Page 73 of Clever Little Thing

“But I can’t do that,” I say. “He’s her father.” If I get rid of him, somehow, Stella will have no father, and no matter how much Pete has hurt Blanka, he hasn’t hurt Stella. He loves her.

But he also won’t let her be herself. Maybe that is part of why Blanka slipped into Stella so easily—that pressure from Pete to change. Still, he has a legal right to see her. “He will never go,” I say. “I can’t do that.”

Stella shrugs. “ThenIwill never go.” I shiver at the thought of being stuck with Blanka forever. She is setting me an impossible task, like in a fairy tale. Find the ring I dropped in the sea. Spin hay into gold.

But as in a fairy tale, there has to be a way.

I make up my mind: I will do what Blanka wants. I will find a way. It is the first thing she has ever asked me for, after all. “If Pete goes, you’ll be satisfied? This will be over?”

Stella nods. “Oh yes.”

Irina says she’ll take Stella home and they’ll wait until I come up with a plan. But I don’t feel good about leaving Stella alone with Pete. “Aren’t you scared, after what he did?” I ask Stella, or rather Blanka.

“What more can he do to her?” Irina asks, her face grim.

•••

I go to the NICU to drop off my pumped milk for Luna. The nurses there are on edge around me, after yesterday’s fight with Pete and Kia, but they can’t deny me access to my own daughter,and the kind older nurse from yesterday provides me with a new breast pump. Then I take the train to my mother’s house in Oxford. I need to be alone, somewhere I can think. I have no idea how I am going to do it, but at least I know what I have to do.

I inherited the place on Edith’s death, but haven’t had the heart to come here since. I’ve had it cleaned, but it smells of damp, and of course it’s freezing. The kitchen cupboards still contain her meagre supplies: tins of baked beans and a packet of digestives. A plain white eggcup is inverted on the dishrack. Her sad last meal: a boiled egg.

I hold the eggcup and look out at her bird table, which has a shelter on top like a miniature Swiss chalet. She kept it stocked with suet balls, which she bought in bulk, rather than making them. Even for her beloved birds, Edith wouldn’t cook from scratch.

It probably baffled her that I liked to cook so much. All that effort for something that was going to disappear in a few minutes. Maybe I frightened her a little too, in my otherness. I wasn’t possessed, but I was still very different from her: look at how differently we’d reacted to giving birth.

Edith had to endure a grueling two-day labor. She was alone, since my father was dead by then. The doctor dragged me out with forceps, and, Edith said, I’d resembled “a skinned tomato, rather horrifying.” She told me this when I was pregnant with Stella. Why did she have to tell me that?

A robin lands on the bird table and finds it empty. He looks at the house with an impatient air, as if wondering why his dinner order is taking so long. Maybe Edith stood here and watched this very robin.

I can’t find suet balls in the kitchen, so I rummage around, and in the cupboard under the stairs, on a shelf by themselves, I find a child’s faded sun hat, a small pair of yellow binoculars, and a notebook that saysCharlotte’s Bird Logon the cover. Inside: lists of birds I wanted to see, a crayoned drawing of a woodpecker. I trace my finger over its wing. My mother could have binned this stuff. But she kept it to hand, as if any day, we’d go birding again. I pull down her blue waterproof, hanging on a peg on the inside of the cupboard door, and press it to my face.

She used to spread this waterproof out so we could sit on it when it was time for our lunch. She hated being in direct contact with the grass. A list starts to take shape.

Sensory issues

Extreme focus

Bluntness

Meltdowns

I know what Cherie would say. Maybe she’s right. I turn out the waterproof’s pockets as if they might hold the answer, and not just a few shreds of Kleenex. Then I sink to the floor and sit there for a long time, sifting through memories of my mother. I hated how hard it was to get her to look me in the eye. I thought it was because she wasn’t paying attention to me.

It doesn’t matter what her diagnosis would be. I understand now that her mind worked differently from mine. When she told me I was “horrifying,” I don’t think she meant to hurt. She thought shewas passing on helpful information: I might not love my baby on first sight. It probably baffled her when my eyes filled with tears.

I go back into the kitchen. I wish I’d thanked her properly for the two pots of mustard she gave me. I think now that they weren’t an insult. She simply thought that, like her, I would be happy to receive a gift of mustard, which took up little space in my house and worked perfectly well on fish fingers.

Outside, the robin is still waiting. Suet balls are best, but the damp digestives will have to do. But when I go outside, he flies away. I crumble the biscuits onto the bird table anyway, my eyes streaming in the cold. If only I’d understood that, when my mother wouldn’t look at me, it was because meeting someone else’s gaze was hard. We could have stood here and watched the robin instead.

•••

A few hours later, I am hungry, for the first time since the morning sickness hit, ravenous in fact. I order Indian food and gorge myself on saag paneer and chana masala. I feel warm and full, especially because the food comes in single-use plastic containers, which will probably be burned overseas, or be dumped in a landfill, or, worse, end up in the ocean in an island of trash the size of Texas. I wish that I could dump Pete in the middle of the Pacific trash vortex for eternity. But I can’t do that, and I can’t kill him, because I’ll end up in prison and then I won’t be able to take care of Stella and Luna.

If I can’t be with Stella, I’ll die. But if I have Stella, I could survive losing Luna. When I gave birth to her, I didn’t feel horrified, as Edith was when she first saw me. But I didn’t feel overwhelming love.

I can offer him Luna in exchange for Stella.

Pete might take that deal: he’ll have a fresh start, with Kia, and they’ll be rid of Stella, the difficult party pooper. Luna can still have her life this way, whereas if Blanka stays, Stella’s life is over, one way or another.

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