Page 43 of Clever Little Thing

Wesley put his head on one side. “Only being slim is natural?”

“Of course not. I simply want her to be myself. I mean, herself.” The playroom smelled unpleasant, sweetish, like apple juice and glue sticks. I placed my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry, I misspoke.”

“Are you feeling OK?” Wesley asked.

“Fine.” No need to mention that since giving up Irina’s bread, I was back to round-the-clock morning sickness. I didn’t want to seem weak.

“What kinds of things do you and Stella like to do together?”

I told him how even when I worked full-time, I’d spent as much time with her as possible. We read, we went on walks, we had secret games. “Like SkyPo,” I said. Wesley nodded and twinkled, and I explained.

SkyPo (rhyming with typo) were mysterious enemies in the sky who were out to destroy us. We hid from SkyPo under bushes and trees. The birds were sometimes on SkyPo’s side, their brains controlled by SkyPo’s birdbrain-control technology, and sometimes on our side, desperately trying to give us messages in their bird language.

I suddenly stopped, seeing Wesley’s twinkle fade away. SkyPo always seemed to transform the ordinary stuff of the world—pigeons, bushes, clouds—into an epic drama. But did I somehow make Stella afraid of the world, of clouds and birds? Maybe it wasn’t actually such a fun game.

“You mentioned some other changes in Stella that you have concern about,” Wesley said. “I mean apart from the eating and sleeping and such.”

“She hardly reads anymore, and she talks less,” I said. “A lot less. She’s always been hyperverbal. Until recently, she read constantly. Talked in elaborate sentences with subclauses. Now, it’s like…it’s like her language is declining. Like she’s forgetting it.”

Once, Stella would have listened to our conversation and understood every word, no matter what circumlocutions we used. Butnow, as we discussed her, she polished the stovetop, using her sleeve again, showing no sign of paying attention to us. I felt a sudden urge to quiz her. Did she remember the name of that jellyfish that could turn itself into a baby?

“Tell me, did you have her IQ tested?” Wesley asked.

“There was no need. She was using phrases likememento moriwhen she was five years old.”

“Have you heard of asynchronous learning?” Wesley asked. “Different parts of the brain develop at different speeds. Sometimes if one part is developing, the other parts aren’t keeping up. That’s how you get a child who can use sophisticated sentence structures but who hasn’t learned to share yet. It’s possible that the verbal part of Stella’s brain was developing really fast and now the other parts of her brain are catching up. The playing, the socializing—those are as important as reading books.”

“But it’s not like the verbal part of her brain is no longer developing as fast. It’s shutting down.”

“Being a parent can take some unexpected turns,” said Wesley. “Our young people are figuring out who they are every day. I’ve got a client whose daughter was a school refuser, didn’t go to school for a year, barely came out of her room. All she did was these incredibly realistic oil paintings of dead fish. Now she’s back at school, doing A-levels in geography and computer science. Her mother’s over the moon.”

“Those fish paintings sound more interesting to me,” I said.

“Hm,” said Wesley. He looked at his list of questions. “How is your relationship withyourmother?”

What did that matter? But I didn’t want to sound defensive. So Igave my stock response when asked about Edith. “She and I were very different people.”

“She passed away?”

“About nine months ago.”

Wesley nodded and leaned forward in a way that made me think he’d learned it in therapy school. “Leaning forward at a forty-five-degree angle shows compassion.”

“That could put stress on Stella too,” he said.

“They weren’t close either. It’s when Stella found out about Blanka that she started to change. I told you. When she found out about Blanka and then about Blanka’s father.”

The room really reeked. I wished he would open a window. I pulled out my handkerchief and placed it over my nose and mouth. “Excuse me.”

Cherie once sent me a link to that famous essay about adjusting to having a child with issues. The essay compared it to thinking you’re going to Italy on holiday and then realizing you’re going to Holland. As long as you embrace Holland, you can still have a great holiday. But this wasn’t Holland. This was floating on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic. I cast about for some concrete way to convince Wesley that Stella was changing for the worse. “She started keeping a diary. She’s always writing in it. It’s like a compulsion,” I said.

“That makes you uncomfortable,” Wesley said.

“Because nobody writes in their diary about how peachy their life is, do they?” I glanced over at her to make sure she was preoccupied, and then I whispered, “She smells different.”

Wesley looked startled. “How so?”

I didn’t want to tell him about the vanilla and the honeysuckle, about my life’s most private, glorious moment. But I told him she smelled of someone else’s laundry detergent and of gomgush, even though I used the same detergent I always had, and she hadn’t eaten gomgush in days.

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