‘A grown man. Like, a forty-year-old.’
‘With these puny limbs?’ Todd says, holding a slim arm up theatrically.
Kelly once said to her, late at night, ‘How did we come to raise an over-confident geek?’ and they’d had to muffle their giggles. Kelly’s dry wit is the thing Jen loves the most about him. She’s so glad Todd has inherited it.
‘Even with those,’ she says. But she thinks: You didn’t need muscle. You had a weapon.
Todd shoves his bare feet into a pair of trainers. Right as he does it, Jen remembers this taking place on Friday morning. She’d marvelled at how he didn’t feel the October chill, worried his ankles would get cold at school. Worried, too – shamefully – that people would think she was a shit mother, that she was – what, exactly? Anti-socks? Jesus, the things she stresses over.
But she had. She remembers.
A frisson moves across her shoulders. Todd grabs the doorhandle, and Jen recalls the déjà vu. No. She’s fine. She’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Forget it. There’s no evidence any of it happened.
Until there is.
‘I’m going straight to Clio’s after school. If she’ll have me. I’ll eat there.’ His tone is short. He’s telling her, not asking her; the way it’s been lately.
And that is when it happens. The words are on Jen’s lips, as natural as a spring bubbling from the earth, the exact same sentence she uttered yesterday. ‘More oysters in buckets?’ she says. The first time Todd went to Clio’s for dinner they’d had actual oysters. He’d sent her a photo of one, its entrance prised open, balanced on the tips of his fingers, captioned: You said I needed to open up more?
She waits for Todd’s reply. That he’s pretty sure they will have something low-key like foie gras.
He flashes her a grin which cuts through the tension. ‘I’m pretty sure we’ll just have something low-key, like, you know, foie gras.’
She cannot. She cannot deal with this. This is madness. Her heart feels like it’s going to pound itself into a cardiac arrest.
Todd picks up his bag. Something about the movement of it thumping on to his shoulder unnerves her further. It looks heavy.
The thought arrives, fully formed, right then. What if the weapon is in that bag? What if the crime is going to happen? What if it wasn’t a dream, but a premonition?
Jen goes hot and then cold. ‘Was that your computer I heard?’ she says, eyes to the ceiling. ‘It made a noise.’
It’s laughably easy to make a teenager go to check a device, and Jen feels a guilty pathos, for just a second, as she watches his feet trip over each other in his rush to go and investigate. It’s habitual, a residual sympathy she’s always felt for Todd – too much, at times, getting involved with school-gate drama when he was left out of any social occasion – but, today, it feels misplaced. She’s seen him kill.
Whatever it is she feels, it isn’t enough to stop her looking.
Front pockets, side pockets. It’s a good distraction to be taking action. She hears Todd humming upstairs in that way that he does when he’s impatient. ‘’Sake,’ he says.
Two chemistry textbooks, three loose pens. Jen puts them on the hallway floor and continues searching.
‘No notifications,’ he shouts. His tone is irritated again. Just recently, she’s felt like a nuisance around him.
‘Sorry,’ she calls, thinking, Give me one fucking minute, just one, just one. ‘Must’ve misheard.’
The bottom of the bag is lined with the crumbs from a thousand sandwiches.
But what’s this? Right in the back? A sheath, a leather sheath. It’s as cold and hard as a thigh bone, sitting right there against the back of her son’s rucksack. She knows what it will be before she pulls it out.
A long leather pouch. She exhales, then unbuttons the top and slides a handle out.
And – inside it … a knife. The knife.
Day Minus One, 08:30
Jen stands there, staring at it, at this betrayal in her hand. She hadn’t thought what she would do if she found something. She never thought she would.
She holds the long, sinister black handle.
The panic begins again, a tide of anxiety that goes out to sea but always, always returns. She wrenches open the under-stairs cupboard. Shoes and sports equipment and canned goods they can’t fit in the kitchen crowd out and she fumbles past them, pushing the knife right to the back. She can hear Todd on the landing. She leans the knife against the back wall and retreats out of the cupboard, tidying up the rest of his things back into the bag.
Todd – disgruntled smile, young Kelly written across his features – picks up the bag. He doesn’t seem to notice the difference, the lightness of it. Jen stares at him as he opens the front door. Her son, armed, so he thinks, and with intent. Her son who thrust that knife with such force it split another person’s torso right open in three places. He throws a look over his shoulder, suspicious, and Jen thinks for a second that he might know what she’s done.
He leaves, and Jen climbs the stairs and watches his car from the picture window. As he drives off, she’s sure she sees his eyes flick up to the rear-view mirror and meet hers, for just the briefest of moments, like a butterfly landing and leaving before you even notice, flapping its wings only once.
‘I found a knife in Todd’s bag,’ Jen says, the second her husband arrives home. She doesn’t explain the rest, not yet. She’s spent the day swinging between panic and rationalization. It was nothing, it was a dream, it’s something, it’s a living nightmare. She’s mad, she’s mad, she’s mad.
Kelly’s face shuts down immediately, as Jen expected it might.
He approaches her, picking the blade up and holding it across his hands as if it is some kind of archaeological find. His pupils have gone huge. ‘What did he say? When you found it?’ His tone is frosty.
‘He doesn’t know.’
Kelly nods, staring down at the long, sharp blade, not saying anything. Jen remembers his angry behaviour from last night and thinks that, now, he just looks withdrawn instead.
‘It’s a brand-new knife,’ he says now, flicking his eyes to her. ‘I’m going to fucking kill him.’
‘I know.’
‘Unused.’
Jen laughs, a hard, unhumorous laugh. ‘Right.’
‘What?’
‘It’s just – I mean, I saw Todd stab somebody with this last night.’
‘What …’ he says, the word not lilting upwards, not a question, just a statement of disbelief.
‘Yesterday, I waited up for Todd and he – he knifed someone, on the street. You were there, too.’
‘But …’ Kelly rubs a hand over his chin. ‘But I wasn’t. You weren’t. You said that was a dream.’ He flashes her a quick smile. ‘Have you gone to madtown?’ he says, their abbreviation for neuroses.
Jen turns away from him. Outside, their neighbour walks his dog past. Jen knows his phone is about to ring, remembers it from yesterday, but it does so before she can say it to Kelly. She needs to think of something else that’s about to happen to prove it to Kelly, but she can’t, she can’t think of anything except how has she woken up here, in some alternative, scary universe.