Six

Ava doesn’t cry at all. But that evening she insists that Stella tell her a story. Stella should tell her some story. Ava won’t take no for an answer. For Stella telling such a story is like a free fall. The characters that Ava wants to hear about tumble around in Stella’s head, can only be held on to with great effort, they soar up and float off like helium-filled balloons.

Couldn’t I tell you a fairy tale, Stella says weakly.

No, Ava says, firm and unrelenting. Tell me the story about the little giraffe and the prince.

Stella tries. She tries; afraid to think that, years later, she might regret never having told Ava the story of the little giraffe and the prince. (Back then. One evening in May. You were four years old, and Jason wasn’t there. In that house in the suburbs where we used to live; I think you can still remember it a little. You had a room upstairs under the roof, your night-light was a globe; you always wanted to see the Atlantic Ocean on it. Outside your window there was the garden and a wild meadow; once we watched a buzzard; the buzzard caught a field mouse and flew away with it; you cried so hard; do you still remember? Back then. When I refused to tell you a simple story.)

This regret always stays with Stella. It is like a defect, like a tiny but important flaw in the system. Sometimes Stella thinks that Jason also feels this regret, but he passed the whole thing along to Stella; she took over his regret; she carries it with her. Why does she think this? Regret makes things difficult; at the same time unique, special.

*

The little giraffe can’t fall asleep. She’s lying next to the little prince and tries to close her eyes.

Tries desperately to close her eyes, Ava says.

Tries desperately to close her eyes. The little prince puts his arms around the neck of the little giraffe and presses his face into her furry coat. The little giraffe’s coat is warm. The moon is shining through the window. The little giraffe says, I’m hungry. I’d like a glass of milk. The little prince gets up. The hallways in the castle are dark and very cold. In the kitchen the fat cook is sitting by the warm stove doing a crossword puzzle. She says, It’s a good thing that Your Grace has come just now. Your Grace probably knows what falls from the sky and has four letters. And Your Grace probably wants a glass of hot milk?

*

Ava is lying on Stella’s arm, her head on Stella’s stomach. Her black hair is soft; her entire body is soft. She’s twisting the buttons on Stella’s cardigan; she sighs. She loves simple sentences; Stella knows that Ava is happiest with a story in which nothing actually happens. A story without a point, maybe also without any excitement, a story that tells about the uneventfulness of all days, about everything staying the way it is.

What falls from the sky and has four letters?

Rain. Rain falls from the sky and has four letters.

Snow also falls from the sky. Can I wear my red rubber boots tomorrow? No matter what? Even if it doesn’t rain?

Tomorrow you can wear your red rubber boots, no matter what, even if it doesn’t rain.

We were going to call Papa.

We’ll do it tomorrow. Sleep well, Ava. Go to sleep quickly.

Stella leaves the door ajar and the light on in the hall outside the three rooms. She stands in the living room next to the armchair by the window; turning on the floor lamp, she looks at her reflection in the picture window, and behind her own reflection, the night-time garden, the fence, the street lamp and the street; the images slide into each other, depending on how she looks at them. Stella turns the lamp off again. She sits down at the table in the kitchen and makes a list of the things she wants to remember – light bulbs, coloured oak tag for Ava, ask Walter about medication allocation, letter to Clara, weekend shift schedule, apples and pears – she feels there’s something else she should write down, that there was something she forgot; she can’t think what it could be, and finally she gives up. The radio is softly playing classical music, series of discreetly withdrawn notes. Stella sits at the table holding a pen; she thinks that sitting here doing nothing at the day’s end must be a sign of old age. How did she go to bed before? Before Ava? In the years with Clara, in the years before the decisions for this or that life or a completely different one were made. It seems to Stella that they used to go to bed while talking. Went to sleep still talking, got up again, talking. Went to bed drinking, smoking. Indignant or shaken – by what, actually? – or drunk. Used to fall asleep and wake up again precipitously. Everything was important. Everything was important.

The stillness at the kitchen table, the meaning of Ava’s sleep, that her own encounters are limited to Jason, Paloma, Dermot, Walter and Esther, is odd. Suspect, as if it should mean something.

But I like being alone, Stella says aloud into the kitchen. I like being alone. Before this I didn’t like being alone; now I just am.

She says, Mister Pfister presumably likes being alone too.

Mis-ter Pfis-ter.

What is Jason doing now, alone at the construction site, in the house without a roof, with doors of corrugated metal and floors of Alaska cedarwood. What is Jason doing? With whom actually would Jason like to talk?

*

Stella gets up from the table, runs water into the kettle, puts the kettle on the stove, and stands there until the water boils. She listens to the sound of the gas flame, the voice from the radio, the gradual bubbling of the water. She stands in the kitchen, waiting.