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 Jen remembers his angry behaviour from last night and thinks that, now, he just looks withdrawn instead.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.
‘Look, I didn’t see anything last night. We’ll just ask him about it. When he gets back,’ Kelly says. ‘It’s a criminal offence. So … we can tell him that.’
Jen nods, saying nothing. What can she possibly say?
‘Get out from under my feet,’ Kelly says. He is addressing their cat, Henry VIII, so called because he has been obese from the day they rescued him.
Jen, lounging on the sofa in their kitchen, winces. Kelly said exactly the same thing on Friday night. The first Friday night. He gave in then, fed Henry, said, ‘Fine, but know that I am judging you.’
She gets to her feet and paces past Kelly. She can’t. She can’t just sit here and let a day play out that she’s already lived.
‘Where you off to?’ Kelly says to her, amused. ‘You look so stressed you actually just created a breeze as you came past me.’ Then, to the meowing cat: ‘Fine, but know that I am judging you.’ He opens a packet of Felix. Heat travels up Jen’s chest. She can feel a panicked blush rise through her neck and to her cheeks.
‘This all happened,’ she says. ‘This has all happened before. What’s going on?’ She sits down on the sofa and pulls uselessly at her clothes, trying to escape her own body, trying to express something impossible. If she hadn’t already lost her mind, she certainly looks as though she has now.
‘The knife?’
‘Not the knife, I only found the knife today,’ she says, knowing that this won’t make any sense to anyone but her. ‘Everything else. I have experienced everything else that’s happening. I have lived this day twice now.’
Kelly sighs as he finishes feeding Henry and opens the freezer door. ‘This is mad even for you,’ he says sardonically. Jen tilts her head, looking up at him from her position on the sofa.
They’d argued the first time they lived this night, about holidays. Jen always wanting to go on them, Kelly refusing to fly. A plane he was on once dropped five thousand feet during turbulence, he told her early on in their relationship. He’s not flown since. ‘You’re not remotely an anxious person,’ Jen had said. ‘Well, I am about this,’ he’d said, before getting a Magnum out of the freezer.
‘I know you’re about to eat a Magnum,’ she says now, but Kelly’s hand is already on the freezer.
‘However did you guess that?’ he says. ‘She’s a psychic,’ he says to the cat.
Kelly leaves the kitchen. She knows he will go upstairs to shower.
As he walks past her, he trails his fingers so lightly along her upper back that it makes her shiver. She meets his eyes. ‘You’re fine,’ he says. She wishes she hadn’t been so anxious in the past. She raises her hand to grasp his just as he’s leaving, as she has a thousand times before. His hand is her anchor, a woman alone, out at sea. And then he’s gone. If he is worried about the knife, or what she’s been saying, he doesn’t say. It isn’t his style.
Jen puts on Grey’s Anatomy and leans back on the sofa, alone, trying to relax.
Jen and Kelly met almost twenty years ago. He walked into her father’s law firm asking if they wanted any decorating done. Jeans slung low on his waist, a slow, knowing smile when his eyes landed on Jen. Her father had turned him down, but Jen had gone for lunch with him, more by accident than anything else. He’d walked out with her, at twelve o’clock, and they’d seen the rain-slicked pub opposite had a two-for-one offer on. All through the lunch, then pudding, then coffee, Jen kept saying she ought to get back, but they seemed to have so much to say to each other. Kelly asked her interested question after interested question. He’s the best listener she knows.
She remembers almost everything about that date. It had been late March, absurdly cold and wet, and yet, as Jen sat there, at a little table in the corner of a pub with Kelly, the sun had come out from behind the dense cloud, just for a minute or two, and illuminated them. And, right then, it had felt, suddenly, like spring, even though it began to rain again only minutes later.
They’d shared an umbrella from the pub back to the office. She’d let him leave with it, a totally deliberate act, and when he brought it into the office the following Monday, he left his keys on her desk.