‘No,’ he said again.
‘But why?’
‘Because if it wasn’t for me, his mother would still be alive.’
That killed the conversation. Jack spotted Cam wandering back in their direction. Relieved at the reprieve, he stood up.
‘Thanks so much for everything. For the wine and the food. I’ll... uh... return the favour sometime.’
Celine gave him the hockey stick. She smiled at Cam, said they should set up a playdate with Lola soon, and insisted on Jack taking her number.
They stopped at the food truck and Jack bought them two sausages in bread each. He wrapped them and put them away in his backpack, and they biked home. He and Cam lived three streets over from Elsa’s home on Ripley Street, but the postcode was the only thing their homes had in common. Elsa’s house was a four-bed, five-bath contemporary masterpiece, the kind of house that made the front cover ofArchitectural Digest, whereas Jack and Cam lived in a granny flat at the back of his landlady’s place. And they could only afford that because Mrs Dorsey gave him a deal on the rent in exchange for taking care of her cats when she travelled.
Jack and Cam wheeled the bikes around the side of the house. When they got to the flat, Jack spotted the parcel waiting for them on the doormat.
‘What’s that?’ asked Cam.
‘Don’t know, mate. Lock up the bikes, okay?’
Cam took both bikes around the back of the flat, while Jack picked up the parcel. It wasn’t very big, maybe the size of a shoebox, but it was elaborately wrapped with embossed black paper, a dark red velvet ribbon, and a single pink daisy. He assumed it must be for Mrs Dorsey, but when he looked at the card, he saw his own name and address, written in flowing calligraphy.
By the time Jack had opened the front door, Cam was back. He’d lost interest in the parcel and was ready to do what he did best—talk in an endless, circular flow about his current favourite video game.
‘So Dad.Raftis like this game where you start on a small raft and you have to find scraps in the water and build off that raft while there’s a shark circling you. And then you come across small islands and you start to get slightly more resources, and you keep doing that until you’re getting some iron, and like copper and like mining some more.’
‘Right.’
‘So, the main bit of the game is that there are five or six big main islands that have all the story in them and have, for example, one of them’s a bear-infested island and stuff like that and one of the last ones is like a whole civilisation city that’s now abandoned and just floating in the water.’
‘Cool.’
Jack listened with one ear. He put the parcel on the kitchen table and unpacked the wrapped sausages while Cam got the tomato sauce from the fridge.
‘Can you get water too, mate?’ Jack asked.
They sat at the table and ate, Cam still talking between mouthfuls. When Jack had finished his first sausage, he wiped his hands and unwrapped the parcel. Inside the wrapping paper there was a cardboard box, and the box was full of packing peanuts. Jack searched through them. His fingers closed on something hard and cool and metal. He lifted it out, and found that he was holding a gun. A handgun. Grey and smooth and cool to the touch.
‘Oh, shit.’
Jack dropped the gun onto the table and took a step back.
‘Wow. What’s that? Is it real?’ Cam slid the glasses of water onto the table and reached for the gun.
‘Don’t touch it!’ Jack said.
Cam held his hands up in the air, eyes wide.
Jack had never touched a gun before. Never even seen one in real life. Who the hell would send him something like that? He picked up the card and examined it again. His name and address were clearly and carefully written, but there was no return address for the sender.
‘Is it real, Dad? Where did you get it?’
‘I don’t know.’ It looked real. It had felt too heavy to be a toy.
Jack picked up the box. It felt light, empty except for the packing peanuts. He poured them carefully out onto the counter. There was a folded sheet of paper on the very bottom of the box. It fell out and slipped onto the floor. He picked it up and unfolded it. It was blank, except for a line of text, right in the centre of the page:
He’s still here, sometimes, but he doesn’t want to be.
The words meant nothing to him. They were beautifully handwritten in calligraphy, with navy ink. Were they a quote from somewhere? An extract from a book? Jack turned the page over. The other side was definitely blank. He looked more closely at the gun. It was black, snub-nosed. It looked... dangerous. Like it wasn’t just a tool but something that had a will of its own.
