Page 14 of Clever Little Thing

Stella screamed louder and flailed her arms about.

I began to shake, and Stella shook too, her eyes black hollows, mouth twisted out of shape. Her grief seemed existential andentirely justified. She knew the truth: we’re all trapped in our own heads, incapable of communicating, alone.

Pete gave up trying to hug Stella and started to pace. It had taken me so long to accept that Stella did not like to be physically comforted. I told myself that it was merely a personal preference, like disliking raw tomatoes. It didn’t mean anything. But whenever she began screaming, I was afraid this said something deeper about her. If a child didn’t like to be nuzzled, did that mean she didn’t like being loved? If she didn’t want to nestle in my arms, did that mean she wasn’t capable of giving love? Maybe she had inherited that gene from my mother.

Stella was now crouched on the floor, rocking, and I sank to the floor too. I could bear it if Stella didn’t love me. But I couldn’t bear what it meant for her. She had something essential missing. She’d always be alone, never have—

“Shut up!” Pete yelled. “You shut up right now!” He bent down and grabbed Stella’s shoulders. Her little arm flew up and whacked him in the face, knocking his glasses to the floor. He snatched them up: one of the lenses was shattered. “I don’t have a spare pair. How am I supposed to go back to work tonight? Fuck. Fuck!” He punched the fridge so that a carelessly sealed bag of muesli fell off the top and spilled all over the floor. Then he stormed out of the room, and the front door slammed.

Stella took great, ragged breaths. She wasn’t screaming anymore, at least. I was having trouble catching my breath too. I was shocked that Pete had lost his temper like that. He almost never lost control. I ached to cradle Stella in my arms, but all I could offer wassome pretzels, which she refused. She let me dab her swollen eyes with a cool washcloth.

Now that she wasn’t screaming, I felt shaky, as if I’d had the flu for a week. I started to make some jacket potatoes with cheese for dinner. The storm had retreated as suddenly as it came. Stella now seemed perfectly fine. Pete texted,I feel awful. Walking about trying to get my head together. You guys OK?

Much better,I type, feeling sorry for him.Hope you can see OK with only one lens.

When the potatoes were ready, she asked if she could eat in her room, and when I checked on her, she was forking up mouthfuls of food. She didn’t say anything more about her bird.

After Stella was in bed, I sat alone at the dining table with a glass of water. Overhead hung the light fixture Pete had made after we moved in together in San Francisco, an old California railroad tie suspended from the ceiling on chains, with pendant lights, the effect both delicate and imposing. I would never have imagined I could make my own light fixture, but Pete took a class in metalworking and figured out how to do it. I felt bad now, thinking of that hopeful Pete, who’d had the time and imagination for such projects.

But Stella wasn’t a project. There was no class that could teach you how to deal with freak-out mode. Now, at least, he understood that it wasn’t merely a tantrum. I didn’t know what to do about it, but I did know that until we understood it better, the only thing you could really do was be there by her side. She didn’t need professional help. She needed two parents who would let her be her weird, unique self and try their best to understand her.

Pete came back about half an hour after Stella had gone to sleep. When had those grooves appeared, going from his nose to the corners of his mouth? He pulled me into his arms. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I snapped. I understand now why you took her to the emergency room. You didn’t know what else to do.”

I led him to the sofa. “Freak-out mode fries your brain.”

Pete nodded. “I should be able to comfort my own daughter. We don’t spend enough time together. I’ve put way too much into Mycoship. You and Stella are what really matter.”

I stroked his hair, feeling generous, because at last, someone else understood the terror of freak-out mode. “Stella knows you love her.” When Stella was born, Pete held her skin to skin under his shirt, her bud mouth suctioned around his little finger. The day she lost Sunny, the plush sunfish she’d had since she was a baby, he’d combed the Internet until he found an identical replacement (not that Stella was fooled). When we had friends or family over and she felt overwhelmed, Stella liked to hide on the bottom shelf of our pantry, which she called her alone-time cupboard. Pete never insisted she come out. He installed a light in there, as well as a handle on the inside of the door.

It was only when school started and she still shrank from playdates that he balked at how much time she spent in there. And then he insisted that she have a party for her eighth birthday.

I’d wanted to take Stella to the science museum or the aquarium. But Pete said that his friends had invited her to their kids’ birthday parties, and now it was time for us to reciprocate. He booked an animal entertainer, who brought along a pile of cages. Stella kept shooting desperate looks at me as the man brought outone panicky ball of fur after another. The pièce de résistance was an enormous snake the thickness of a fire hose and the color of a rotten banana. After some encouragement, the other kids had groped the snake while Stella covered her eyes, the only one to empathize with the reptile.

“I should never have organized that birthday party,” Pete said now. “I feel like it was all my fault. I could see she didn’t like the animal entertainer. I should have put a stop to it. Then maybe she wouldn’t have—”

“I’m sorry too,” I interrupted. I wasn’t apologizing for anything in particular, but there was no need to rehash what happened next.

I laid my head on his chest. It took guts to apologize and even more to delve into why you’d erred. In my etiquette column, I’d talked about a shallow versus a deep apology. In a shallow apology, you enumerated what you’d done wrong and apologized. In a deep apology, you talked aboutwhyyou had done something. A shallow apology was fine if you didn’t know the other person and the wrong done was small. But if it was someone you cared about, someone you loved, and the wrong was tremendous, only a deep apology would suffice.

“You’ve been under a lot of stress,” I said. “It’s not easy being responsible for all these other people.” The employees at Mycoship were making token salaries, gambling on it being successful. In California, Pete had worked for CannaGauge, his parents’ cannabis-testing equipment company, and he’d grown it until it was big enough to support us comfortably, as well as his parents. He could afford to pour his soul into Mycoship. But it was stressful for the others who worked there, unable to put anything into retirement or savings. Pete felt he owed it to them to make Mycoship succeed.

Still, maybe he was overdoing it. I saw my opportunity. “Maybe you could establish some boundaries with Nathan, like it’s OK to contact you on weeknights, but weekends are for family.”

Pete tensed: I could feel it in his chest, in his arms around me. “We’re so close to making it, you know? I feel like we’re right on the verge of all our hard work paying off. If we could just get one or two big-box retailers to take a gamble on us.” At the moment, Mycoship’s clients were small luxury businesses with an ecological bent, companies that made artisanal gin or beeswax candles. Pete wanted mycelium packaging—which actually enriched the soil when discarded—to be as commonplace as Styrofoam. “Tell you what, we’ll have one family day every weekend. Will that work?”

“It’s a good start.” As I hugged him, I kneaded his back with my knuckles, smelling his familiar, comforting smell of citrus zest and freshly sharpened pencils. “Maybe youcanteach Stella to surf,” I murmured, catching sight of the new boogie board. “You managed to teach me.”

Pete chuckled. “You weren’t that bad.”

Pete had persuaded me to try surfing after we’d been dating for a month. “Catching a wave is like flying. You’re going to love it.”

But no matter how many times I got it right on land, I couldn’t “pop up”—move from lying on the board to standing—in the water. I fell off my board again and again.

One afternoon, when we were in the ocean, paddling back out to the lineup after I’d wiped out yet again, Pete said, “You’ve just got to believe in yourself,” and I snapped.

“Could you sound any more Californian? You also have to know when to give up. This just isn’t for me.”

I braced for Pete to lose his temper. But he just nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter if you never catch a wave. I’m happy just being in the ocean with you.” He reached out for my hand, and my whole body relaxed. We lay on our boards, feeling the ocean’s rise and fall. A pelican skimmed low over the water. Then a wave moved towards us, and I knew I could catch it. I leaped to my feet in one fluid motion and rode nearly to the shore. Pete leaped off his board beside me, his face alight, and at our knees, the surf fizzed like champagne.

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