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‘I didn’t know Mum ate garlic when she was pregnant.’
‘Oh yes, tons of the stuff. Even raw, sometimes. She’d stick a few cloves in a roast chicken and eat them one by one,’ her father says. Jen can just imagine it. A woman she lost too soon, eating garlic cloves at the kitchen counter, greasy fingers, Jen inside her body. Todd inside Jen’s. Todd’s potential, anyway.
‘She said she overdid it. We always said’ – he takes the beer and peanuts from her in one hand, one deft movement. God, he is so healthy – ‘she wouldn’t eat her favourite foods in pregnancy if we had another, so she didn’t get put off.’
He leans forward and lights the fire. He wasn’t found with the fire on, a garlic bread and a fish pie in the oven. These are all changes Jen has made. It lights easily, zipping along from left to right, like words appearing on a typewritten page. The room is immediately filled with the soft, hot smell of gas.
Jen sits down next to it on a stool her mother embroidered the top of that her father has kept, no snack or drink for her, just watching him. Waiting.
What do you say to somebody when you know they will be your last words to them? You just … you don’t, you don’t leave, do you? Anxiety rushes over Jen like the fire her father has just lit, making her hot. She was never going to leave. How could she possibly leave him all alone?
And what if this could stop it? Somehow?
‘But you didn’t have another child,’ she says to her father, instead of cutting short the conversation, instead of leaving, instead of finding a way to say goodbye to him, now and also for eternity.
‘Never a right time, and then too late,’ he says simply. He opens the bottle of beer with a hiss. ‘The law – it takes so much, doesn’t it? You give it an inch … I always thought Kelly had the right idea, never letting work in so much.’
‘Who knows what ideas Kelly has,’ Jen says tightly, and her father looks embarrassed.
‘He’s got the right idea,’ he says softly. A strange and prescient feeling settles over Jen. Almost like … almost like, if her father knew he was going to die, he might tell her something. A key. A piece of the puzzle. A slice of deathbed wisdom that she could use. A side of the prism currently still in darkness.
They lapse into silence, the gas fire the only noise, a kind of rushing, like distant rain. It pumps out such a fierce heat, the air above it shimmers. She could stay here for ever, in her father’s quaint old living room, while a garlic bread cooks.
And that’s when it happens. Jen watches it pass over her father like a storm cloud. Peanuts and beer right next to him, just like they said. Sweat is the first sign, a milky dusting of it across his forehead, like he’s been out in drizzle. ‘Oh, wow,’ he says, puffing air into his cheeks. ‘Jen?’
Jen feels hot with panic. She didn’t think it would be like this. She thought it would be sudden.
He brings a hand to his stomach, wincing, eyes on her. ‘Jen – I don’t feel good,’ he says, his voice anxious, like Todd’s when he was little and fell over, looked to her first to see how he felt; his maternal mirror. And now here she is, at the end of her father’s life, their roles reversed.
‘Daddy,’ she says, a word she hasn’t uttered for decades.
‘Jen – call 999, please,’ he says. His eyes are brown, just like hers, imploring her. She gets her phone out. There is no question. There is absolutely no question. She has only the illusion of choice.
Day Minus Seven Hundred and Eighty-Three, 08:00
Jen is in September, the previous year. She orients herself, thinking of last night, of her father, of the way he looked at her in the hospital bed. Warm and alive. And now it’s before that again, and he’s alive again now, too, but not because she saved him. She wonders if, somehow, when she goes forward again, she will have still saved him, and he will be there, in the future, alive.
A pile of blue-and-white-striped presents sits in the corner of their bedroom. Oh. It must be Todd’s birthday, his sixteenth. What could be hidden on his birthday that might explain why he commits a crime? She thinks about what Andy said, about how maybe it isn’t about stopping it, but about defending it instead.
She stares at the pile of presents, wrapped last night somewhere in the past; in a yesterday she might never get to. The gifts are PlayStation games and an Apple watch. Too expensive, but she’d wanted to get the watch for him, couldn’t wait to see his face. They will go out for dinner, just to Wagamama’s, nowhere special. It’s cold. The weather turned early that year, becoming autumn almost overnight.
She begins sorting through Todd’s presents, on her hands and knees on the floor. These two squishy presents are socks. This rectangle is the Apple watch … she sets the others out on the wooden floor, looking at them, mystified. That little round one looks like lip balm. Surely not. She has no idea. She can’t remember.
She hopes he will like them, nevertheless.
She stacks up the presents and walks down the stairs to knock on Todd’s door. ‘Er, come in?’ he says in a baffled voice. Right. Of course. Jen only started knocking last year. Next year. Whatever.
‘Happy birthday!’ she says, nudging the door handle down with the stack of presents.
‘Wait, wait, wait for me,’ Kelly says, rushing up the stairs with two coffees and a squash on a tray. At the picture window, beyond him, the sky is a perfect, high autumn blue. Like nothing untoward has ever happened, will ever happen.
When she walks into Todd’s bedroom, he’s in pale green pyjamas, sitting up in bed, hair mussed up just like Kelly’s. Jen pauses at the door, gazing at him. Sixteen. A kid, really, nothing more. So perfectly, perfectly innocent, it hurts her heart to look at him.
Despite his birthday, Todd has to go to school and, while he’s getting ready, Jen sees that she has a trial today; a rare event in any divorce lawyer’s calendar is a full-scale trial. It’s Addenbrokes vs Addenbrokes, a case that took over her life for the past year. A couple who’d been married for over forty years, who still laughed at each other’s jokes; but the wife couldn’t get past Jen’s client’s infidelity. Andrew regretted it so much it was painful. If he was in Jen’s position, it would be the first and only thing he would change about the past.
She heads downstairs, the house empty again, thinking that she can’t attend a trial. It won’t matter. She won’t wake up on tomorrow, anyway. What are the odds?
Just as she’s thinking this, her phone rings. Andrew.
