Page 19 of Clever Little Thing

Stella said she wasn’t hungry, and Pete gave her permission to go to her room. I was too tired to protest.

“I think Stella would do better socially if we give her more space,” Pete said as I picked at my burrito.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, take today. You were in the bathroom feeling sick. I was chatting with Nick. We kind of just left the girls to themselves. Stella got on great with Lulu.”

The burrito smelled like cat food. I couldn’t eat any more. “A few days ago, you were so worried that you wanted to take Stella to the doctor. Now, on the evidence of one day with her, you think all she needs is more space?”

Pete looked at me, concerned. “I wasn’t criticizing your parenting.”

Stella appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Can I please have my bath, Mommy?”

“But you had one last night,” I said. Because of Stella’s aversion to hot water, we’d never had a daily bath routine.

Pete sent a message to me with his eyes: “Let’s give her more space.”

“I’ll do the dishes if you’ll get her bath started,” he said.

In Stella’s bathroom, I shut the door and turned the water on. I always ran only hot water first, because when we first moved in, our hot water was liable to run out. We’d replaced the boiler since then, but the habit of running hot only first had stuck. Closing the door behind me, I went to her bedroom for a nightdress, then realized the clean laundry was still in a pile on our bed.

When I went back to the bathroom, the door was open. Pete must have gone in to check on the bath. Maybe he’d decided she was ready to handle the sound of running water. But when I went in, I was stunned to see Stella already in the bath, with the tap still on. I gasped—that water was scalding. I turned it off and knelt down. “Sweetheart, are you OK?”

Stella seemed not to hear. She lay with her ears underwater, only her face sticking out. I put my hand in, and the water was hot enough to make my skin itch. But it wasn’t hot enough to burn. She was fine. “This is nice bath,” she said dreamily.

“What?” When Stella began to talk, it was in full sentences. I’d never heard her drop an indefinite article. I plucked at her arm to make her sit up. “What did you say?”

Stella sat up, hair dripping. “This is a nice bath. Thank you for running it.” She studied her reflection in the tap while I washed her hair. She even let me rinse out the shampoo without complaint. Maybe Pete was right and she did do better when her parents weren’t breathing down her neck. Something twisted in my heart: “You two have such an intense relationship.”

When I went into the kitchen, Pete had done the dishes and wiped the counters and now was removing the stove grates in orderto get at the crud beneath them. “Thanks for doing that,” I said. “Did you know that Stella’s keeping a secret diary? She’s like Harriet the Spy.”

“Who?”

“A girl in a children’s book who’s always writing in her diary. She wrote a lot of things about the people around her, and not all of them were very nice. Are you not curious to know what Stella’s writing? I’m tempted to take a peek.”

“No way,” Pete said. “She could leave the diary wide open on the coffee table, and I still wouldn’t read it. You’re not planning to read it, are you?”

“I was joking! Of course I won’t read it.”

He nodded. “By the way, were you not able to remove that mark?”

I was stunned to see that the cross was back. It looked like felt-tip this time. It had started out at child’s-nose level and was nearly at the level of my nose now.

“We need to talk to her about this,” Pete said.

“She knows not to draw on the wall,” I said. I went to the sink and squirted soap onto the sponge. Pete gently took the sponge away.

“We have to makeherclean it off,” he said. “She has to learn to handle her own problems.”

I couldn’t think of a good reason to disagree, in this particular instance, even though I felt uneasy about leaving the cross there all night. It was ridiculous, but I felt like the only way I could be sure it wouldn’t move any higher was to sit in the kitchen and watch it.

Pete’s phone rang, and he groaned. “Nathan,” he said. “Dudedoesn’t understand what it’s like to have a family.” He declined the call. At once, his phone rang again.

“Take the call,” I told him. “It’s fine. We had the whole day together.”

I remembered that Stella’s rejected lunch was still sitting in its box in my handbag. It was squashed and unappetizing, and I was about to toss it in the compost. Then, on impulse, I went up to her room and knocked. “Stella? I’m leaving some food outside your door.” I stood there for a moment, wondering if I should bring it in, but then I reminded myself what Pete had said: “She’ll eat when she’s hungry.”

I went into the living room and got out50 Stress-Relieving Designsand began to color a wise owl perched on a branch, its body an intricate network of paisleys. My mother thought coloring books stifled the intellect. But the day after her death, I’d felt an uncontrollable urge to grab an adult coloring book off the rack at WHSmith and hadn’t looked back since.

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