Page 10 of Clever Little Thing

“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 wasnothing 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 Blankatookgood 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 wassomething 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. Ididfeel 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?

6.

When I got to Cherie’s, Zach was playing with a lump of putty-colored gunk in a large metal bowl. I didn’t bother greeting him, because he never responded. Stella sat at the other end of the dining table, glued toBirdflight as the Basis of Aviation.

Cherie made coffee for herself and tea for me and carried the mugs into her breakfast nook, where the kids couldn’t hear us talk if we spoke in low voices. We both agreed that we were dreading tomorrow, the first day of school. I told Cherie about yesterday’s dead-bird incident, and she laughed and then said, “Neurotypicals can’t understand kids like ours.”

I burned my tongue on the tea. “Kids like ours?” Stella had her obsessions, but unlike Zach, she paid attention to the people around her. Zach never met anyone’s gaze, but Stella looked you straight in the eye.

Cherie placed a hand on mine. “Listen, I’ve been mulling overthis a lot, and I think you should get Stella tested. I dreaded it too, but when I confirmed that Zach’s autistic, it was actually a huge relief because then I had a way forward. And you’re lucky—you’ve got the money to go private. You don’t have to worry about NHS waiting lists.”

“Stellaisdifferent,” I agreed. “But that’s not a reason to take her to a doctor.”

Cherie leaned closer. She was skinny and energetic, always dressed in exercise gear, as if parenting were one long triathlon. Usually she was like a coach, always there to say, “Great job!” and “Keep it up!” whatever I did. But not today. “Charlotte, this is coming from a place of love, but Stella has so many of the signs. The sensory processing issues. The difficulty socializing. The hyperlexia.”

“Hyper what?”

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