Page 50 of Clever Little Thing

But she wouldn’t take her hands away from her face. She really was terrified, not excited, not curious. I felt sick. Where did my weird, brave scientific daughter go? I pressed my face into her solid, unyielding chest. “Stella, Stella, my Stella. What’s happening to you?” I moaned.

“Jesus fucking Christ! How did that get in here?” Pete was home, standing over the bed.

I leaped to my feet. “It’s OK, it’s fine. Don’t use that language in front of her.” I was trembling. I wiped my tears away. “I bought it. I put it here. I thought Stella would like it.” I turned back to her, sniffing. “Darling, don’t you remember the gannet? This is a replacement. It’s even bigger, it’s better.”

But she shrank away from me. Maybe it had to be a bird she found herself, in its natural environment. Maybe there was something wrong, suspicious, about a dead bird in a box—How did it die really? But then I remembered how excited she’d been about the gannet.

“Daddy?” said Stella in a small voice.

“Stella, my love,” I said. “Don’t look at Daddy, look at me. You don’t have to pretend to be someone else. I know you’re in there. Moo, I’m a cockatoo. What do you say? Please, Stella, please. Moo, I’m a cockatoo. And you say?” Nothing. “Please, Stella,” I begged, but Stella just stared at me.

Her eyes were different. The irises seemed darker, the eyes themselves narrower. I saw, clearly, that she wasn’t pretending to be someone else for her father’s sake. Shewassomeone else. But that wasn’t possible. I sank down onto her rug.

“Stella?” Pete took her hand. “Go downstairs until I can clear this up. Look, I’ll take you.” He returned wearing the rubber gloves and put the bird in a bin bag. I picked myself up off the rug. He started stripping her bed, his face drawn. When he’d got all her sheets in a bundle, he said, “Can you at least explain to me why you thought she’d be happy to find a dead bird in her bed?”

“On her bed, notinit,” I said. “And obviously, I got it because she loves that kind of thing. You saw what happened when you threw away the gannet. I was trying to make up for that.”

Pete picked up the bundle of sheets and then the bin bag with the bird in it. “Look, go and lie down or something. I’ll come and talk to you in a minute.”

In our room, I got into bed with my clothes on and tried to closemy eyes and shut everything out. But our sheets were bamboo twill, supposed to be both sustainable and soft, but I felt every diagonal rib abrading me. When Pete came in, he said, “I’m really worried about you. You’re so hostile to Stella. To me too. You correct her grammar, you said nothing about her swimming or about me taking her all day or dealing with dinner. Then this bird. What the fuck.”

“Great black-backed gull.” I felt like it was disrespectful to its wild, beautiful life to call it “this bird.” Like none of that ever happened. “Anyway, I didn’t realize taking care of Stella was such a chore.”

“Well, it’s tiring, however much we love her. Eight-year-olds are tiring. Emmy and I were talking about how hard it is.”

I stared. Why was he lumping her in with other kids? Why was he confiding in Emmy? I wondered if he knew about @LittleHiccups, where there were in fact no hiccups whatsoever. Emmy had once rescheduled Lulu’s birthday party at the last minute because the light that day wasn’t conducive to photography.

I pulled the sheet over my head and curled up, cradling my stomach, wondering how the child inside me could survive this. Maybe the stress would cause me to miscarry again. That might be a good thing. How I could mother a second child feeling that I had lost my first?

The bed creaked as Pete sat down. He squeezed my shoulder through the sheet. “Would you really want to go back to fighting with her over baths and putting on her pajamas? Getting called into school twice a week? Taking her to the emergency room because she’s screaming so much?”

“Yes, I would,” I mumbled. “She’s changed too much.”

He cracked his knuckles, a bad habit I thought he’d quit. “From where I’m standing, you’re the one who’s changed.”

He had it all wrong. I sat up and climbed out of bed, pulling a hoodie from my dresser. “I need some air.” Pete nodded, even though it was dark and raining. It was like he was relieved that he and Stella could get a break from me.

Outside, Christmas trees twinkled in people’s front windows. One in particular caught my eye, over the top with garish tinsel, multicolored fairy lights, and presents piled high. I’d ordered Stella’s presents early, as I always did, and they were waiting on the top shelf of my wardrobe: a biography of Earhart, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’sFlight to Arras, a copy of a 1940s Spitfire manual, a pocket compass. All gifts for who Stella used to be. I’d had such fun choosing them, imagining her delight. The fairy lights blurred as my tears fell.

•••

Irina gave me a hard stare when she opened the door. “You look terrible.”

“I know.” It was raining and my hair hung in rattails. Irina’s hair was scraped back, but there seemed to be much less of it: she wasn’t wearing the hairpiece with which she usually bulked out her bun. “You’re not looking your best either,” I found myself saying.

Irina shrugged and patted her hair. “So far, this is terrible apology.”

“Look, it’s really cold out here.” I’d tried talking to Cherie and failed. Irina was the only person I had left, even if she hated me.

She led me into the kitchen, which smelled somewhere betweenstale gingerbread and the back of an old cupboard. “Well?” she said.

The kitchen had unpleasant fluorescent lighting. “You’re not to blame for what’s happening to Stella,” I admitted. “I shouldn’t have thrown you out like that.”

Irina’s shoulders relaxed a little. She gestured for me to sit at the kitchen table, covered with an embroidered cloth. Before, she’d taken me into the living room. This was where she ate her meals. I felt a tiny spark in my chest. Maybe I wasn’t a guest now, to be treated formally. We knew each other better than that.

“I’m worried that something’s happening to me,” I said. “Pete thinks—” I tried for a laugh. “He thinks I’m going a bit mad.”

Irina nodded. “You are—what is word—too tight?”

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