Page 46 of Clever Little Thing

“The first night? I did notice the smell, yes.” Pete looked sheepish. “I always thought she smelled like, um, the birth canal. Maybe it was your hormones that made her smell so good to you.”

I stared at him. Pete clearly didn’t understand what I was talking about at all. That night was the closest I’d got to the molten core of love at the center of it all, to my true purpose in the scheme of things. It was more than just oxytocin. I’d always assumed we loved Stella the same amount, but I now saw that his love for her was not as powerful as mine.

Pete stayed up late to work, and I went to bed alone. When I closed my eyes, I could see her handwriting, so small and careful, like someone was going to whack her hand with a ruler if there was a pen stroke out of place. But few of the letters she had formed were ones I recognized. Stella didn’t care about leaving the diary in plain sight, because she wrote in code.

Now

25.

The fruit bowl now contains mottled red-and-yellow pears, and they look real. I scan the room, but the ceramic green Bartletts from this morning are nowhere to be seen. I take a bite out of each pear to check: real, real, real.

I sink into the chair by the window. I know this doesn’t matter and I should let it go, but I can’t. Maybe someone put the fake pears in the fruit bowl by mistake and they noticed it when they came in to make my bed. They added the red-and-yellow pears and removed the ornamental Bartletts. But why wouldn’t they put them on the window ledge? They would have looked perfect.

Or maybe the fruit was all real in the first place. There never was any test, that was just paranoia. I mistake reality for an imitation of itself. Panic rises inside me: Can I trust my perception of anything?

I should pump to encourage my milk to come in, but I need to relax to pump. I go to the bathroom and fill a glass with water.When I look in the mirror, for a moment I just see a jumble of features—a nose here, a grim mouth there, two wild eyes all the way over there—and it takes a moment to organize them into my face. Maybe it’s just because I’m not wearing any makeup. I have the dizzying thought that the person in the mirror isn’t me, and maybe I’m not real either. I can’t be alone anymore. I have to talk to someone.

I listen at Dr. Beaufort’s door and can’t hear any voices, so she’s not with a patient. I knock and enter, and she’s sitting in her armchair, scrolling through something on her phone and eating a slice of Christmas stollen, which looks much more tempting than the apple-parsnip muffins on the buffet table at lunch. She stands up, brushing icing sugar from her poncho. “Charlotte, now’s not a good—”

I sit on her sofa. “I have to talk to you.”

She remains standing. “I know your concern about your daughter feels urgent, but perhaps we need to take a break for the rest of the day. The best thing you can do right now is take care of yourself. Proper sleep, proper meals.”

“Please—I’m not some entitled rich bitch who expects her therapist to be available on demand. I’m—” My whole body is trembling. I put my face in my hands.

Her voice is gentle. “Things will look different when you’ve had some rest.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“When you’re depressed, your mind plays tricks on you.”

“I’m not depressed. Why do people keep saying that to me?”

Dr. Beaufort returns to her chair, sighing. “Having a motherwho suffered from postnatal depression is a major risk factor. I’ve been reading through your file.”

I take my hands away from my face. “My mother wasn’t depressed either.”

Dr. Beaufort consults my file on her phone. “Your husband informed us that your mother was hospitalized three weeks after you were born. She also had major depression later in life, and was hospitalized several more times.”

“She had a lot of academic conferences,” I say. “My husband must be confused.” But I press my fist to my forehead. When I was little, I hated the feeling of the teaspoon scraping the shell of my boiled egg. Now I have that feeling inside my head, something hard scraping at the delicate inside.

My mother’s academic conferences never appeared on any calendar. She always remembered one right after she’d lost her temper. She never threw birthday parties or made proper meals. She thought saying, “You’re welcome,” was unnecessary. Who but a depressed person, a person who can barely get out of bed, would think that saying, “You’re welcome,” is too much effort?

“My motherwasdepressed,” I say, trying it out.

“Perhaps it affected the way she parented you.”

My mother treated me as if I were not Charlotte, not the daughter she expected. She made me feel that I didn’t act right or look right. Maybe I didn’t smell right either—just like Stella is not Stella and doesn’t smell right to me.

Maybe I’m the problem, not Stella.

Dr. Beaufort is looking at me like she knows something, but shewants me to realize it on my own. I do know it, but I don’t want to say it: my mother and I are not so different after all.

•••

I go up to my room and call Pete for the second time today. “How do you know my mother had postnatal depression?”

Pete sighs, like we’ve already been over this. “She told me when you were pregnant the first time. It wasn’t a big heart-to-heart. She just said she’d had to go to hospital several times for ‘trouble with her nerves.’ ”

---