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‘He is a great physicist,’ Todd says. ‘This assignment.’ He passes her his phone.
‘Well done,’ she says sincerely. She starts to read the assignment with interest, partly wondering if it might contain some science that might help her, but Todd takes the phone off her.
‘Really, don’t worry about it.’
‘I’m interested!’
‘You never usually are,’ Todd shoots back.
A guilty stone arrives in her stomach. Maternal guilt, that thing she has tried to work against for much of her life, but that always – always – sits there anyway. You never usually are.
‘You all right?’ Kelly says with a laugh. ‘You look like the Grim Reaper.’
Todd snorts into his takeaway while Jen dishes hers out.
Kelly leaves the counter, his mobile ringing. She stares into the hallway, thinking about Todd.
‘What do you mean?’ she asks him.
‘I mean – you don’t usually pay attention to my stuff.’
‘Your stuff?’ Jen says, the world feeling suddenly still. Todd says nothing, reaching for a chicken ball and eating it whole. ‘Do you think I don’t listen to you?’ she asks.
A hazy kind of awareness is descending on her, the way cloud cover does: you can’t quite see it if you’re in it, but you can feel it.
Todd seems to actively consider the answer, looking down at his plate, his brow furrowed. ‘Maybe,’ he says eventually.
He is still staring at her. Kelly’s eyes. But everything else is hers. Dark, unruly hair, pale skin. Unbearably large appetite. She made him. And look: he thinks she doesn’t listen to him. Just says it like it is a plain fact.
‘It isn’t interesting to you,’ he adds.
‘Oh,’ she whispers.
‘I care about physics,’ he says. ‘So it isn’t funny that I care about Alexander Kuzemsky. I actually care about him.’
Jen experiences the eerie feeling of being wrong in an argument. So totally wrong. Her mind performs gymnastics. This isn’t about planets. This is about their relationship.
Todd with his fun science facts and his head in the clouds. Jen with her wry inability to understand what he is talking about. That’s how she has always thought of them. She and Kelly couldn’t believe they’d made such a cerebral child, clever in a totally different way to them, both so earthy, and Todd so … not. But he isn’t something made. He isn’t an object. Here he is, right in front of her, telling her who he is. She’s let her own insecurities about being stupid turn his intellectualism into something to be laughed off. Laughed at.
‘God.’ She puts her head in her hands. ‘All right. I see. I’m sorry. It’s not – I’m so sorry,’ she finishes lamely.
‘Okay,’ he says.
‘Everything you do is interesting to me,’ she says, tears springing with the kind of reckless fatalism of somebody who won’t be here tomorrow; a deathbed proclamation, a call from a hijacked plane. A woman who can connect and connect and connect with her son, but it doesn’t matter, it won’t last. ‘I have never loved anybody as much as I love you. Never will,’ she says plainly, her eyes wet. ‘I got it wrong. If I don’t show you that. Because it is so true – it is the truest thing.’
He blinks. His expression ripples into sadness, like a stone dropped into a pond. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘It’s just – you know.’
‘I know,’ Jen says. ‘I know.’
‘Thank you,’ he says again.
‘You’re welcome,’ she says softly, just as Kelly strides in.
‘I ate all the balls, because this last one’s mine too,’ Todd says with a smile. The joke’s a deflection, armour against their other family member witnessing this private moment, but Jen laughs anyway, too, though she wants to cry.
‘That was a client,’ Kelly says needlessly. Jen glances back at Todd. He puts the final chicken ball in his mouth and smiles up at her with his eyes. She reaches over to tousle his hair, which he leans into, like a neglected animal.
Todd drops the Tupperware right into the bin, something she would usually complain about but chooses not to, today.
