Page 2

Then

2.

When Stella and I spotted my friend Emmy, her daughter Lulu was already racing towards the sea. But Stella clapped her hands over her ears. “Too loud,” she moaned.

“What is, sweetie?” I asked as Emmy unfolded a blanket, laying her baby, Madeleine, on top. When she sat down, she took care to spread the skirt of her white Breton striped dress so it wouldn’t get creased. It was a perfect August day, the sky a rare, deep blue. I wanted the girls to run around together. But Stella clutched her head and grimaced as if a military jet screamed overhead, even though the only sound was the surf and the cry of gulls.

Emmy pushed up her oversized sunglasses and studied Stella with concern. “Does she have a headache?”

I shook my head. “I think she doesn’t like the sound of the waves. She’s got very acute hearing.” She also didn’t like the sound when I ran her a bath.

Stella sat down and drew her knees up. The broad brim of her sun hat cast her face into shadow. She seemed subdued. Maybe she was more upset about Blanka leaving than I’d realized. She had resigned abruptly a week ago. After four years of working for us, she’d sent a brief text: I cannot come anymore. When I tried to get a reason out of her, she ghosted me. After all that time she’d spent with Stella, playing with her, bathing her, feeding her, apparently my daughter was still just a job to her, one she cast aside like a used tissue.

“Maybe Stella needs a snack,” Emmy suggested. “How about a piece of your mom’s homemade banana bread, sweetheart? Or I’ve got some carrots somewhere.”

With her hands still glued to her ears, Stella shook her head. “No, thank you.”

“She might be getting a bit hot in that sunsuit,” Emmy said to me.

“With our Irish coloring, you can’t be too careful,” I said. Stella had inherited my pale complexion, along with my hair, the dark red of saffron threads.

Emmy’s daughter Lulu attempted a cartwheel at the edge of the sea, her flaxen hair twisted into a pretty crown braid. Emmy herself had a fashionably messy side plait. I’d looked at videos on how to do both, but Stella hated me touching her hair. I wished that Stella would go and play too. Year four started in a few days, and Stella still struggled to fit in. I organized this end-of-summer trip to a beach in Kent so Stella could spend time with another kid in her class. Instead, Stella sat in her self-imposed bubble of silence.

Lulu finally turned a perfect cartwheel and then did one after another. My chest felt tight. Lulu looked so joyful and free. Stella had never done a cartwheel in her life. But I reminded myself that other mothers had trouble getting their kids to read, whereas Stella read happily for hours. I tapped her shoulder and made sure she could see my lips. “I love you,” I said. Her gaze met mine, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

Emmy attached her baby to her breast, though thanks to a clever opening in her dress, you couldn’t see a thing. She managed to look chic even when breastfeeding. She caught me looking at her, and I turned away and folded my arms over my own chest, clad in a nondescript white T-shirt. My breasts were swollen, and Emmy didn’t know I was pregnant. I was hopeful this time, but I’d lost pregnancies before, and I didn’t want to jinx this one by making it public. Not yet. Luckily, I was barely showing.

Emmy placed a hand on my arm and murmured, “I’m so sorry about Blanka. I only found out this morning, or I would have messaged you.”

I murmured back, “It’s fine. Stella liked her, but she actually wasn’t very good at babysitting.”

Emmy looked reproachful. “Well, she’s gone now.”

“She moved?” I laid a palm over the back of my neck. I’d recently had my hair cut short, a practical bob, and it felt like the sun was burning the newly exposed skin.

Now Emmy was staring at me too. “Oh my god, you haven’t heard?” She looked at Stella, who still had her hands clapped over her ears, then leaned closer to me and whispered, “Are you sure Stella can’t hear?”

I wasn’t. Then I had an idea. I took a tissue from my tote, tore it down the middle, and folded each half until I had two tiny wads. I wet the wads and squeezed them out. I pulled Stella’s hands away from her ears. “Ta-da! Earplugs.” Once I got them in, her whole body relaxed. “Now you can go and have fun,” I said. Stella clambered to her feet and ran to join Lulu.

“Genius,” said Emmy. I smiled. It seemed like we were going to have an actual, real conversation, instead of just administering sunscreen and snacks. Best of all, Stella was at last playing happily with Lulu.

“Blanka’s dead,” Emmy said.

I shook my head. The surf rushed into my ears, smashing, pummeling, grinding. Stella was right: the noise was unbearable. Emmy’s mouth kept moving. When the noise finally retreated, I thought I had the gist: an accident of some kind. Emmy didn’t know the details.

“But I just saw her,” I said absurdly, as if the fact that she’d just been alive could disprove her death. “When did this happen?”

“On Thursday. Just before the weekend. Look, I’m so sorry you’re finding it out from me. I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

“How do you know?”

“I ran into my friend who lives on the same street,” Emmy said. “She saw them taking her away.”

Blanka had died just before the weekend, a few days after she quit. If she hadn’t stopped babysitting for us, would she still be alive?

I closed my eyes and saw Blanka shuffling along the pavement in her long black skirt and grey hoodie, shoulders drooping as if she carried all her worldly belongings on her back. She’d only been in her thirties, and had a round, girlish face, but she had moved like an old woman.

“Was it a car accident?” I asked, feeling sick.

Emmy shook her head. “My friend didn’t know.”

“Her poor mother,” I said. I had never met her mother—Blanka was a very private person—but I knew they lived together. I wondered if the accident had happened at home.

“Blanka was with you for a long time, wasn’t she? I’m so sorry, Charlotte. This must be awful for you.”

I nodded, although in fact Blanka was never one of those babysitters where people say, “She’s part of the family.” Stella liked her, but Pete and I never quite understood why. We used to joke that she was the nondairy creamer of babysitters: the only good thing you could say about her was that she was better than nothing.

Now I felt terrible for every bad thought I’d ever had about her.

A shriek tore the air. Lulu charged towards us, face crumpled. She threw herself on the blanket, wailing, and Emmy set her baby down and squeezed Lulu tight. Stella stood at a safe distance, clutching something behind her back. My heart sank.

“Stella, what is that?” I called. She shook her head and pointed to her earplugs.

“We went to the rocks,” Lulu choked out. “Stella said she had something to show me, and it was a—dead—” She resumed her wailing.

“Oh my god,” said Emmy as Stella finally presented what she held: a mass of bones and quills, some kind of seabird. A piece of it fell to the sand. “Oh my god.” She snatched up her baby and, clutching Lulu’s hand, retreated several yards.

“Get it away!” Lulu whined.

“Don’t worry, Lulu,” Stella called. “It can’t hurt you. It doesn’t even have a head.”

Lulu buried her face in Emmy’s waist. “I don’t want that thing near the baby,” Emmy called, clutching her infant to her chest. “It could have a disease.”

“OK, OK.” I walked over to Stella, leaving Emmy consoling Lulu. I pulled out her earplugs, but she didn’t complain about the noise of the surf anymore. She was too excited. “Why do you have that seagull, sweetie?” I asked.

“It’s not a seagull, it’s a gannet. I want to look at it. Please, Mommy?”

I softened. Stella loved investigating. It never even occurred to her that Lulu might not share her scientific interest.

“You can study it at home,” I said. “But it’s going in the boot. And you’re apologizing to Lulu.” Luckily, I had a spare plastic bag in my tote. I helped Stella stuff the thing in, and marched her back to the blanket, where Emmy was placating Lulu with banana bread. “I’m sorry you felt scared, Lulu,” Stella said, hanging her head. Lulu sniffled and kept on eating. Nobody offered any banana bread to Stella, even though I was the one who made it. I used almond flour because Emmy claimed Lulu was allergic to gluten.

Emmy looked at Stella, her face wary. With a shock, I realized that she was thinking about what Stella had done at her eighth birthday party. My face grew hot.

This skin Stella and I had: you really couldn’t be out in the sun for a minute.

···

Stella insisted on having the bag on her lap on the way home, and I didn’t have the energy to argue with her. As I started the drive back to London, my heart ached. She was so different from her peers. She read at an adult level: her bedtime reading was Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation by Otto Lilienthal. No wonder it was difficult for her to socialize. And the hard part was, she didn’t yet understand the gulf between her and other kids.

Stella was murmuring something under her breath, but the noise of the motorway made it impossible to catch her words. I glanced over my shoulder. Her window was wide open, so wind filled the car, making her hair float as if it were underwater. Whatever she was saying, it was the same phrase, over and over.

Someone swerved into my lane right in front of me, and I hit the brakes. Shaken, I pulled the car onto the hard shoulder, just as my brain made sense of her words: “ Poor Blanka. Poor Blanka. Poor Blanka.”

“Why are you saying that, darling?” She’d been well out of earshot when Emmy had told me, so there was no way she knew Blanka was dead. But why was she bringing up Blanka now? She’d gone into freak-out mode when I told her Blanka wasn’t coming back, but then abruptly stopped mentioning her.

Stella gave me a patient look. “I was saying, ‘Poor Mommy,’ because it seemed like you didn’t have a nice time at the beach.”

I’d misheard her, that was all. Of course, she didn’t know that Blanka was dead. And she was so sensitive, there was no way I could let her find out.

···

Pete worked late at his company, Mycoship, which made packing foam out of mycelium, the root system of mushrooms. He wasn’t home until ten, long after Stella was in bed. I was reading in the bedroom, and I heard him putting his bike in the bike shed and then opening the front door. He would likely go to the freezer to get something to eat. He wasn’t a fan of takeaway, because of the single-use plastic.

I decided I’d let him eat before telling him about Blanka. Suddenly I remembered about the gannet. I leaped out of bed and sprinted to the kitchen, but I was too late.

“Jesus, what is that?”

I explained.

“So you stuck the thing in our freezer—with our food?” was all he managed to say. When I met Pete in California ten years ago, he was thirty-eight, but had looked much younger, with his blue eyes, his swimmer’s shoulders, his head of tight blond curls. Now the overhead light showed up the bags under his eyes. I wished he didn’t have to work so hard.

“I triple bagged it,” I said. “You can still eat your veggie lasagna.” Because my morning sickness made cooking difficult, Pete had stocked up on readymade food from the gourmet place we liked. He stuck the lasagna in the microwave and pulled me into his arms. “How are you feeling, my love?” he asked. I was the one who had pushed for a second baby so Stella could have a brother or sister, but now Pete was as eager as I was. He checked the Pregnant Dad app every day.

“I still feel sick.” I’d tried everything: motion sickness wristbands, B6, promethazine, you name it.

Pete nodded. “But the other times, when we lost the pregnancy, you felt great. So maybe this is a good sign.”

I followed him to the dining table, and we sat down at one end. When we bought this big Edwardian in coveted Muswell Hill—one of the five best places to live in London, according to The Sunday Times —we’d ripped out most of the walls downstairs so it was one huge, open space. We kept the period detail—the mantelpieces and wall moldings—but we had sleek, modern furniture and huge black-and-white photos of surf pounding the beaches of Northern California, where Pete grew up. The table was reclaimed oak from an old barn, big enough to seat twelve when you pulled out the hidden leaves. We both loved entertaining. A few days after we met, we threw a Dungeness crab party for twelve. We pushed together borrowed tables and covered them with butcher paper. I served Negronis while Pete wrestled the crabs into the pot. Guests cracked claws and dipped the flesh into my champagne-shallot butter. Then we rolled back the rug and danced until dawn.

After Stella was born, we still entertained, but less and less. We stopped eating crab when the crab population declined due to ocean acidification. And now, after her birthday party, it was hard to imagine any guests ever coming over again.

I’d felt awkward about inviting Blanka to that party. I was worried it might feel too much like working without pay, and that Blanka would feel shy about socializing with our friends. So I didn’t ask her. But if I had, would the party have turned out differently? Would Blanka still be alive?

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had failed her.

“What’s the matter?” said Pete, seeing my face, and I knew I couldn’t put off telling him any longer.

“Blanka’s dead.”

Pete blanched. He pushed his lasagna away. “That’s terrible. She was just here—what, last week? Jesus Christ.”

“Emmy said it was an accident, but she didn’t have the details.”

“What a tragedy. I can’t believe it. God—how does Emmy know?” He asked a few more questions, and I told him the little I knew. We were both silent. Then Pete said, “Are you OK, baby? It’s terrible news, but it’s not a good time for you to get stressed. Here, give me your feet.” He pulled them into his lap and began to massage them.

“What kind of accident could it have been?” I said. “Do you think she got run over?” She did cross the road very slowly, apparently never having developed city smarts, even though she’d moved to London with her mother when she was a teenager. Before that, they’d lived in Armenia, and before that, they fled from some country I no longer recalled, some place with a spiky name like Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan. But I forgot where, and as time passed, it became more and more embarrassing to ask her again. Besides, questions seemed to make Blanka uncomfortable.

“Or perhaps it was a freak accident of some kind,” I continued. “Though it’s not like Blanka went skydiving. I used to ask her every Monday what she’d done on the weekend, and she always said, ‘Not much.’?”

Pete bent the toes of my right foot gently back and forth. “We’ll send flowers to her mother. I’ll do it, since you’re sick.”

“She must feel awful,” I said. “Do you think it’s strange she didn’t call me to tell me?”

Pete was frowning at me. “You look very pale. Have you eaten today?”

“Rice cakes.”

“You have to eat.” He served me some lasagna, and I smiled, swallowing down nausea.

“Listen, this bird obsession of Stella’s worries me.” Pete cut his portion into neat squares. “Year four starts the day after tomorrow. I’m concerned she’s not going to fit in.”

I frowned. “Marie Curie probably didn’t fit in either. If Stella was a boy, Emmy wouldn’t have made such a big fuss about her picking up the dead gannet. The problem is that Stella’s a girl and so her interest in the thing comes across as macabre.”

Pete looked skeptical. “How was everything before that?”

I had to admit that Lulu had mostly played alone while Stella sat with her hands over her ears. “But it’s not her fault. She’s got very acute hearing.”

“She has to learn how to be with other kids,” Pete said. “We need to be proactive, especially since—you know.”

We both shuddered, thinking of the birthday party, and I tried not to look at that one spot on the kitchen floor, which Pete had scrubbed so aggressively that it was paler than the surrounding wood.

“It’s not just other kids,” Pete continued. “She hates baths. She hates noises. She hates food, unless each item is separate. And what about freak-out mode?”

I said nothing. Freak-out mode was frightening. Late at night, I’d watched videos other parents had posted of their kids’ meltdowns, hoping to feel solidarity. Instead, I thought, If you can take a step back and film it, it’s not that bad.

Pete squeezed my hand. “I just want to help her. I love her too.” Having finished eating, he pulled out his iPad. “Look, I’ve been collecting recommendations. I made a spreadsheet of different doctors and therapists.”

“But she had her checkup recently,” I said. Here in the UK, parents only took kids to the doctor if they were actually ill, but Pete, being American, believed in kids having annual checkups, so I took Stella for the sake of marital harmony. “She’s healthy as a horse.”

“Physically,” Pete said.

“It’s not that hard to accommodate her needs,” I said. “I would rather do that than take her to a doctor who is only going to slap some label on her that might not fit. And how’s she going to feel about seeing a doctor? We don’t want her to think there’s something wrong with her.” Pete looked at his spreadsheet, marshalling another argument, and I offered, “Look, I only stopped working last week. More time with me is going to help her relax. I really think I can help her much better than any doctor. If she gets worse”—which she wouldn’t—“then, I promise, we’ll get her evaluated.”

Pete fiddled with his glasses while I searched desperately for a change of topic. Usually, just the word Brexit was enough to get him going, and by the way, why didn’t Boris Johnson ever brush his hair? But I didn’t think that would work today. “I can’t believe Blanka is dead,” I said, hating myself for using her death as a segue.

At that, Pete’s face filled with compassion. “It must be really hard getting this news so soon after losing your mom.”

“I’m upset about Blanka,” I said. “This is not about my mother.”

My mother, Edith, had died six months earlier: of a stroke, in the night, at home at her terraced Victorian house in Oxford. She slipped away without saying goodbye, exactly as she would have wanted. She and I were very different people. Still, I expected a wave of grief to hit me, but it never did, not like the way Pete got sideswiped when his dad died. Sometimes I’d give a little start, like when you realize, I’ve forgotten to do something: the kettle is screaming, the smoke alarm needs a new battery. Then I’d think, No, I didn’t leave the kettle on, but my mother is dead.

···

At two in the morning, I was wide-awake, feeling as if the sea still pummeled my eardrums. We met Blanka when Stella was four. I’d been looking for a babysitter to pick her up after school. I was going back full-time to my job at Design Your Life , a lifestyle portal, where I churned out content about entertaining and gave etiquette advice in my column, “Charlotte Says.” I’d worked there since my late twenties, when an editor at Design Your Life had spotted my blog about stress-free dinner parties, The Reluctant Hostess , and offered me a job in San Francisco. Luckily, they let me work remotely when we moved to London. “Everybody already knows all this,” my mother said, nonplussed, when Pete persuaded her to read my column.

“Americans don’t feel they know everything about etiquette,” I said. Design Your Life had a primarily US audience.

“Well, they wouldn’t.” Edith was the mistress of the poison dart. A professor of nineteenth-century literature, she spent her last afternoon on earth alone, editing her book on illness and femininity in the mid-Victorian novel. Although Edith thought my job was silly, I loved it. The way I saw it, etiquette wasn’t about what fork to use. It was about making other people feel good—with a handwritten thank-you note, a wonderful dessert, or maybe a white lie. This seemed simple on the face of it, but judging by the number of letters I received, common social situations tripped a lot of people up, and made them anxious. As an etiquette expert I gave them a road map: a way to navigate any interaction.

Unfortunately, finding a babysitter good enough for Stella was brutal. One applicant wanted to be picked up and dropped off. A second needed to schedule the babysitting “gig” around her shamanic therapy classes. A third said any house she worked in had to be completely free of artificial scent. When I met Blanka at the door, her hair was in two clumsy black plaits secured with elastics decorated with pink plastic bobbles, and her olive-skinned face was childishly round. She was fairly overweight, noticeable in Muswell Hill, with its yummy mummies in Pilates gear, and had heavy eyebrows that needed attention. She slowly lowered herself onto our slender-legged midcentury modern sofa.

I asked, “What do you like about working with kids?”

“I like taking care of kids,” said Blanka.

“What do you like about that?” She smiled, and I wasn’t sure if she’d understood the question. I decided to move on. “You have to keep everything separate when you serve her meals.” I showed her Stella’s compartmentalized melamine plates.

“Oh yes.” She sounded matter-of-fact, not skeptical like the other babysitters.

Encouraged, I continued. “Also, you have to slice her fruit nicely, or she won’t eat it. Apples, especially.”

“Oh yes.” Blanka nodded vigorously, like nobody in their right mind would expect a four-year-old to tackle an unsliced apple. I went through Stella’s whole routine, and Blanka agreed with everything I said. Maybe it was because her English wasn’t very good, but it was relaxing. I went up to Stella’s room and coaxed her out to meet Blanka. As with all the interviewees, Stella marched straight over to Blanka and studied her. The other women had chirped out their names or inquired as to Stella’s favorite color. Blanka just held Stella’s gaze. Several seconds passed. Then, to my astonishment, Stella climbed onto the sofa and nestled up to Blanka’s pillowy body. Our savior.

Now I gave up on sleep and crept into the kitchen. I stuffed a handful of pretzels into my mouth. I’d forgotten about that first meeting with Blanka, when she’d seemed so perfect for the job. Yet somehow things had changed so much that she had left without saying goodbye. That was one mystery I would never solve now. But maybe I could solve the mystery of how she died.

I grabbed my laptop and sat on the sofa. Perhaps she had a Facebook page, which might have more information about her death. But when I typed in “Blanka Hakobyan,” there was no Facebook page. No Blanka Hakobyan on Twitter or Instagram. When I googled her name, I got no results. There was a faint twang in my abdomen, and I felt afraid. In years of trying to get pregnant, I’d miscarried three times. But I kept going, because if Stella had a sibling, it wouldn’t matter so much that she didn’t really have friends and, worse, didn’t seem to care. A sibling, I hoped, would teach her how to get along with others.

I walked to the window, hoping a change of position would help. The whole back wall of the house was glass, showcasing our view over London, a sea of lights with the Shard on the horizon, the dull glow of the light-polluted sky. At night, things looked different than they did in the day, but I always felt like I was seeing things as they really were: the night truth. I was going to lose this baby, and Stella would always be alone.

I went into Stella’s room and listened to the ebb and flow of her breath. Maybe it was my fault she didn’t turn cartwheels on the beach, and I didn’t deserve to have another child.

“Oh yes,” Stella said, quite clearly, and I gave a start. But her breath was deep and regular: she was talking in her sleep. Blanka used to say, “Oh yes,” in response to everything I asked her, always in exactly the same way, like a two-note birdcall. I shivered. It was an innocuous phrase, but still, it was uncanny how perfectly Stella captured Blanka’s singsong tone.