That date has come to define Jen’s sense of time. Each March, she feels it. The smell of a daffodil, the way the sun slants sometimes, green and fresh. An open window reminds her of them, in bed together, their legs entwined together, their torsos separate, like two happy mermaids. Each spring, she’s back there: rainy March, with him.
Jen finds comfort, now, watching Grey’s Anatomy, as she has many times, in the cardiothoracic wing of the Seattle Grace Hospital, and in taking off her bra. Maybe this is her fault, she thinks, watching the television but not really watching it, too. She always found motherhood so hard. It had been such a shock. Such a vast reduction in the time available to her. She did nothing well, not work nor parenting. She put out fires in both for what felt like a decade straight, has only recently emerged. But maybe the damage is already done.
It’s a dream, that’s all, she tells herself. Yes. Conviction fires up through her chest. Of course it was a dream.
She turns Grey’s Anatomy off. The news replaces it automatically. She remembers this segment, about Facebook privacy settings being reviewed. The next one will be about an epilepsy drug being tested on laboratory mice. It’s hardly proof of time travel but, nevertheless, it pops up.
‘A new trial of a drug in the …’
Jen turns off the television, leaves the kitchen and goes into the hallway. Upstairs, the shower is running, just like she knew it would be. She’s got to be able to use this stuff to convince somebody. Surely?
She gets the knife out of the downstairs cupboard and inspects it. Unused, just as Kelly said.
She sits on the bottom stair, waiting for Todd, the knife across her lap. Waiting up for him once more. But this time, she’s waiting for an explanation. Waiting for the truth.
‘I found this,’ Jen says, and something small and spiteful within her is glad to be having a new conversation, and not one she has lived before. She extends the knife out to Todd. He doesn’t take it.
There are a million tells: his brow drops, he licks his lips, he shifts his weight on his feet. He says nothing and everything. ‘It’s a mate’s,’ he says eventually.
‘That is the oldest lie in the book,’ Jen says. ‘Do you know how many times lawyers have heard that?’ She swallows down more stomach acid. His shiftiness has confirmed it for her. It happens. It happens, tomorrow.
‘What are you doing, gulping like that?’ Todd says with an indolent shrug. This is how he has been lately, Jen finds herself thinking as she stares at the floor and tries not to be sick again. A boy full of secrets. She finds his shrugging presence sinister now, tonight.
‘I’ll speak to him,’ Kelly says from the top of the stairs.
She thought they’d got away without this stuff happening, this teenage stuff. Todd was an easy baby, a happy child. The only drama they’d had over this last summer was when a girl, Gemma, dumped him for being too weird. He’d come home heartbroken, not spoken for a full twenty-four hours, leaving Jen and Kelly guessing. He’d sat on Jen’s bed the next evening, when Kelly was out, crossed his legs, told her what happened, and asked if she thought it was true. ‘Absolutely not,’ she’d said, while guiltily wondering if there was a way to tell him … well, maybe? Not too weird, but definitely nerdy. He’d shown her some of the messages he’d sent. Intense was the word for them. Long missives, science memes, poems, text after text after text without a reply. Gemma had clearly been cooling off – thanks for that, chat tomorrow, nah bit busy today – and Jen had winced for her son.
But now this: knives, murders, arrests.
Kelly is silently appraising his son, his head tilted slightly backwards. Jen wishes he’d blow up, escalate things somehow, but evidently, he decides not to. Todd looks suddenly angry. His jaw is fixed.
He holds his palms up but says nothing more.
‘So if I check your bank statements – you didn’t buy it? It won’t appear there?’ Kelly asks.
Todd calls his bluff, looking levelly up the stairs. After a few seconds, he breaks eye contact with his father, shrugs himself out of his coat. He kicks his trainers off, feet bare on the floorboards. ‘That’s right,’ he says, his back to Jen as he hangs his coat up, something he never usually does.
‘We understand, you know – wanting to feel … protected,’ Kelly says. ‘Look – come with me. Take a walk.’
‘Do we? Understand that?’ Jen says. She looks up at him in surprise.
Todd turns violently away from her, running the rest of the way up the stairs and pushing past Kelly.
‘What do you think I’m going to do, kill you?’ Todd says, so softly Jen wonders if she’s misheard. Her whole body heaves.
‘Unless you tell me where you got it – and why – you won’t be going anywhere. Not for days. Not even to school,’ she says.
‘Fine!’ Todd shouts.
He goes into his bedroom, the door slamming so hard it shakes the whole house. Jen stares at Kelly, feeling like she’s been slapped.
Kelly runs a hand through his hair. ‘Fucking hell,’ he says to her. ‘What a mess.’ He swipes at the cabinet that stands at the top of their stairs. A piece of paper falls off it which he picks up, rubbing at his forehead. That piece of paper is an offer of a big job, one Kelly refused because they wanted him to go on their payroll rather than stay self-employed, and he’d said he’d never do that.
‘What’s happened to him?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ Kelly snaps. He shakes his head. ‘Let’s fucking leave it.’ He isn’t directing the anger at her, Jen knows. It’s his temper, sudden and volatile when it eventually goes. He once exploded at a man in a bar who touched Jen’s arse. Said he’d be happy to see him outside, which Jen couldn’t believe.
She nods, now, too choked up to speak, too panicked with what she fears is to come.
‘We can deal with’ – Kelly waves a hand – ‘all this tomorrow.’
Jen nods, happy to be directed. She takes the knife upstairs with her and puts it underneath their bed.
She and Todd cross paths later that evening, he coming down for a drink, she about to go upstairs for the night. She’d ordinarily be in a whirlwind of laundry and other banal tasks, but she isn’t, tonight. She’s just watching him across the kitchen without the busyness of normal life surrounding them.
He fills a glass from the tap, downs it in one, then fills it again. He pulls his phone out and scrolls on it while sipping, half smiles at something, then puts it back in his pocket.
She pretends to occupy herself. Todd strides past, glass of water still in hand, but just before he goes upstairs, he checks the lock on the front door. He gets one step up the stairs, turns around, then checks it again. Just to be sure. It looks like a check undertaken out of fear. Her skin feels chilled as she watches.
As she falls asleep, she finds herself thinking that Todd is here, safe in their house, grounded. And she has the knife. Perhaps it has been stopped. Whatever it is. Perhaps she will wake and it will be tomorrow. The day after. Anything but today again.
Day Minus Two, 08:30
Jen wakes up, sweat gathered across her chest. Her phone is lying on the bedside table, but she doesn’t check it. A perverse impulse to keep hope alive resides within her.
She pulls on Kelly’s dressing gown, still damp in places from his shower, and heads downstairs. The wooden floors are lit up by the sun, glossy with it. The honey light warms her toes and then her feet as she steps forwards.
Please don’t let it be Friday again. Anything but that.
She peers into the kitchen, hoping to see Kelly. But it’s empty. Tidy, too. The counters clear. She blinks. The pumpkin. It isn’t here. She walks into the kitchen, then spins around uselessly, just looking. But it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s Sunday. Maybe it’s over.
She brings her phone out of the dressing-gown pocket, holds a breath, then checks it.
It is the twenty-seventh of October. It is the day before the day before.