make tea.” She trudged off. I looked around for somewhere to put the blanket. An icon hung on the wall above the sofa: a saint with a disappointed face. My body upgraded the bad feeling in my abdomen from an ache into pain, and I sank onto the sofa, still clutching the blanket. I examined the pain’s nature and location, trying to discern if it was the same as the pain that heralded my three previous miscarriages. My most recent had been at fifteen weeks. Today, I was fourteen weeks and five days pregnant.
“You like jam?” Irina called from the kitchen.
“Um, whatever you’re having,” I called back. I’d assumed that she’d tell me what I’d done and I’d apologize profusely, and then I’d leave, my duty fulfilled. Her hospitality unsettled me. Perhaps that was her intention. She’d keep me here until I lost this pregnancy all over her velour sofa. Sweat broke out on my chest.
Or perhaps she expected me to share fond recollections of Blanka. I searched my memory desperately.
Irina returned with a clinking tray: gold-rimmed teacups, a floral teapot, a dish of jam. She sat down very close to me, and I realized I had the blanket pressed to my midsection. She held out a plate of small, flaky pastries. “Blanka’s favorite.”
I let her take the blanket and put a pastry on my plate. “Yum,” I said, though I couldn’t eat a bite right now. I crossed my legs and squeezed my thighs together, hoping nothing was going to gush out. The house smelled thickly of frying oil and some kind of spice like cinnamon. Irina studied me. I realized I had one hand on my belly, the back of the other hand under my nose.
“Sick?” she said gently. I nodded, and she said, “With Blanka, I have sickness all day too.”
I was nonplussed. I wasn’t showing. Irina saw the surprise on my face. “Here, I am nurse at hospice. But in my own country, I am midwife. I know pregnant woman smells everything.” She wrinkled her nose. “Like dog.” Then she touched my knee. “But bad smells are good. This means baby is healthy.” She compressed her lips in a way that was almost a smile.
The pain in my belly eased: She didn’t hate me. I hadn’t done anything awful to Blanka. And she was right: smell sensitivity was a pregnancy symptom. I felt a surge of hope, and my eyes filled.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really very sorry.” My voice broke.
My tears seemed to satisfy Irina, and she nodded. “You do not have to be sorry. I am sorry for not telling you the day Blanka dies. But for three days, I cannot speak to one single person.”
Of course. Grief was what had made her so bitter when we’d spoken on the phone. She had lost her only child: the worst had happened. What a narcissist I’d been to think her misery had anything to do with me.
But if she hadn’t cursed Stella, what had she meant? “She drown.” Meaning dawned on me. “Blanka drown—I mean, drowned?” I said, as gently as I could.
Irina inclined her head in the smallest of nods. “We run from our home to Armenia. There, we are refugees. Many times, we have only bucket for washing. So after we come here, Blanka loves hot bath.”
“It happened in a bath?” I’d never even seen Blanka allow herself a glass of water. It was a surprise to learn that same woman loved to indulge in long soaks. And I’d never heard of anyone drowning in the bath.
Irina stood up. “I show you.”
Show me what? Though my stomach had mostly stopped hurting, I still felt nauseated. But she took my arm, and her grip was surprisingly strong. I realized she was much younger than I’d thought, perhaps not even sixty. She drew me through the kitchen and into a meagre back garden—mostly concrete, a plastic table. She gestured me towards a narrow gate in the fence between their garden and that of the neighbors. I hesitated.
“Neighbors do not mind. They are gone,” said Irina briskly. The neighbors had a tasteful, low-maintenance garden with perky succulents in beds of bark chips. Irina gestured towards a plastic hot tub with the cover off.
I gasped. “In there?”
Irina stood by the tub. “Last week, Blanka is guarding their house when neighbors go on holiday. Blanka decide to go in water. But she stays too long, and I do not know this but she has sickness. Here.” She placed her hand over her heart. She paused. “She pass out and goes under.”
An undiagnosed heart condition. Poor Blanka. That would explain her lethargy. Sometimes she huffed when she climbed stairs; I’d thought it was her weight that made her breathless. I felt awful. To think I’d felt impatient with all her huffing, had even wondered why she didn’t exercise.
Irina climbed the two steps that led up to the hot tub and gestured for me to join her. I was uneasy. Why did she want me to look inside? Surely you would want to avoid the place where your child died. But I had no experience of such grief. Maybe this felt like a way to honor her daughter. My legs felt shaky as I climbed the steps and looked over the edge. The neighbors had not refilled the tub, and there was nothing to see but its bland white plastic interior, smelling faintly of chlorine.
A life had been cut short here, and there was nothing to show for it. There should be some kind of marker of what had happened. Blanka had sat on the ledge that ran around the inside, and all she’d wanted was the small pleasure of a hot soak. Then: a freak accident, a random tragedy. You couldn’t make sense of it. It hadn’t happened for a reason.
We went back into Irina’s house, and she showed me a grape-leaf tin on the mantelpiece. “This is Blanka,” she said.
It took me a second to realize what she meant. “Her ashes?” I couldn’t think of anything to say in response. “Lovely” wasn’t going to cut it. It felt impossible that a living, feeling person—her only daughter—could be reduced to fit inside a grape-leaf tin. There was nothing I could say that would make the situation any better, but I was clearly expected to say something. Then I remembered my mirroring technique. “This is Blanka,” I repeated solemnly.
My phone pinged: Everything OK? I’d told Cherie I’d only be gone an hour. I explained that I had to leave, and Irina insisted on putting the remaining pastries into a cookie tin decorated with troika-pulling horses. She handed it to me. “Thank you for coming. These are Blanka’s favorite. For your little one.”
“Thank you,” I said, moved. I had my daughter and another child inside me. I had riches beyond compare. But still she wanted to give me a gift.
Now she was studying me. “Blanka takes good care of your daughter.”
I stared at her. Had grief unbalanced her, so she’d temporarily forgotten Blanka was dead? Then I realized that of course, she meant Blanka took good care. Irina was more comfortable using the present tense, as if everything that had happened was still happening and would continue to happen.
“Yes, she took good care,” I said, even though it wasn’t true. Blanka became sloppy in the last few weeks: dirty dishes on the table, uncapped markers on the floor. But there was no need for Irina to know this. Let her think Blanka had been a veritable Mary Poppins.
On impulse, I said, “May I ask why she stopped babysitting Stella? She didn’t give me a reason.”
Irina shrugged. “She love Stella.”
“Yes, Stella loves—loved her,” I agreed. “So why did she leave?”
Irina threw her hands up as if to say, “Who knows?” There was something ancient and resigned about it, as if she included all of human suffering in the gesture.
But there must have been some impetus for Blanka to give up her job. “Do you think she wanted more?” I asked. “More of a career?” This was hard to imagine, but it was the best explanation for her departure.
“A career?” Irina looked doubtful.
“Maybe not. Anyway, I’m so sorry.” It was time to leave. I gave Irina a suitably sad smile. I did feel sad, of course I did, but I could let go of my guilt. I’d never know her reason, but Blanka didn’t leave because of anything I did.
But Irina wasn’t finished. “My husband wanted to call her Roza or Anna, but she is such a beautiful baby, she deserves special name. Such a good girl when child,” she said. “I used to punish her only with cross. I tell her, ‘Hold your nose to cross until I say.’ Blanka is such a good girl. Always she stay there until I say.”
“A cross?” I was startled. That cross on the wall at home was about the height of Stella’s nose. Obviously, Stella knew about this childhood punishment of Blanka’s, and that was why she’d put it there. But why wouldn’t she admit it? She’d happily confessed after drawing on the wall in the past. And if the cross was a punishment, who was it for?