Page 40 of Clever Little Thing

I had to get rid of Irina. No haggling over how many pickups we’d each do. I had to get rid of her for good.

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It was Irina’s turn to collect Stella the following day. When they got home, she went into the kitchen and began unpacking Stella’s lunchbox, something Blanka never did. I turned to Stella: “Can you go to your room? Take a snack from the kitchen.”

“Oh yes.” She went.

“I need to speak to you,” I told Irina.

She nodded, but began filling her black stewpot with water so I had to raise my voice over the sound of the tap. “You shouldn’t have told Stella all those terrible things,” I said.

She hefted the pot onto the stove. “Children need truth.”

“But not theentiretruth, Irina. She’s not old enough for that. Can you not see how much she’s changed? You’ve traumatized her.”

Irina nodded, like I was just telling her we’d run out of bin bags, and turned the gas on under her pot. I turned it off, placed myself between her and the stove.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable with you taking care of Stella.”

Irina took an onion from the basket she kept on the countertop, determined not to hear me. I stood there, hesitating. With my columns, there was always one troll who said, “Just tell it like it is.” If your dinner party guests stay too late, if someone serves you a food you hate, if a friend asks if they can come to your birthday party when you didn’t invite them, tell the truth. I want you to go now. I don’t like this food. I didn’t invite you because I don’t like you.

But I couldn’t “tell it like it is” to Irina. I couldn’t “tell it like it is” to anyone, let alone her. I could not say, “Get out of my house. I don’t trust you to take care of my daughter, because you failed your own daughter.”

She was watching me, shoulders hunched, eyes sunken. I couldn’t just “tell it like it is,” because she’d suffered too much.

We stood there, frozen, for a moment. Then I emptied the stewpot and thrust it into her arms. I walked to the front door, opened it wide, and stood there. She would have to go eventually, and then all I had to do was not let her back in.

Irina moved towards the door finally, her lips so tightly pressed they were almost folded inwards. It was raining outside. She surveyed my bump. “You have baby in hospital?”

“Probably,” I said, wrong-footed by this new tack.

“Bad idea. Very dangerous.”

“Hospitals in this country are pretty safe,” I said.

“In my country, I help with many, many babies at home,” Irina said. “All I need is old shower curtain and scissors.” She snipped with two fingers and smiled. “I boil. Good for Stella too. She can help.”

“I don’t think so.” I went upstairs to tell Stella that Irina was leaving. “She has to go away for a while,” I said, lacking the energy for a proper explanation. At the door, Stella flung her arms around Irina. “Goodbye, Little Wolf,” Irina said. When she left, Stella didn’t protest, and this made me more certain I was doing the right thing. Something was very wrong if she could no longer cry or scream.

After Irina was gone, I got a plastic bag and swept through the house, purging it of the afghan, the ceramic spoon rest, the tea caddy, the sticky pot of jam, the packets of herbs and spices. I tied the bag and threw it in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d drop it all by Irina’s house at some point. For now, I wanted to get it out of my sight.

I went to the powder room and took my time washing my hands. When I returned to the kitchen area, the cross was back. It wasn’t on top of the patch where I’d removed the paint, but higher up. Stella would have had to climb on a chair to draw it. I thought she’d been in her room the whole time, but obviously she’d sneaked out while I was washing my hands. I called her, and she shuffled downthe stairs—shuffled, when she used to spring and prance. “I see you’ve drawn another cross on the wall, even though I asked you not to,” I said. “Why did you do that?”

“I did not,” said Stella. “I was upstairs.”

“Stella, you know all those things Irina told you? How Blanka died, and how Blanka’s father died. Pretty upsetting things. Do you want to talk about it?”

She shrugged. “I’m not dead.” Again, that puzzling phrase, the one that sounded so callous but surely betrayed a depth of repressed feeling. Unless she really wasn’t capable of feeling things, but I pushed that thought away.

I pointed at the cross. “Is this your way of trying to tell me something?”

“Oh yes.” Stella dragged over a stool from the breakfast bar. She clambered atop the stool.

“That’s not safe,” I told her, but she rose to her tiptoes, her nose resting against the cross. “Stop that,” I said sharply.

She meekly climbed down, but I didn’t tell her to clean the wall. I decided not to clean it myself either. It was clear that whatever I said to her, the cross was going to come back. Maybe she was doing it as a cry for help. Really, that was the only explanation that made sense. In that case, the only way to stop it from reappearing was to actually help her.

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