Page 37 of Clever Little Thing

“She passed away,” Emmy whispered loudly, at the same time as Irina said, “Dead.”

Kia placed her hand over Irina’s. To her credit, she didn’t try to make it any better. I felt awful. I’d judged Irina for being a no-neck seagull. I’d tried to push her away. I’d had no idea of the depth of her suffering.

•••

The guests left soon after dessert, and I slipped up to Stella’s room to check on her. Her light was off. I listened for the sound of herbreathing, and instead I heard a busy little sound.Scritch scratch. Scritch scratch.A mouse? I snapped the light on and caught Stella scrambling to put something under her pillow. I was sure it was the diary. I could see her pen on the nightstand.

“You don’t have to write in the dark, honey,” I said. “Don’t you want your nightlight on?” She’d always hated complete darkness. She shook her head. “Without your nightlight, it’s dark-dark,” I said.

“I like the dark-dark,” she said.

Another change, I thought. “Night night, my precious.” She let me kiss her, and I recoiled a little: even though she hadn’t been swimming for a few days and had since bathed daily without fail, she smelled faintly of chlorine.

Pete insisted on doing all the clearing up, so I lay on the sofa. I found myself googling “Azerbaijan bread ovens” and learned they made their bread in giant clay pots, with a fire at the bottom. The bakers leaned in to slap the bread to the walls. The ovens didn’t look big enough to fit a person. Maybe they cut him in pieces first, but this wasn’t a Grimms’ fairy tale. That kind of thing didn’t happen in real life. Then I read a little about the Baku pogrom and dropped my phone, nauseated.

Irina surely still thought about his death. Now she had to think about Blanka’s death too. But she kept on going. How weak I was by contrast. I doubtless seemed absurd to her, too much of a delicate flower to get out of bed some days, stressing because my daughter was only reading at her own age level, because I didn’t like her hair in plaits. I should be so grateful for what I had. My child was alive. I fell asleep determined to be nicer to Irina. I could let her bea family member of sorts. You could still set boundaries with family members after all.

In the small hours, I heard a little sound, faint but persistent. I crept to our bedroom door and listened. Silence. I went back to bed and drifted off. In my dreams, I kept hearing that sound:scritch scratch, as if some creature were busy in the wall, making its home inside ours.

22.

Iwent by Irina’s after school drop-off the next morning—of course English children didn’t have the day off—to tell her we’d keep the wedding dress. She just nodded, like it had been a done deal all along.

“You stay for tea,” Irina said, and disappeared into the kitchen. As I sat down, I wondered what on earth we were going to talk about. Other than Stella, we had no interests in common. I contemplated Blanka’s school photo, in which she smiled stiffly.

Returning with the tray, Irina caught me looking at the photo, and I felt I was expected to say something about Blanka. “They grow up so fast,” I offered.

“Not Blanka.”

I nodded. So maybe she did want to talk about Blanka. I’d been so desperate for her help, so ill, that I’d never realized. But here was a chance.

“What was she like as a child?”

“Blanka takes long time to grow up,” Irina said. She poured tea from a hideous monkey teapot. The monkey’s tail was the handle and its head, resting on the lid, was the knob on top. “She does not—have blood, you know.”

“Blood?” I was startled.

“Menstruation,” Irina said.

“Right,” I said. I’d been expecting to hear about Blanka’s first day at school, about the one-eared bear she took everywhere, or about their happy hours crocheting together. Not this.

“No menstruation, her whole life,” Irina continued. “We do not know why. But for years, no blood.”

I was uncomfortable. I would never have talked to Blanka about this when she was alive, and it seemed like the dead deserved their privacy even more.

“She didn’t menstruate,” I repeated, falling back on my mirroring technique. But she was in her thirties, a grown woman. “Did you not go to the doctor?”

Irina shook her head. “I ask, but she say no, no, no, is OK.”

This seemed strange to me, but then Blanka was a quiet woman whose English wasn’t fluent even after nearly two decades in this country. She was so secretive, so private. Perhaps she didn’t want to talk to a doctor about something so intimate or, god forbid, remove her long skirt and oversized hoodie and submit to a physical examination.

“But then,” Irina said, cradling her teacup, “four days before she die, she is woman.”

“Blood? I mean, she was menstruating?”

Irina nodded. The jam seemed very red as she spooned more of it into her tea. I didn’t know what to say. All through my teens, I’dnever mentioned the wordperiodin front of my mother. She replenished the supplies under the sink without comment. It was strange to hear Irina talking about the topic so frankly.

I felt sad for Blanka, not menstruating for years and not knowing why. It was tragic that she couldn’t do what a privileged, rich person would do, what I had done for Stella (although it hadn’t worked): march straight into the doctor’s office and demand to know what the matter was.

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