Something She's Not Telling Us - Darcey Bell Page 0,1

is why the staircase hasn’t been replaced. She refused to sign the release, even when Eli offered to pay for the project. When the co-op (Eli is president of the tiny board) banned smoking, Ariane responded by switching to expensive black cigarettes, as smelly as cigars.

In her charitable moments, Charlotte thinks: Who can blame her? Ariane has no money. And her crazy middle-aged son, Drew, moved back in with her a few months ago. Charlotte knows that Ariane resents her for her privilege, her money, for the beauty of their loft, for Charlotte’s easy life. For what Ariane thinks is easy. But what can Charlotte do? She can’t think of a way to defuse the ill will between herself and her downstairs neighbors.

Charlotte has heard Ariane and Drew shouting and slamming doors, sometimes all night long. Fighting and smoking and fighting.

The smoke would be less upsetting if Daisy weren’t asthmatic.

Every puff Ariane and Drew exhale up through the floor terrifies Charlotte. So far cigarette smoke isn’t among Daisy’s triggers, but there’s always the chance that smoke could bring on an attack. Sometimes Charlotte lies awake at night, smelling smoke or maybe just thinking she smells smoke, feeling scared and enraged, waiting to hear that first horrifying wheeze and rasp from Daisy’s room.

If that happens, if Daisy has an attack, they’ll have to sue Ariane or move . . . or something.

Actually, Drew scares Charlotte even more than the smoking. Charlotte doesn’t like the twitchy smile on his face when he sees Daisy and pats her on the head. Who pats five-year-old girls on the head? Charlotte hates to think this way, but with his furtive little face, his steel-rimmed glasses dirty with fingerprints, his brush of short gray hair, stiff with excessive product that is probably natural grease, Drew looks like a serial child molester on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

One especially paranoid night, Charlotte woke Eli and made him look up Drew in the online sex offender registry. But Drew wasn’t on the list. Not yet.

It makes Charlotte super vigilant, as if she weren’t already vigilant enough. What will they do when Daisy is old enough to go up and down the stairs—to pass Drew’s door—on her own?

Charlotte’s shrink, Ted, is helping her work on not worrying quite so much. Not living in fear. Not worrying about Drew, or about anything, until something happens. Until something is about to happen. It’s a subject that she and Ted talk about, a lot.

She says that every mother is as bad as she is. And Ted oh-so-gently says she’s wrong. There are mothers less plagued by fear and able to enjoy their lives more of the time. If only Charlotte were one of them! She can’t stop worrying about what Daisy eats and doesn’t eat, why she doesn’t have more friends, why she seems so shy. Why she always seems so . . . worried. Like me, Charlotte thinks guiltily.

Charlotte can’t explain how it works, but after fifty minutes in Ted’s sunlit office looking down on Madison Square Park, she feels braver. More comfortable out in the world. More in control. Not that therapy isn’t hard, not that she doesn’t cry sometimes. But Ted knows what to say, or not say, to help her get through it—and get over the past. He’s helping her forgive herself for the things she’s done—well, for one thing she’s done—that she can’t seem to get over.

At the same time, Charlotte feels confident that she’s handling her life so well that sometimes therapy almost seems like an indulgence. Except she has to watch out for the lasting damage done by crazy neglectful Mom, who became a normal person only after a stay in a facility—and really only after Charlotte and Rocco were out of the house.

Ted says that Charlotte needs to remember that her fantasies aren’t real. She’s too quick to imagine catastrophe and disaster.

By the time Daisy’s old enough to come home on her own . . . who knows? Maybe they’ll live someplace else. Maybe—better option—Drew will live somewhere else.

Eli goes into Daisy’s room to help her pick out clothes for school. Charlotte hears the first sounds of a disagreement likely to escalate between her daughter and her husband. Charlotte needs to shower and get dressed, but she pauses outside Daisy’s door.

Daisy is insisting on wearing the gauzy shirt, embroidered with flowers, that her grandmother—Charlotte’s mother—bought her in Oaxaca. It’s great that she wants to wear Grandma’s present. But it’s still very cold outside.