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Jen smiles a wan, sad smile, hangs up, and thinks about today. It’s all she has, after all.
Today. May 2021.
May 2021. Something is creeping towards her consciousness, like a fine mist gathering on the horizon.
It hits as some thoughts sometimes do. It arrives without warning. She checks her phone. Yes. She’s right. It is the sixteenth of May 2021.
That’s when it lands.
Like a sucker punch, so violent it knocks her off her feet momentarily: today is the day her father dies.
Jen pretends to resist the urge to do it. She’s not travelling back in order to see her father, to right one of the big wrongs in her life, she tells herself as she straightens her hair. She’s not doing this to say goodbye to him. She’s here to save her son.
But all morning she thinks of that morgue goodbye, just her and his dead body, his hand cold and dry in hers, his soul someplace else.
She watches Todd play Crash Team Races Nitro-Fueled – their game du jour – while fiddling madly, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Eventually, Todd goes, ‘What?’ to her, and she wanders off, leaving him to it.
She googles Kelly on her phone while standing in the hallway. There is nothing, no online footprint at all. She puts his surname into an ancestry site, but it throws up hundreds of results around the UK. She finds a photograph of Kelly and reverse-image searches it, but nothing comes up.
She drifts upstairs. Kelly is doing his accounts. ‘I’m being patronized by Microsoft,’ he says to her. Cup of coffee on a coaster. Small smile on his face. As she approaches, he angles the computer just ever so slightly away from her. She catches it this time. Must have missed it the first.
Maybe he has another income stream somewhere. Drugs, dead policemen, crime. Does he have more money than a painter/decorator ought to? Not really. Not a lot, she doesn’t think. Nothing she’s ever noticed – and wouldn’t she have? A memory springs up from nowhere. Kelly having given money to charity, a couple of years ago. Buckets of it, several hundred pounds. He hadn’t told her, and when asked he had explained it as anonymous philanthropy thanks to a good job that had come in. It had bothered Jen in that intangible way it does when your husband lies to you, even about something benign. The lie hadn’t been bigger than what it was, but, nevertheless, it had been one.
‘Hey, strange question,’ she says lightly. ‘But do you have any living relatives? You know, a cousin, once removed …’
Kelly frowns. ‘No? Parents were only children,’ he says quickly.
‘Not even a very distant relative, up another generation maybe?’
‘… No. Why?’
‘Realized I’d never asked about the wider family. And I got this – this weird memory of seeing an old photograph of you. You were with this man who had your eyes. He was thicker set than you. Same eyes. Lighter hair.’
Kelly appears to experience a full-body reaction to this sentence, which he disguises by standing up abruptly. ‘No idea,’ he says. ‘I don’t think – do I even have any old photographs? You know me. Unsentimental.’
Jen nods, watching him and thinking how untrue this is. He is not at all unsentimental.
‘Must’ve made it up,’ she says. They’re just eyes. Perhaps it’s only a friend in the photograph.
Jen meets those blue irises and suddenly feels as alone as she ever has in her entire life. She is supposed to be forty-three, but, here, she is forty-two. She’s supposed to be in the autumn, but she’s in a spring, eighteen months before. And her husband isn’t who he says he is, no matter what time zone she’s in.
And her father is alive.
Her father who loves her unconditionally, even if that is in his own way. Just as Jen feels she must examine her own parenting in order to save her son, she wants, now, to turn to the person who raised her.
‘I’m going to go see Dad,’ she says. It comes from nowhere. She can’t resist. She needs to feel his warm hand in hers. She needs to watch him lay out the beer and the peanuts that he dies beside. She won’t stay. She’ll just – she’ll just tell him she loves him. And then leave.
‘Oh, cool,’ Kelly says. ‘Have fun,’ he calls, as she races down the stairs. ‘Say hi from me.’
Kelly and her father have always had a cordial relationship, but never close. Jen thought Kelly might search for a father figure, adopt hers willingly, but, actually, he did the opposite, always keeping Ken at arm’s length, the way he does with most people.
She calls her dad from the car, part of her brain still thinking he won’t answer.
But, of course, he does. And this proves to Jen, above almost anything else, that this is really happening. It really is.
‘A nice surprise,’ Jen’s father says to her. And there he is, on the end of the line. Back from the dead. His voice – posh, reserved, but mellowed into humour with age. Jen leans into it like a captive animal feeling a breeze after so long, too long.
‘Up to much? Thought I’d come over,’ Jen says, her voice thick.
