Page 49 of Clever Little Thing

“Does it bother you that Stella still won’t eat with us?” I asked as he lit candles. “She’s been like this for months.”

“She’s eaten with us a few times,” Pete said. “When Irina was—” He stopped. We both understood that in marriage, you had to understand when to drop it. Irina wasn’t coming back.

“She’s eating proper food at least,” I said.

Pete took my hand and kissed it. “Are you feeling better? How was Cherie?”

“Great,” I said. “She—never mind.” I didn’t want to rehash my conversation with Cherie, because then Pete would know she agreed with him about Stella. That I stood on my own.

“The green papaya salad is so good,” Pete said, tucking in. Then he noticed that I was only toying with my food. “Feeling sick again?”

“I don’t have an appetite,” I told him.

“Poor baby,” Pete said, gazing at me with concern. To make him feel better, I spooned some more papaya salad onto my plate. He was so tender, so loving. I could see how Stella yearned to pleasehim too. I just had to make her understand that changing her entire personality was not the right way.

•••

“Bedtime, honey,” I told Stella after we’d all finished eating.

“Will you read to me?”

I was surprised. I’d given up reading to her years earlier, at her request. Now she got into bed and actually scooted over to make room for me. Once, she would have felt suffocated having me in her bed. I would have rumpled the cover in a way that was unacceptable, or accidentally sat on a fold of her pajamas, or read too slowly, or too fast. Once I would have given anything to have had this coziness with her.

She chose a book from when she was a toddler:Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a book about a donkey that finds a wishing pebble and foolishly wishes he were a rock. He drops the pebble and he’s stuck: a rock forever. Eventually he escapes from his predicament, but I’d almost never been able to read to the end, so I was surprised by her choice now. The description of the poor donkey rock, alone in the snow, subsiding into endless sleep, had brought Stella to tears every time.

Now Stella listened without comment.

The poster of California birds on Stella’s wall caught my eye.Flight: The Complete History of Aviation, the book I’d bought for her, still sat on her desk, untouched. She was obsessed with flight until just a few months ago. When she found that gannet on the beach, she’d been so thrilled. At last, a chance to strip a bird’s wings down and study the biomechanics of flight like her hero, Otto Lilienthal.

Then I had an idea. I didn’t need to crack the diary to find out what was really going on inside my daughter. There was another way to tempt the real Stella out.

I spent a couple of hours looking online and finally posted an ad on what seemed like a suitable site. It seemed right, a way to go back to when this all started and take a different path.

Late that night I checked the site, and I had an offer. It was bigger than I needed, and I wasn’t entirely sure it was legal, but this was an emergency.

27.

The box took five days to arrive, because the Christmas delivery rush was beginning. Luckily, the box was insulated. When it finally showed up, Pete wasn’t home from work yet. “Why don’t you go and have your bath, honey?” I told Stella, and she went. Once she wouldn’t have been content until I’d showed her what was in the box straightaway.

I grabbed a kitchen knife and took the box to her room. I put it on her bed and slit it open. First, I had to pull out blocks of Styrofoam. It was ironic that the packaging used to send a dead seabird was exactly the sort that choked seabirds—although maybe it wasn’t that ironic.

The bird was much bigger than I expected. It was frozen but emitted an eye-watering smell: salty, gamy. It had slate-grey feathers, with a white neck and breast, a yellow beak with the characteristic red spot—a breeding adult—and pink legs, neatly folded underneath. The one eye I could see, red-rimmed in life, wassunken and yellow. I wondered what had killed it. I couldn’t see any obvious wounds. The seller had said it was a great black-backed gull that had died “of natural causes,” and I didn’t want to inquire further.

I’d thought of the bird as a scientific specimen, something for Stella to dissect, as she had longed to with the gannet. I’d say it was a present from both of us, and she would understand that this present meant we accepted who she was, no matter how hard that was for other people. We supported her fierce curiosity, which could seem ghoulish to others. We accepted that we had a daughter for whom a small corpse was a better present than a jewelry-making set.

But as I stared at the bird, sadness filled me. This was a wild thing that had once been alive, strutting along the shore, soaring on updrafts. There were gulls everywhere when Stella and I went to the beach in Mendocino, one day about a year ago. The waves broke in creamy, shallow swathes of surf, and when we stood in it, feeling the water tug at our ankles, it felt as if we were standing ankle-deep in shining waterlilies.

Stella ran around in circles, shouting quotes fromThe Art of War, which she had insisted on reading, at the gulls. “Know thyself, know thy enemy!” “Warriors win first and then go to war!” “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat!” Whenever one came near our backpack, as it always did if we strayed too far away, Stella raced towards it, waving her arms and shouting. There were other kids on the beach, building sandcastles, playing volleyball, or running in circles. But Stella was happy being Stella that day, and I was happy with her.

I wanted that girl back.

I pulled the bird out and arranged it on her bed, and then I stuffed the packaging back into the box and hid the whole thing in her wardrobe. I’d have to get rid of it later, without Pete seeing the Styrofoam. Then I went down to the living room and found my coloring book. I tried to lose myself in completing a mandala. Her bathroom door shut and the landing creaked. She was going into her room. I felt fluttery with anticipation.

A little noise of surprise came from upstairs. “Oh!” Then silence.

Was that happy surprise? I galloped to her room. But she was backed into the corner, her hands pressed over her face. Oh no. She didn’t like it. How could she not like it? Only three months ago, she went into freak-out mode because her father composted her dead gannet. Now here was a bigger prize, and in better condition too.

“Stella, baby. It’s OK. It’s a present,” I said. Obviously, surprising her had been a mistake. I knelt before her and held her shoulders. “I bought it so you could use it for science.”

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