Page 41 of Clever Little Thing

Pete got home when I was putting Stella to bed, and when I came out of her room, he was in the garden, on the phone. He was crouched on his heels, digging a dandelion out of the lawn with aweed puller—he refused to use pesticides. While he worked, he murmured into the phone. Nathan was incapable of solving any problem on his own. When he saw me, he ended the call and stood up. He put his arms around me. “What’s the matter, baby?”

“I had to get rid of Irina,” I confessed.

Pete recoiled. “What? Why on earth would you do that? After all she’s been through?”

“She told Stella that Blanka killed herself.”

“Poor Blanka,” Pete said. I’d told him about Blanka’s suicide.

“She also told Stella about the pogrom.”

“That is a lot for her to process,” Pete said carefully. “But Stella seems OK.”

I cast about for a way to convince him I’d done the right thing. “Irina asked about our birth plans. She said I had to have the baby at home.”

“You do hate doctors.”

“She offered to be the midwife.”

“That’s so generous.”

“It’s weird, Pete! And she said Stella could help. That does not sound psychologically healthy.”

A vein showed in Pete’s forehead. “You know I sometimes get home from work before Irina leaves. Every time, Stella stands in the window and waves until she’s out of sight. Have you noticed that?”

“Well, she won’t be doing that anymore.” I suddenly realized that I didn’t like beards, not that I would ever tell Pete that.

“At Thanksgiving, Nick said he couldn’t believe how much she’s changed. So neat and well-behaved.”

I felt like trampling over his careful vegetable bed. “Nick’s sexist, have you looked at his tweets? I don’t want a well-behaved little girl who’s all sugar and spice.”

“You don’t want her to behave?”

“I’m telling you, Irina has damaged her.”

“Jesus, Charlotte. Have you thought about how this will affect Stella?”

“Isawhow it affected her,” I said. “She was there when I threw Irina out. She didn’t react at all. No emotion. Does that sound like our daughter to you?”

Pete was silent, and I pressed my advantage. “I want to find a therapist for her. She needs to talk to someone. She needs support to process all the horror that woman has fed her.”

Pete scratched his beard.

“A few months ago, you wanted to get her professional help. It couldn’t hurt,” I said.

“I don’t agree,” he said. “If she talks to a shrink about it, that could make her think it’s a big deal. That could be traumatic in itself. It’s like when she was little and she fell over. If you picked her up and said, ‘Oops-a-daisy,’ she was fine. But if you sprinted over and said, ‘Oh my god, you poor baby,’ she screamed her head off.”

I said nothing. I wished I could make him understand how I felt about Irina and particularly about her nutso offer to serve as my midwife. It was as if, not content with messing up both her daughter and mine, Irina wanted to preside over my baby’s birth and reach right up inside me where I was most vulnerable.

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Later, when Pete was dealing with work email, I pulled up the Google Doc he’d shared with me, back when he was pushing to take her to get assessed. I found the tab for child psychotherapists, and I felt a stab of misgiving.

When we’d lived in California, everyone seemed to go to therapy, often for the low-grade malaise that was part of life—this person loved his spouse but wasn’t “in love” with her, or that person, although a successful doctor, felt she wasn’t “passionate” enough about her job. Therapy seemed to be cleansing in a way that wasn’t really necessary, like colonic irrigation. In my case, I couldn’t see the point of rehashing my childhood after I’d launched myself more or less successfully into adult life.

But Stella was suffering from something much bigger than low-grade malaise. I clicked through therapist web pages, disqualifying anyone who seemed unserious. One woman smiled too widely, flashing teeth I thought had been straightened. A man mentioned “perfectionism” as one of the issues he helped to address—when every job interviewee knows that this is only a pretend flaw.

Wesley Bachman was a fortysomething balding man with a gentle face. He was highly educated, with a lot of letters after his name. He specialized in trauma. He was serious. Over the phone the next day, I told Wesley I believed that the shock of learning about Blanka’s suicide, and about Blanka’s father’s murder, had caused behavior changes in Stella. “I can’t get her to talk about it. All she says is ‘Oh yes’ and ‘I’m not dead.’ She acts like it’s not a big deal, but Iknow it is. And she’ll only eat at the table if Blanka’s mother is present; otherwise she eats in her room. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

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