Chapter 41
Two Months Later
41.
“More soup, anyone?” I ask Irina and Stella. I made it out of nettles we gathered together, Stella and I, while Irina stayed at the cottage with Luna.
Irina holds out her bowl, but Stella says, “I’ve had enough.” She only spooned up a little, but I didn’t have to serve it as components: progress. “Can Luna try it?”
“Not yet,” I say.
“Do they think they will close school?” Irina says.
They’re talking about a shutdown to limit the spread of coronavirus.
“Yay!” says Stella.
“If that happens, maybe I’ll finally become good enough to crochet a decent sock. Right, Irina?” I nudge her. It’s a running joke how terrible I am at crocheting.
It’s March now, and I’ve rented a cottage on the Devon coast. Pete deposits money into my bank account every month. If there’s a shutdown, we’ll have enough to live on, and the four of us will keep each other company, drive each other crazy, or both.
Meanwhile, Irina looks after Luna so I have time to work out what I want to do. I don’t know what I am passionate about, but I am going to find it. I have begun to cook again.
All those meals Stella refused to eat—I never enjoyed cooking them. I told myself I didn’t enjoy cooking because she wouldn’t eat. But what if she didn’t eat because I didn’t enjoy cooking? Now I cook what I feel like eating, and I enjoy it. Sometimes, Stella does too.
Stella goes to the village school. Her handwriting needs work, the teacher tells me. At break, she mostly reads hefty science books while hiding from the teacher on duty behind a bush, but I’m fine if she doesn’t want to socialize. She’s changed so much, and she will get there in her own time. Plus, she has Luna now.
“I put wild garlic in the soup,” I tell Irina. “Like you showed me the other day. Is that something you gathered when you fled Azerbaijan?”
Irina shakes her head. “For three days, we have nothing to eat but dandelion.”
“Where did you sleep?” I ask.
“Were you very scared?” says Stella.
“I walk with Blanka, she is three years old. I carry nothing but wedding dress and often Blanka too. There is nothing more to tell.” Irina scrapes her spoon around her bowl.
I once wondered if she was exaggerating when she told us about her life. The little house in the forest. The husband shut in an oven. Could she really have walked over the mountains for three days, carrying her daughter and her wedding dress, with only dandelions to eat? But living with her, I’ve noticed that she tells her story in the same words every time, and if I press her for more information, she shuts me down. This happens and then that happens and then there’s nothing more to tell. I think this is her particular way of making the past manageable.
After dinner, we crochet, or try to. Stella is as bad as me. But we find it calming. Irina inspects my work. “Your stitches are too tight. Relax hands.”
“But this sock is going to last forever,” I say. “Look how thick it is.”
“Perfect for one-legged man,” mutters Irina.
“Do you remember the crocheting you did before?” I ask Stella. For weeks, I’ve been terrified to ask her about her time as Blanka, but I am starting to feel safe. She’s been Stella for some time now, her hair ablaze again. “Socks are tricky, aren’t they?” I ask her as she frowns over hers. “It’s funny, you used to crochet such complicated doilies.”
Stella shrugs. “I don’t remember.”
I’ve asked her other questions too. Does she miss eating lamb stew, her old favorite? Does she miss writing in a diary? I get the same answer whenever I ask her about that time as Blanka.
“I don’t remember.”
The reason I ask is to find out if she remembered that time of sharing her body, if she has questions or worries about it. But apparently not. She doesn’t remember. And I don’t want to probe her further. Perhaps her amnesia is self-protective.
After I’ve put Luna to bed, I have tea with milk. Irina has tea with jam. Stella has milk with jam. I tell Irina, “I’m learning about Armenia, and I read that they have a saying, ‘A cup of tea commits you to forty years of friendship.’?”
Irina snorts. “Where do you read this? I never hear one Armenian person say that.” Her eyes water as she gulps her tea the wrong way, and I have to thump her on the back.
···
The next day, we take the grape-leaf tin with Blanka’s ashes to the beach. It is cold, but Irina stops and kicks off her boots. Without any modesty, matter-of-factly, she lifts her skirt to peel off her long underwear. “You’re going to paddle? You’re crazy. It’s freezing,” I call.
Luna nestles against my chest in her carrier. She never had that honeysuckle smell, and my love for her is different, slower, but growing every day. Her eyes notice everything. Is she too planning, storing it all up?
I take off my shoes and socks and let the sea nip my toes. The air tingles with brine. Irina is already in up to her ankles. She holds out her hands to Stella.
Stella takes off her shoes and socks and walks to the edge of the water. I am surprised. I thought Stella was scared of the sea but apparently not anymore. Blanka has left her, but she isn’t the old Stella. She is becoming someone new. I can no longer label her behavior as “Stella” or “not Stella,” because that is a way of refusing to see her. I have to let her be whoever she wants to be, unfolding from one day to the next.
The wind blows spray into our faces, and something spooks the gulls, so they whirl overhead. “Did Blanka like the sea?” I call to Irina.
She smiles. “We did not come, but I think yes. I think she would—would have liked.” I realize with a jolt it is the first time she’s spoken of her daughter in the past tense.
Stella gazes out to the horizon. “Is Daddy still in California?”
There is both an ocean and a continent between us and Pete. Emmy heard that Pete left Mycoship and retreated to the Bay Area. He’s back to working with his mother at CannaGauge, their cannabis-testing equipment company. I don’t know if he turned what happened into a story in which he was the good guy. Or if seeing Blanka for that one moment changed him—if indeed he did see her.
“Do you miss him?” I ask Stella now. I still feel stricken about the price Stella had to pay for getting rid of Blanka. Despite what he did, Pete is her father.
But Stella shakes her head. “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m happy being with you and Luna and Irina.” She looks so perky, and I have to admit she does seem to find life easier without Pete. I think back to her birthday party, which she purposely ruined because Pete threw a party for the child he wanted, not the one he had.
That birthday party was the day before Pete assaulted Blanka. He hurt Blanka because he couldn’t hurt Stella.
I stub my toe on a rock and stumble, one arm protectively around Luna in her carrier. My god, Stella was there that day. I remember now. Emmy was supposed to take her to the group swim class, but Emmy had texted while I was out: Stella had refused to go, so Emmy and Lulu went without her.
Stella was probably in her room when it happened. I pray that she had on her noise-cancelling headphones, the ones I’d got her for when school was too much. She liked a documentary series, Earthflight , so maybe she was watching that. When Pete assaulted Blanka, I hope Stella was blissfully ignorant, watching gorgeous footage of cranes and snow geese.
But was Stella definitely upstairs? What if she came out of her room while Pete was working downstairs? When Blanka arrived, she could have been in her alone-time cupboard, the door open a crack. Or perched at the top of the stairs. I don’t know if she would have understood what was happening, but you could understand that Blanka was in distress without knowing what was going on.
If she’d seen that, what might she do? Perhaps she was afraid to tell me, especially if she wasn’t sure what she had seen. But if she said nothing, she was left with her anger. It wasn’t acceptable for a daughter to hate her father. Maybe she found a way to channel that hatred. To let someone else do the hating for her.
I take sips of the cold air to calm myself. She is capable of more than she lets on, I’ve always known that. When she was barely a toddler, she hoarded words for months so that her first utterance was a full sentence.
She could have put Vaseline in her hair to make it limp. She could have force-fed herself, and who wouldn’t gain weight on a diet of meat stew? She was quite capable of changing her handwriting. Easy enough to adopt shuffling steps and simple sentences.
Her mastery of crochet as Blanka was impressive, but maybe that was “sudden competence”—the genius child’s ability to learn skills seemingly overnight. Like Pete said, she could have used Google Translate for the diary: it was only one phrase, after all. With her memory, she could have learned enough Armenian for her brief conversation with Irina.
Perhaps it all began as a game, and it got out of hand, to the point where even she no longer knew quite where she ended and Blanka began. Or maybe she planned all of it. She is Pete’s child, master of the long game, but more intelligent than her father.
Pete brought Kia home and shut himself in our bathroom with Emmy and who knows what else Stella has been aware of. Maybe she saw what I refused to see. Freak-out mode might have been a cry for help, but it didn’t work, so she turned to something else.
My mind teeters: Is it possible? Maybe Stella always says, “I don’t remember,” when I ask her about that time because forgetting is healing. Or maybe it is the subterfuge of a child who doesn’t want to be questioned too closely, for fear of giving herself away.
“Are you having a good time at the beach, Mommy?” Her look holds concern for me in a way I’ve never seen before. Maybe Stella knew, even if I didn’t, that we would be better off without Pete. Luna too.
The winter sun comes out and changes the sea from grey to green and turns every pebble on the beach bright and sharp. Tears prick my eyes. “I’m having a lovely time, my darling,” I say, and she smiles. Her skin is pearly again, her red hair a wild tangle. If she masterminded Pete’s overthrow, she did it for me. I fought so hard to protect her, but all along, she was protecting me—and herself. She was fighting for us . My heart ignites.
Irina opens the grape-leaf tin and offers it to me. I take some ash in my hand. The only time I ever touched Blanka was when I released her after Stella tied her up. Now I am touching her in the most intimate way: the fine rubble of her bones, the powdery dust of her organs and skin. In my hand I hold the remnants of the vertebrae that once formed inside Irina. Now I am releasing her again. The wind is at our backs, and the ash leaves my hand and turns to cloud, a puff of breath in cold air. “Thank you,” I murmur. “Allons-y.” That’s what her favorite Doctor Who said when it was time for another adventure. Maybe now she will finally travel to the fringes of the universe.
“Allons-y!” Stella shouts. She is right behind me. She strides farther in, up to her knees, and puts her little warm hand in mine. She’s just a child, she couldn’t have masterminded such a hoax. And when Blanka finally spoke to me at the soup pots, I knew , without any doubt, that I was talking to a being beyond my understanding. I felt such awe, as if I were looking into the eye of a whale, sensing its unimaginably vast strength. That couldn’t have been my daughter.
If it was, Stella’s not going to tell me. She looks up at me and smiles. A wave sucks our footing away and makes us stagger. But we hold hands tightly, and we find our balance.