‘What are you –’
‘I think I’ve had some sort of episode,’ she says in barely a whisper. She rolls her pyjamas up over her knees and stares at her skin. No impressions where she knelt on the gravel. Not a single speck of dirt on them. No blood under her nails. Goosebumps erupt up and down her arms fast, like a time-lapse.
‘Did I carve the pumpkin?’ she asks again, but, as she speaks, some deep realization is dawning all around her. If it didn’t happen … she might have lost her mind, but her son isn’t a murderer. She feels her shoulders drop, just slightly, in relief.
‘No, you – you said you couldn’t be arsed …’ he says with a little laugh.
‘Right,’ she says faintly, picturing exactly how that pumpkin turned out.
She stands and stares at herself in the mirror. She meets her own eyes. She is a portrait of a panicked woman. Dark hair, pale complexion. Hunted eyes.
‘Look, I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it was a dream,’ she says, though how can it be?
‘Okay,’ Kelly says slowly. Perhaps he is about to say something but decides against it, because he says only ‘Okay,’ again, then adds: ‘I’ll leave early,’ and Jen is glad he is this, a family man, not the kind of man who goes to pubs or plays sport with friends, just her Kelly.
She leaves the bathroom and goes down to the kitchen. Mist shrouds the garden beyond their patio doors, erasing the tops of the trees to nothing. Kelly built this kitchen for them a couple of years ago, after she had said – drunk – that she wanted to be ‘the kind of woman who has her shit together, you know, happy clients, a happy kid, a Belfast sink.’
He presented it to her one evening. ‘Expect to imminently have your shit together, Jen, because you’ve got the sink of dreams here.’
The memory fades. Jen always advises her stressed trainees to take ten deep breaths and make a coffee, so that’s what she will do herself. She’s trained for this. Two decades in a high-pressure job does give you some skills.
But as she approaches their marble kitchen island, her footsteps slow. A whole, uncarved pumpkin sits on the side.
She stops dead. It may as well be a ghost. Jen thinks she might be sick again. ‘Oh,’ she says to nobody, a tiny slip of a word, a giant syllable of understanding. She approaches the pumpkin as though it is an unexploded bomb and turns it around, but it’s whole underneath her fingertips, firm and unharmed, and Jesus Christ last night didn’t happen. It didn’t fucking happen. Relief laps over her. He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it.
She listens to Todd in his room. Opening and closing drawers, footsteps back and forth, the sound of a zip.
‘Back in the real world yet?’ he says, arriving in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. His arch tone makes Jen jump. She stares at him. His body. He is slimmer than he was a few weeks ago, isn’t he?
‘Almost,’ she says automatically. She swallows twice. Her back feels shivery, like she’s ill, adrenalin burning a kind of feverish panic.
‘Well, good …’
‘I guess I had a horrible dream.’
‘Oh, bummer,’ Todd says simply, as though something could explain her confusion so easily.
‘Yeah. But – look. In it – you killed somebody.’
‘Wow,’ he says, but something shifts, just slightly, beneath the surface of his expression, like a fish swimming deep in an ocean, unseen, apart from the ripples created by it. ‘Who?’ he says, which Jen thinks is a strange initial question. She is accustomed to seeing clients not tell the complete truth, and that is what this looks like to her.
He reaches to pull his dark hair back from his forehead. His T-shirt rides up, exposing the waist she used to hold when he was tiny and wriggly, just learning to sit up, to bounce, to walk. She’d thought motherhood was so boring at the time, so unrewarding, the hours and hours dedicated to the same tasks in a variety of orders. But it wasn’t, she now knows; to say so is like saying breathing is boring.
‘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.