Page 31

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 a t and a u . There was a gap and then a letter that looked like an upside-down m . 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 were yes 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 hate me . 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?

I prowled the gloomy back garden. A plastic table and chairs stood in the middle of a square of concrete paving stones. A mass of brambles hid the back fence. I checked the back door: locked of course. As I turned away, I stubbed my toe on a broken concrete paving stone and cursed as pain shot through my foot. My midriff squeezed, tighter and tighter, and I crouched on hands and knees, a moan escaping me. I had to get into the house. I had to get this done quickly so I could get to the hospital. I dug my fingers under the broken paving stone, and a chunk came away. I scrabbled and scraped until I’d worked it loose.

I took off my jumper and wrapped it around my right hand. I picked up the chunk, and went to the back door. The glass shattered decisively. I dropped the concrete and pushed away enough glass with my jumper-covered hand to reach my hand through, feel for a key inside. The key wasn’t in the lock, because what idiot leaves their key in the back door? I picked up the rock again and bashed at the lower pane of the door until I’d got rid of most of the glass. I laid my jumper on the floor on the other side so I had something to protect my hands from the dagger-strewn floor.

I got down on my hands and knees. It wasn’t a big space to squeeze through, but even with my pregnant belly, I was a small woman. I crawled forward. I felt pinpoints of brightness on my scalp and knew that glass had fallen into my hair and cut me, and then pain flashed in the meat of my right palm as glass poked through the sweater. Then I was through. I was in the kitchen, and I almost felt safe for a moment. I could use the lights: who would know I wasn’t Irina? I found a tea towel and pressed it against my bleeding hand.

I went through to the living room. Photos crowded the mantelpiece, pictures that were either new or that I hadn’t noticed before. Wait—was that Stella? Half a dozen photographs of a round-faced, solid little girl in ugly long dresses, hair tightly braided, face unsmiling. I grabbed the nearest one: a vast grey lake in the background, a pebbly beach. When had Irina taken Stella to visit such a lake? Then I blinked and saw of course it wasn’t Stella. It was Blanka as a child. No photographs of Blanka looking older than eighteen. But hadn’t she been in her thirties when she died? It was like Irina didn’t want to acknowledge that Blanka had grown up.

Could Irina be the person Blanka hated so much?

A door off the hallway led to a bedroom with a double bed with a patchwork quilt, like someone had made it using all the ugliest possible clothes; a bureau with a mirror; a huge, heavy wardrobe; lace curtains dimming the light; a crucifix on the wall: Irina’s room. Where had Blanka slept? Surely not in the front room, on that tiny velour sofa?

I went back out to the hallway. Then I spotted a smaller door. I hadn’t noticed it because it was under the stairs. I opened it, and concrete steps led down. Cold air streamed out, a whiff of damp, of the earth itself. An iron fist squeezed me, and I had to stop for a moment. When the fist let go, warm wetness trickled down my leg. But I couldn’t pay attention to that now. I was too close to discovering something at last, I could feel it. If I was ever going to rid my daughter of Blanka, I had to go down those stairs.

They led to a basement bedroom with a small window at ground level, a carpet smelling of mildew. A chair piled with clothes. A child’s bed: maroon sheets with a white arrow on a yellow circle that I thought was a Star Trek logo. It was a child’s room, for a grown woman.

On the wall hung a Doctor Who poster: the TARDIS floating in space, a door open, light beaming from within. “Allons-y,” it read. “Let’s go.” I studied it, desperate for a clue. Was that what lay behind her dull expression: dreams of adventures to the fringes of the universe?

“Get out.” Irina’s voice was matter-of-fact, but her anger was like a wall of heat. Something trickled down my leg, and for a second, I thought I’d wet myself in fear, and I was ashamed. But of course, it wasn’t that, there was too much of it, splashing onto the carpet, soaking my shoes. I needed to get to the hospital, but she blocked the stairs. She was perhaps twenty years older than me, in her late fifties. But she was tough, a survivor, and I was an emaciated pregnant woman whose water had broken ten weeks early.

I placed my hand on the wall to steady myself and realized there were faint lines there. They swam into focus: a swarm of crosses. I blinked. “What are these marks?”

“From when she is little. I tell you this once already. If she is bad, she must stand with nose to cross until I say.”

I shivered. How long did Blanka have to stand there as a child? How harsh was this penalty? Did Irina make her stand there for hours, hungry, needing the toilet? Maybe that was when Blanka began to think, I hate that person.

I sank onto the bed for a rest, but it felt cold and damp. It was the bed Blanka had slept in as a child, the same sheets, even. Irina should have bought her new sheets, or encouraged her to buy them herself. Small things like taking care of your surroundings could make you feel better. “How could you let her be like this?” I said, gesturing at the child’s bed, the posters.

Irina snorted. “Nowadays, you people tell your kids they can do anything. This will not help Blanka. She does not speak good English, bad with people. She does not have big choice of job.”

I looked around the room. The light was dim, I realized, because the recycling and rubbish bins were partly blocking the window, which was at ground level. It would have been so easy for Blanka to move them, but she didn’t do it. She couldn’t. “What did she do all the time?” I whispered. It hurt so much I could hardly talk.

“TV shows. She watches same ones many times. Looks on computer and learns many things about this Doctor Who.” If this was Blanka’s life, then surely, she was depressed. At some point, years before she died, she had stopped living. Did she blame her mother for that?

Irina touched the poster, the TARDIS floating in space with one door open, glowing inside, so inviting, like a kitchen on a winter’s night. “I thought she was happy.” She swiped at her eyes.

Irina could have helped Blanka to lead a bigger life, but Blanka had made choices too. She’d chosen to stay in her basement bedroom with faded crosses on the wall. She didn’t return from the grave because she hated her mother. So who was it?

I felt like someone had taken a stick and was stirring my insides, trying to rearrange them forcibly. My time had nearly run out. I needed an ambulance. I had to be direct.

I tottered to my feet and clutched her hand so hard I could feel the bones scrunching together. “Blanka’s come back. She’s drawing crosses on my wall, writing in Stella’s diary about hating someone. Who did she hate? Tell me.”

Irina shook her head. “If Blanka came back, she would come to me, not to you.”

Then the pain came again, and it was the kind of pain that makes you think you could die, that stops you from thinking. More water gushed from me, soaking the rug. “I need to get to the hospital. I don’t have my phone. Please, call an ambulance.” I wasn’t sure I could get up the stairs.

Irina’s face set and she disappeared, and I sank onto my knees and let the pain out in a groan. I didn’t have the breath for screaming. Of course, she wanted to punish me, even if Blanka didn’t, and there were so many reasons, the simplest being that I had my daughter, and she did not. The pain came again, obliterating thought, drawing forth a deep, animal sound.

When that contraction ended, Irina was back in the room, wearing an apron and holding a pile of things. She closed the basement door. I felt hot panic. Why did she close that door? “No, no. Call an ambulance. Call Pete. Please.” Those were all the words I could get out before the next wave of pain.

I retched as on her knees, she spread out the shower curtain on the moldy rug. “Listen to me. You must be calm. I do this many times.”

“No, no, no,” I said in the space between contractions. “I’m not having the baby. I can’t have the baby. I can’t have a baby until Stella is safe. It’s too soon. The baby will die. I’ll die.”

Irina shook her head. “The water is broken. Too late to go back. Too late for hospital.”

“What? No. Please. Get me an ambulance. At least call Pete. Please.” Then the pain carried me away on its wave, where nothing existed and nothing mattered except the pain. Even I didn’t. There was nothing but the pain and groaning. I came out of it and thrashed as I realized she had removed my trainers and was pulling off my maternity jeans. I protested weakly, but when the next wave of pain came, I let her take them, my underwear too.

I was having my baby too early. I would die and so would my baby. I would bleed to death. The baby would be hopeless lumps of flesh that Irina would shove deep into the compost—my baby in exchange for hers. This was what she’d wanted all along.

The waves of pain came, over and over. I vomited. Irina told me to lie on my left side and gave me water to sip that tasted of dirty coins. “Don’t leave me,” I begged. She left again, only to return with a pair of scissors wrapped in a cloth.

In a moment of clarity, I saw little raised bumps on the white ceiling, like ringworm. Blanka had looked at this and dreamed of journeys to other worlds. Of going to another galaxy in the TARDIS. I closed my eyes, and I was standing in a red desert with Blanka. Three suns appeared above the horizon: dawn on a new planet.

A slap in the face brought me back to the cold, damp room. Another slap. “Charlotte? Listen. You cannot sleep. You must push now. Now, Charlotte.”

“No,” I moaned. “I can’t, I can’t. Please.” I closed my eyes to be with Blanka. I deserved this. I accepted it. I just wanted it to be over. My baby was dead; Irina’s wedding dress would become its shroud.

She got behind me and pulled me between her legs with superhuman strength. She held my hands. “Charlotte. It’s coming. Get ready. Now push.”

The pain became a blazing white sun, and I was inside it. A circle of women surrounded me, murmuring prayers. Not Edith or Dianne, but Irina and her mother and her mother’s mother. I was Irina’s daughter, and this was her grandchild. Women from her family moved around me, praying, bringing tea and towels. I smelled flatbread fresh from the oven. I had to keep this line of women going, the women who survived, who would do anything for their girls. Blanka had broken it, but I could make it whole again.

It wasn’t Irina’s fault that Blanka died. It wasn’t my fault. I felt love surrounding me. I pushed. I pushed. I pushed.

Then Irina was snipping in a brisk, professional way, and then holding a tiny baby, greasy with vernix, small enough to fit in my cupped hands. “A girl,” said Irina, trembling a little. She didn’t hate me after all. But I was afraid to look, afraid of how I’d fail this daughter.

Irina clasped my shoulder. “You are good mother,” she said. I looked at her, and something passed between us. It wasn’t her fault that Blanka had died. She could have done better, but she did the best she could. And I too was doing the best I could.