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Front pockets, side pockets. It’s a good distraction to be taking action. She hears Todd humming upstairs in that way that he does when he’s impatient. ‘’Sake,’ he says.
Two chemistry textbooks, three loose pens. Jen puts them on the hallway floor and continues searching.
‘No notifications,’ he shouts. His tone is irritated again. Just recently, she’s felt like a nuisance around him.
‘Sorry,’ she calls, thinking, Give me one fucking minute, just one, just one. ‘Must’ve misheard.’
The bottom of the bag is lined with the crumbs from a thousand sandwiches.
But what’s this? Right in the back? A sheath, a leather sheath. It’s as cold and hard as a thigh bone, sitting right there against the back of her son’s rucksack. She knows what it will be before she pulls it out.
A long leather pouch. She exhales, then unbuttons the top and slides a handle out.
And – inside it … a knife. The knife.
Day Minus One, 08:30
Jen stands there, staring at it, at this betrayal in her hand. She hadn’t thought what she would do if she found something. She never thought she would.
She holds the long, sinister black handle.
The panic begins again, a tide of anxiety that goes out to sea but always, always returns. She wrenches open the under-stairs cupboard. Shoes and sports equipment and canned goods they can’t fit in the kitchen crowd out and she fumbles past them, pushing the knife right to the back. She can hear Todd on the landing. She leans the knife against the back wall and retreats out of the cupboard, tidying up the rest of his things back into the bag.
Todd – disgruntled smile, young Kelly written across his features – picks up the bag. He doesn’t seem to notice the difference, the lightness of it. Jen stares at him as he opens the front door. Her son, armed, so he thinks, and with intent. Her son who thrust that knife with such force it split another person’s torso right open in three places. He throws a look over his shoulder, suspicious, and Jen thinks for a second that he might know what she’s done.
He leaves, and Jen climbs the stairs and watches his car from the picture window. As he drives off, she’s sure she sees his eyes flick up to the rear-view mirror and meet hers, for just the briefest of moments, like a butterfly landing and leaving before you even notice, flapping its wings only once.
‘I found a knife in Todd’s bag,’ Jen says, the second her husband arrives home. She doesn’t explain the rest, not yet. She’s spent the day swinging between panic and rationalization. It was nothing, it was a dream, it’s something, it’s a living nightmare. She’s mad, she’s mad, she’s mad.
Kelly’s face shuts down immediately, as Jen expected it might.
He approaches her, picking the blade up and holding it across his hands as if it is some kind of archaeological find. His pupils have gone huge. ‘What did he say? When you found it?’ His tone is frosty.
‘He doesn’t know.’
Kelly nods, staring down at the long, sharp blade, not saying anything. Jen remembers his angry behaviour from last night and thinks that, now, he just looks withdrawn instead.
‘It’s a brand-new knife,’ he says now, flicking his eyes to her. ‘I’m going to fucking kill him.’
‘I know.’
‘Unused.’
Jen laughs, a hard, unhumorous laugh. ‘Right.’
‘What?’
‘It’s just – I mean, I saw Todd stab somebody with this last night.’
‘What …’ he says, the word not lilting upwards, not a question, just a statement of disbelief.
‘Yesterday, I waited up for Todd and he – he knifed someone, on the street. You were there, too.’
‘But …’ Kelly rubs a hand over his chin. ‘But I wasn’t. You weren’t. You said that was a dream.’ He flashes her a quick smile. ‘Have you gone to madtown?’ he says, their abbreviation for neuroses.
Jen turns away from him. Outside, their neighbour walks his dog past. Jen knows his phone is about to ring, remembers it from yesterday, but it does so before she can say it to Kelly. She needs to think of something else that’s about to happen to prove it to Kelly, but she can’t, she can’t think of anything except how has she woken up here, in some alternative, scary universe.
‘I was awake,’ she says, turning her gaze from the neighbour, thinking of all of the items that would be considered circumstantial evidence that yesterday didn’t happen: the smooth, uncut pumpkin, her son’s presence in the bedroom, the absence of any blood or police tape on the street outside. But then she thinks of the knife. That knife is the only piece of tangible proof she has.
