‘What?’ Todd says, his expression softening, lowering.
‘I had this dream …’ Jen says. A dream is the easiest way into this mess. ‘About the future.’
‘Okay,’ Todd says, but it isn’t imbued with his usual sarcasm. He looks curious, concerned, maybe. He fiddles with the fork from his chocolate pudding.
‘You want a tea?’
He shrugs. ‘Sure.’
They order from an irritated waitress who brings them over quickly, bags still bobbing in the liquid. Todd pokes at his with a wooden stick.
‘The dream,’ she says carefully, ‘was that you were older, and we’d grown apart.’
‘Right,’ Todd says, his hand creeping across the table towards hers, the way it used to, yes, yes, yes, like this, when he was still half-child.
‘You’d committed a crime,’ she says. ‘And it left me wondering …’
‘I would never do that!’ he says, his body making such a violent move as he laughs chaotically in that teenage way of his.
‘I know. But – things can change. So it kind of made me want to ask … if you wanted anything to change – between us?’
‘No?’ Todd screws his face up again in that way that he does. He first made that face when he ate a strawberry when he was eight months old. Jen had known, somewhere deep inside her, that it came from her. She hadn’t known she made it until she saw him do it. That’s my face! she’d thought in wonder. She had seen it in candid photographs sometimes, but she only recognized it truly when he did it; her reflection.
The overhead lights, on some sort of sensor, begin to go off, leaving their bench spotlit in the middle, alone, like they’re in a play. Just the two of them, in the basement of a shopping mall, out for his birthday. His later actions must start here: with her, his mother.
‘No?’
‘You’re human.’ He says it so simply something deep within Jen’s body seems to turn over, exactly the same way she used to feel when he was yet to be born, her baby, tucked up away in her, rolling like a little barrel, warm and safe and happy.
‘I wouldn’t have you any other way, Mother,’ he says. He puts his hands on the table, motioning to leave. The conversation closed. Not, Jen thinks, looking closely at him, because he wants to end the discussion, but because he doesn’t think that a meaningful discussion has even taken place.
They get to the car and Jen almost tells him, then. That it wasn’t a dream. That it’s real, that it’s the future, and that she’s doing her best to save him, her baby boy, from that grizzly fate, that crime, that knife, that blood, that murder charge. But he wouldn’t believe her. Nobody would. Just look at him. Pink-cheeked in the cold, the hint of a chocolate smear rimmed around his lips just like when he was tiny and she weaned him on all sorts, but mostly on his and her favourite: Bourbon biscuits. They ate so many of them.
She almost hopes she can go back to then, even further. Perhaps it is not directly about Kelly, but about how Todd reacts to whatever his father has done.
‘Mad that I used to be able to carry you, and now look,’ she says, looking up at him.
‘I bet I could carry you now.’
‘I bet you could.’ His arm is still across her shoulders, hers around his waist. It occurs to her, as they walk to her car, that this might be the last time they embrace. She’s pretty sure Todd gives it up after this age. Becomes too cool for it. The first time she walked with him on his birthday, here, tonight, she didn’t know. She didn’t know it might be the last time.
A voice downstairs. Jen was almost asleep but – clearly – not quite. She walks soundlessly past the picture window, down, down, down, into the house. Kelly is in the study, off the hallway, and Jen pauses, listening.
He’s on the phone.
‘Yeah, all right,’ he says. ‘Tell Joe I called as soon as you can get hold of him in the morning, yeah?’
Joe.
But it can’t be the prison. It doesn’t sound like he’s talking to an organization. And it’s so late. It must be a mutual acquaintance of some sort.
‘Yeah, exactly,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t want him to think I don’t care.’ He says it very carefully, slowly stumbling over the words like an amateur picking a guitar. ‘Wouldn’t want to ruin a twenty-year business partnership.’
Jen sits down on their bottom step. Twenty years.
Those two words are doubly significant. A betrayal, but also a prophecy of how far back she may have to go.
Day Minus One Thousand and Ninety-Five, 06:55
Jen has an iPhone XR, she thinks. It feels like a big rectangular block in her hand. She stares down at it in shock where it rests against the duvet. She upgraded it – she remembers it so clearly – because it stopped connecting with her car’s Bluetooth and she couldn’t check up on her neediest clients on the way home from work.
She checks the date now. The thirtieth of October 2019. A Wednesday. Three years before. Almost exactly three years before.
She makes a cup of tea downstairs, the house silent and empty. Todd isn’t up yet. Kelly isn’t here, even though it’s so early.
Their oak tree out the back is in all its autumn splendour. Three mushrooms poke out of the base of the tree. She opens the door. The ground has that smoked-damp smell, winter revving its engine softly.
She sips her tea, standing with cold bare feet on the patio, wondering if she will ever see November 2022. The steam curls upwards, obscuring her vision.
Jen is angry, and now fixated on what it is that she is supposed to uncover about her husband or her son.
Kelly has been a natural father. Kelly is a natural everything, never plagued by a surplus of thoughts, by resentment, by guilt. He loved the baby they made, and that was that. Jen had watched his transformation with interest. ‘That smile makes it all worth it,’ Kelly had said one morning at four o’clock, the moon out, only the owls and the babies of the world awake.
But sacrifice is a different notion for men and women. Worth what, exactly? Kelly did not have his body change, his nipples crack right across the centre like smashed dishes. Jen now agrees it is worth it all, but she sometimes wonders if that is because some of the things she lost have been given back to her. Sleep. Time.
That is where the damage might live, she thinks, if she has somehow caused something to happen within Todd, which she is sure she must. Never a confident parent, Jen feels certain, deep inside herself, that something must have happened. Maybe in Todd’s early years. When Todd was four, she clean forgot to collect him from nursery, thought Kelly had done it. Todd had been waiting with his key worker outside a locked-up nursery. She winces as she thinks of it now, standing here in the mildewing autumn. Is it that sort of thing that would lead him to think, much, much later in life, that he must solve whatever his father is mixed up in? It isn’t about Kelly, perhaps, but Todd’s response to it.
‘Hope you’re ready,’ Todd shouts from upstairs, his voice wobbling, still breaking. ‘It’s finally here.’
Anxiety fires off in Jen’s stomach. She has no idea what today is, and she has no idea what to expect her son to be like. He’ll be fifteen. Jesus Christ.