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38.

Irina arranges to pick Stella up the following day. She tells Pete she is bringing Stella to her house for a crochet lesson, but really, she brings her to the playground to meet me at 6:00 p.m. We choose the evening because we don’t want other people watching whatever is going to happen.

Stella shuffles along, her walk painfully slow now. Her face is calm, empty. She doesn’t seem like an angry spirit who cannot rest. But when Blanka was alive, she seemed perfectly placid too.

All the time she babysat Stella, I never walked anywhere with Blanka, because if I was paying her, then I was busy with my job. But now I wonder why I never spared half an hour when she was on duty—Why couldn’t I have invited her to go to a café with us?

When we get to the soup pots, it is already getting dark and the playground is deserted except for a couple of teenage boys hanging off the play structure, the tips of their cigarettes glowing. Irina marches over to them and says something, at which they shake their heads, drop to the ground, and race off. “What did you say to them?” I ask.

“I say, ‘Sexy boys, which one wants snog with Grandma?’ Then I go like this.” She puckers up her lips.

“Nice.”

We climb the steps by the soup pots, and then I take Stella’s chilly hand and stand her next to the biggest one. It is hard to balance on the slope. It is really only comfortable if you are either in a soup pot or you’re clambering around. But Blanka spent hours here.

I give my phone to Irina and ask her to record it. I won’t show it to anyone, because they’d still think I’m mad, they’d think I coached Stella to act like Blanka. But still, even if only for myself, I want proof—as close to proof as I can ever get.

I turn to my daughter, but I speak to the spirit inside her. “Stella loved you,” I say. “For Stella’s sake, you need to speak to me directly and tell me what’s wrong so I can help you rest. This is Stella’s body, and you need to give it back to her.”

Stella nods. “Oh yes.” My skin crawls. Is that an agreement or the other kind of “oh yes,” which is a refusal to communicate?

I keep trying. “You must speak up. I should have asked you before if you were OK, I should have kept asking you. Well, now I am. I am listening, and I am not going to stop asking until you answer me. I already know something is wrong. I know you’re angry. I know something happened. I know you hate someone.”

“I talk, I make you angry.” Her accent is strong now. Blanka lived in England for years, but she still had a strong accent. I know now that’s because she barely spoke to anyone except Irina.

“I won’t be angry, I promise,” I tell her. “Whatever happened. I want to help you so that you can rest. I can’t help you until you tell me what you want. We found the diary. I think you wanted us to read it. Yes atum yem ayd mardun.”

“Pete.” Stella says the word with utter disgust, a contrast to Blanka’s normal singsong utterance. And suddenly I know that I am talking directly to Blanka. The last vestige of Stella melts away, and Blanka is here with me. It is an unearthly, vertiginous feeling, talking to this creature. A glimpse of another realm.

My legs are weak, and my knees knock. But then I feel a surge of energy. I’ve been right all along. This is not Stella. Finally, I’ve got the spirit to talk to me. I’ve made this creature of the deep rise to the surface. And we are doing something we never did when Blanka was alive: having a proper, honest conversation.

“That day you went to pick up the cheque,” I say through chattering teeth. “What happened?”

Stella considers. “He say nice things at first. He say I look pretty today.” She is silent, staring over my shoulder, into the past.

“Stella’s dad,” I say, to be clear, though I feel sick. “Pete? That is who we’re talking about.”

“Father of Stella. He has brown drink in glass.”

“Whiskey.” He sometimes has one when he really needs to unwind. “Then what?”

“I am mysterious, he says. He wants to get to know me. I do not know what to say. Then he comes close. He kisses me.” She closes her eyes, remembering. The expression on Stella’s face is one I’d never seen before—an adult expression, that of a grown woman remembering her first kiss. It was a little sour, that kiss, I can see, but sweet too. Unexpected.

Stella continues: “I try his whiskey. Then he puts his tongue in my mouth.” She makes a face, as if she is sucking saliva into her mouth to wash away the taste. “Then he grabs me, squeezes.” There is anguish on her face as she wrings the air, the most emotion I’ve ever seen Blanka show. “I do not like. I want to go home.”

“Did you say that aloud?” I ask.

Stella is silent, and I am afraid that Blanka didn’t protest. This is a woman who couldn’t ask for a glass of water. I am not sure if she had the power to ask someone not to assault her, especially not her employer. And in her mind, not speaking might have seemed the safest course of action. Maybe she was just allowing the inevitable, the cormorant surrendering to the hawk.

“Then what?” I say, though I know.

Stella speaks in a rush. “Stella’s daddy does not listen, forces me to floor, brings up my skirt, opens my knees. All the time, talking, how pretty I am. He pushes inside me and it hurts….” She covers her eyes.

My heart hurts as I imagine her lying there, limp, unresisting. But inside, maybe she was somewhere else. Inside, the whole time it was happening, maybe she was busy being her hero, Doctor Who, fighting monsters throughout space and time.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m so, so sorry. It wasn’t your fault.” If only Blanka had told me this when it happened, but of course she feared I wouldn’t believe her, thought I might blame her perhaps. She was probably right. I would never have believed this of Pete back then. Tears run down my face. I weep for Blanka, for Stella, and for Irina, who has to listen to her daughter’s story.

Now I understand why Stella—or, rather, Blanka—takes her meals to her room and won’t sit at the same table with him. I understand why when he picks her up for a hug, she turns to dead weight, and when he holds her after the bath, she slithers away. I know why she closes her bedroom and bathroom door against him. He thought it was because she’s growing up, but in fact, he makes her skin crawl.

I feel a sort of pride in Blanka, despite my grief and horror. She’s mastered her revulsion so she can return and get revenge.

“Does he touch Stella?” Irina asks sharply. I start. I haven’t thought of that. The Pete I love has stepped aside, replaced by a second man, a serial cheater. Then a third, worse Pete appeared, the man who assaulted Blanka. Is there an even more terrible man behind him, a man who assaulted his child? That time Pete dangled Stella over the bath and she screamed so hard— Was that weird? But no, that was just Pete thinking you could overcome Stella’s issues by using force, and before me, Stella is shaking her head firmly. “No. Not Stella.”

I know Pete hasn’t touched Stella, because Stella wouldn’t shut up. She would tell me if Pete ever laid a finger on her. You couldn’t silence Stella, back when she was still herself, and Pete knows that. He likes to play with chaos, not unleash it.

Irina addresses Blanka. “What do you want? What shall we do for you, my darling? What do you need so you can be free?”

Stella’s face hardens. “Make him leave.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. He is leaving,” I say. “Or I am. We’re not living together anymore.”

Her voice is harsh. “Not enough. Get Stella away from him.”

“You mean stop him from seeing her?”

“He can never see her again,” she says, and it makes sense. Pete took Stella away from her, and now she is taking Stella away from him.

“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. “Then I will 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 says Charlotte’s Bird Log on 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 she was 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.

But no. I tried so hard to have this second baby because Stella needs a friend, or at least an ally. Besides, I can’t leave any child to be raised by Pete. I thought Pete was a good father, but you can’t be a good father and a cheater and rapist.

I don’t have anything else to offer him. But maybe I can offer him a negative inducement—threat rather than reward. How can I terrify him so much he’ll do whatever I want, even give up his own children? And then I realize: it is so simple.

I message Pete and tell him to set up a meeting with a mediator for the following afternoon. I tell him I want to “discuss next steps and get the ball rolling,” which I think sounds important and Nathan-like, but also nice and vague. I’ll keep him guessing as to what I want to discuss—separation, divorce, custody?—and that way it’s harder for him to prepare.