Page 56 of Clever Little Thing

Pete went downstairs to make some calls, and I changed out of my jumper and muddy jeans. As I was getting into bed, another contraction came. It was Braxton-Hicks because it was far too early for the baby to come. Probably it was stress, and if I rested, they would pass. Still, the prelude to labor made me think of what life would be like when I had the baby. It took all my time and energy to find out what Blanka wanted. I didn’t know how I could do it if I was breastfeeding and changing nappies. Ihadto make her leave before the baby came.

31.

“I want my diary.” Stella shook me, her breath hot in my face.

I sat up with a jerk. It was morning. “Where’s Daddy?”

“Making breakfast. I want my diary.” She pointed at Pete’s wardrobe.

“I already looked there.” Still, I climbed out of bed and opened it. She pointed at the high shelf where Pete kept his suitcase. I pulled it down. “I looked in here too.” Then I remembered the pouches he used to keep things when he traveled, now neatly folded in the suitcase’s mesh pocket.

The diary was in the smallest one. I’d forgotten that it was such a cheap, dog-eared notebook. I hoped I wasn’t foolish for expecting it to have the answers. “May I?” I asked her, and she nodded. I opened it at random: a wall of baffling symbols. This had to be the Armenian alphabet. Pages and pages that I had to find a way to translate. I found myself tracing the letters on the carpet, beginning with atand au. There was a gap and then a letter that lookedlike an upside-downm. After five clumps of these strange letters, I was back at the beginning. She was repeating the same phrase. I flipped to the previous page: the same. I looked backwards and forwards through the book, and it was all the same. She’d been copying out the same phrase for months.

“What does it mean?” I whispered. Why repeat the same phrase over and over—to yourself?

“Stella?” Pete called. “Charlotte! Breakfast!”

I took her arm. “Can I show him?”

But Stella shook her head.

“OK, I won’t show him. But can I hold on to it?”

More headshaking. She put her finger to her lips.

I understood: Pete couldn’t see the diary, and he couldn’t even know that I had done so. Whatever Blanka wanted, it was between the two of us.

“Can I take a photo at least?”

She nodded, and I did so before I zipped the book into its hiding place. Then I put the suitcase back on the shelf, careful to leave everything exactly as we’d found it.

Stella went downstairs to get her breakfast, and I grabbed my phone to figure out how to translate the diary. “Charlotte?” Pete appeared in the doorway, and I shoved my phone under the bedclothes. He presented a tray: oatmeal with sliced bananas. “I’m dropping Stella off at Lulu’s, so she’ll be off your hands for the day, and then I’m heading to the office. I wanted to make sure you eat something before I leave.”

“Great!” I shoveled in oatmeal until he was satisfied, and then rushed to Stella’s room. I hustled her through getting dressed and brushing her teeth, desperate to be alone with my phone.

The minute the door slammed behind them, I pulled up Google Translate. I couldn’t type in the words from the diary because I didn’t have those symbols on my keyboard. But I saw the images button and realized I could just upload the photo. With shaking hands, I did so. It was Armenian, of course. In the English alphabet, those words wereyes atum yem ayd mardun.

Translation: I hate that person.

I felt a jolt of fear. If Blanka hated someone this much, then whatever they had done, they couldn’t atone for it simply by holding their nose to a cross. She wanted them to suffer.

I understood now that Blanka didn’t hateme. I was her collaborator—she showed me the diary. But she’d written it in Armenian. She wanted me to have some information but not all of it. She wanted me to work to get at the truth. The diary took me one step nearer to understanding what she wanted, but not all the way.

I paced around the house for hours. I didn’t have the focus for detective work. My thoughts felt like those little silver balls in a game where you have to tilt a plastic tray in a box to get them into the slots. They rolled around and bounced off each other. I couldn’t make them come one at a time, or easily decide which was the most important thing to focus on.

In the early afternoon, another contraction came, and it didn’t feel like just Braxton-Hicks this time. It felt like a metal contraption squeezing my whole body. I sank to my knees and rested my forehead on the bed. It was too early, just thirty weeks. I had to go to hospital. I had to lie down. But if I dealt with what was happening in my body, it would be all-consuming. I’d probably be put on bed rest. I wouldn’t be able to save Stella, and the time to do that was now.

I needed more information about Blanka. Irina wasn’t going to tell me anything more. But if I could go to her house when Irina wasn’t there, I could look at Blanka’s room, at her things. Maybe she had a laptop with an obvious password, or maybe she’d written something down. She wouldn’t let me get to know her in life, but in death I could force the issue. She had to have left some clue about who she hated so much.

•••

Outside Irina’s house, I lingered for a while, trying to tell if she was in or not, hoping I might see her leave, so I’d know for sure. I dared to walk past once, quickly, to see if she was sitting in the window. Maybe she’d resumed her job as a hospice nurse, sitting at the bedsides of the dying. There was no point in ringing the bell if she was there. Last time I saw her, she’d made her feelings about me clear.

It was getting dark now, raining again. My hands ached with cold. I was so distraught I’d left the house without a jacket and, I now realized, without my phone. People rushed by with the hoods of their parkas up, the handles of heavy bags of festive groceries cutting into their palms.

I rang the bell, and rang it again. If Irina was there, I didn’t know what I’d say. The pavement was black with rain now. I rang the bell a third time. No answer. The house was dark. I tried the front windows: locked. I looked around for a hidden key. There wasn’t even a pot of geraniums out here.

But then I noticed the alley down the side between Irina’s house and the neighbors’. The gate at the back wasn’t locked. I went into the backyard. I could see over their fence to the neighbors’ garden.They had removed the hot tub, and there was a half-finished wooden deck in its place. I felt outraged. When summer came again, were they planning to grill rosemary pork chops and sit on indoor-outdoor furniture on the very spot where Blanka had sunk into oblivion?

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