by Sophie Jaff
“Kat?”
She’s not in her bed. Lucas can tell by the light that it’s not early in the morning. Where is she? She must be in the bathroom. He turns and sees the closed door. That’s it. In a moment she’ll come out of the bathroom and come over and sit on the bed and say, Want to talk? Because it’s important to use his words, it’s important to share his feelings when something bad happens. And something really bad has happened.
He lies there and waits for the bathroom door to open. He waits and waits. Nothing. The brown door is closed. Lucas begins to wonder if it’s ever been open. He gets up and goes over to the door. Maybe Kat is in the shower. When Kat is in the shower she likes to sing. She gets embarrassed about this, but Lucas likes to hear her sing. She’ll sing him lullabies; she sings funny songs in the shower.
He doesn’t think she’ll be singing today.
He gets up and presses his ear against the door, but he can’t hear the shower. Maybe she’s on the toilet. That would be bad to hear because that’s private, but still, it would mean that she was there. Again he puts his ear against the door and listens; again there is nothing.
“Kat?” he whispers.
Still nothing. So Lucas raises his hand and he knocks, lightly at first and then louder. He’s scared now. “Kat! Kat!” he cries.
He wonders if he will have to go and get Sue, the tears are starting to come, when there’s the clink of a key in the lock. The handle slowly turns and the door opens, revealing Kat. Her skin is pale and her eyes are pink and swollen.
“Kat? Are you okay?”
She stares at him for a moment like she doesn’t know who he is, and then she tries to smile. Somehow, this is worse.
“Yes, honey.”
“Did you see Matthew?”
Kat winces. “He’s still very hurt.”
“Can I see him?”
He is not surprised when she shakes her head. “Not yet, my love.”
“When will he better?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“Is John here?”
“John is with Matthew.”
Lucas swallows. He wants to tell Kat something. “John was screaming,” he whispers, “screaming and screaming.”
“That must have been very scary.”
He blinks.
“It’s okay to admit you were scared. I was scared too. He was just very upset about Matthew.”
“Is Matthew going to be okay?”
Kat bites her lip. “I hope so.” She sniffs and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Now,” she says in a clearer voice, “why don’t you go downstairs and ask Sue for some breakfast? You must be hungry.”
“Don’t you want to eat breakfast?”
“I’ll grab something later. I’m not that hungry and I need to pack up.”
“Pack?”
Kat’s smile is watery. “We’re leaving today. I made a plan.”
He wants to ask more questions, but Kat frowns and closes her eyes and rubs at her forehead like her head is very sore, so he doesn’t. He goes downstairs, where Sue is cleaning up some breakfast dishes.
“Hi, Lucas,” Sue greets him, “Where’s Katherine?”
“She says she’s not that hungry.”
Sue frowns. “Poor thing, you’ve all had such a terrible time. Maybe I’d better check on her.”
“She’s fine.” Lucas thinks Kat wants to be alone right now. “She’s just packing.”
“Packing?” Sue frowns.
“She says she made a plan.”
“I’ll speak to her after I give you breakfast. You’re both welcome to stay.”
Lucas smiles. That would be good. He likes Sue. He feels safe with her.
Sue gives Lucas cereal, yogurt, and fruit. Then she leaves him to eat it and goes upstairs to talk with Kat. Then he hears the stairs creak. Sue and Kat are coming downstairs together, carrying their suitcases.
“Now that’s taken care of, why not have something to eat?”
“Thank you, but I’m not sure I could manage it,” Katherine replies apologetically.
Sue is understanding. “At least let me make you some tea.”
“Well, maybe a cup, thanks. Then I’ll settle up with you, and I’ll settle John and Matthew’s room too.”
Sue nods. She looks sad.
Katherine turns to Lucas. “If you’ve finished your breakfast, why not go upstairs and check our room to make sure I didn’t forget anything?”
He’s proud of the responsibility.
The room looks fine, apart from one of the beds, which has no bedding on it. Lucas hesitates at the open bathroom door. Still, he wants to see, wants to know. He peers around the door. There’s nothing, nothing wrong, and Lucas wants to laugh at himself for being so silly except—
There is a duvet and a pillow in the bathtub. Was Kat sleeping in the bathtub?
Also, he sees something on the mirror, a circle with a line through it. The circle and the line look like scratches but deeper. Lucas wonders how it got there, how you could be so strong as to scratch a mirror like that. He remembers seeing the glassblowers at the fair, watching them use long sticks of metal in the ovens, how long it took to shape something.
He stands on tiptoe, puts up his hand to touch the smooth, cool glass. Something faint red is in the center of the circle, underneath the line. A thumbprint. He learned about thumbprints in school. Everyone has their own thumbprint; no two are alike. They had used paint and made thumbprints and given the thumbprints little faces and stick legs and arms so they looked like silly little people, but this thumbprint doesn’t have a face or legs or arms. He stares harder. It doesn’t look like paint either. It looks like—
“Lucas!” Kat’s voice drifts up the stairs. “Time to go!”
He starts guiltily, as if he were doing something bad. He would have liked to look more at the circle, and the thumbprint. He doesn’t think Sue will like it. He doesn’t like it. It looks . . . wrong.
“Lucas!”
All of a sudden, he doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay here with Sue, where it’s safe.
“Come on, honey, let’s go!”
Slowly he heads down the stairs.
Kat is there, her hands on her hips. “What took you so long?”
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“Time to go. Say good-bye to Sue.”
Lucas peers up at Sue. “Good-bye. Thank you.”
Sue smiles, bends down. “It was my pleasure. Come back soon.” She straightens up and turns to Kat. “Please let me know how he is and how everything goes.”
Lucas knows Sue is talking about Matthew.
Kat takes a breath; she seems like she may cry. “Thank you for all your kindness.”
Both women hesitate. Then Sue swallows, and Kat takes his hand, and they walk out into the sunshine toward the car. Kat opens the car door for him, but he pauses. The driver briefly glances at him.
“Don’t you remember Niamh?”
He stares at the woman. This can’t be Niamh. The Niamh he knows is laughing and pretty with a big belly because there is a baby inside, like Kat’s belly. This Niamh is pale and thin and her hair hangs straight, doesn’t bounce. It’s dirty. Why would Kat let them get in the car with someone like this?
The question comes before he can stop it. “Where’s your belly?”
Niamh’s face darkens. “Get in.”
Lucas gets in and sits in the backseat, trying not to cry. Kat makes sure he is buckled up and then goes to the front of the car. She is moving very slowly.
She gets in and addresses Niamh. “Thank you for doing this.”
Niamh nods.
Kat closes her eyes, leans back. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
Niamh presses a button to start the ignition, and Kat closes her eyes; her head rolls.
“Kat?” he asks. “Kat?”
“Let her sleep,” Niamh tells him.
And they drive.
32
Lucas
Niamh
sings to herself.
“Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop . . .”
It sounds strange in the daytime when there are no babies around. She has a pretty voice and she doesn’t sing loudly, but it makes Lucas feel uncomfortable. He sits in the backseat and stares out of the window.
He tries to remember when it all first began. It started soon after they had come to London on the big airplane. He would wake up in the night and realize she was standing in the doorway, watching him. She looked like Kat, she wore Kat’s clothes, but when she came to him in the dark, she wasn’t Kat. His bedroom would turn cold. He would shut his eyes tight and pretend to be asleep, and eventually he would hear her leave.
Kat knew there was something bothering him, but she didn’t know what. And he couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell anyone, but the knowledge grew like a balloon inside him. Tighter and tighter and tighter, until he thought his chest would burst.
Once Mrs. B had asked him, “Is it Katherine?”
And he had to say no, because Kat would never hurt him. Kat loved him. But Kat was no longer Kat. At first, it had only been at night, but more and more, Kat was like somebody else. But who?
It was like new shoes. He and Kat had bought him nice shoes before he started at his new school, but they were a little stiff and they hurt his feet. The salesman had said that sometimes shoes have to get broken in.
“Why broken,” he had asked, “when they’re supposed to be new?”
“He means you have to wear them for a little at a time every day,” Kat, the real Kat, had told him. “The longer you wear them, the more comfortable they get. But you’ll let me know if they stay sore? Maybe you do need a larger pair.”
But the salesman was right. He had worn the new shoes around for a little bit at a time, and then for longer and longer, and then he began to forget he was wearing them at all. That is what is happening now with Kat. Whoever is inside Kat is breaking in her body. Wearing her skin. First just at night, and now in the daytime too.
“When are we getting to London?”
New, thin Niamh doesn’t answer. The car makes a tick, tick, tick noise as they turn onto another street.
“We’re not going back to London, are we?” he says to her.
She doesn’t say anything, but he knows he’s right.
He looks at Niamh. She doesn’t have a belly anymore. If her belly is gone, then maybe her baby is gone too.
“What happened to your baby?
She flinches. Lucas has a very bad feeling.
For a long time he looks out of the window at the other cars. He wishes he were in any of them. And a growing need, a pain, starts in his bladder.
“Kat?”
She doesn’t move.
“Niamh?”
No response. As if he isn’t here.
“Niamh?”
Again, nothing, but now he must say it.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
Finally she glances at him in her rearview mirror.
He makes sure he looks straight back at her, even though he really doesn’t want to. Her eyes are dark.
“Please?”
“You can’t hold it?”
He shakes his head. “How long until we get to our house?”
It’s now that he knows for certain that they’re not going to their house or her house or anywhere Kat wanted to go.
“Please,” he begs. The pain is getting worse. “Please don’t make me go in my pants like a baby.”
She bites her lip.
He can see she’s unsure. “I’ll be fast,” he pleads. “I promise.”
“You had better be,” she responds.
The green rest stop sign says welcome.
They turn in and find a parking space.
“Okay.” Niamh turns off the car. She turns to Lucas. “We’re going to be quick. Like five minutes. Got it?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t talk to anyone. You don’t say a word. Understand me?”
“Yes.” He is suddenly sure she would hurt him if he did.
It’s very quiet. They walk quickly toward the bathrooms.
“You have five minutes,” she tells him.
By now his need is so great that he almost doesn’t make it to the toilet. Afterward, he just stands there. What can he do? What can he do? The tears come.
Don’t be a baby, he tells himself, but it’s no use. He rubs his eyes furiously.
Then there is a tap on the wall of his stall.
He peers up. Directly in front of him.
Another tap, lower down the wall.
He bends down and then farther down until he sees into the next stall, through the gap between the floor and the wall.
Those feet. Bare and brown. He remembers them. He would know them anywhere. “Momma?”
“Lucas! Come on!” Niamh must be in the doorway of the bathroom. She sounds angry.
“I’m still using the bathroom,” he calls back.
“Hurry up!”
A hand, Momma’s hand, appears next to her feet. She drops a crumpled wad of toilet paper on the floor. Spots of ink have seeped through. He grabs it, unfolds it.
LOOK
IN
BAG
“What bag?” he whispers.
No answer.
“What bag? Momma, what bag?” There is no bag here.
A knock on his stall door.
“Lucas! Stop playing around! Let’s go!”
He hastily throws the toilet paper into the toilet and flushes, unlocks the stall door.
Niamh is furious. “I said let’s go! What were you doing in there?” She peers suspiciously into the stall.
“Nothing,” he says. “I just really had to go.” As he walks out, he casually tries to see into the stall next to him.
The door is open, and the stall is empty.
Niamh allows him to rinse his hands, and then he is marched out. She squeezes his arm so tightly that he almost cries out.
They have taken about ten steps outside toward the parking lot when she slaps his face, hard. “I told you to hurry up!”
Then she half drags, half pulls him along to the car. Kat is still inside, asleep.
Niamh turns to Lucas. “Get in.”
His face is stinging and his arm aches. He sits quietly, not moving. Niamh buckles up and turns to him.
“I hope you enjoyed your little bathroom break because that’s the end of it. We’re not stopping again.”
He doesn’t reply. He needs to put on his seat belt. It takes him several tries, but he keeps at it, and on the fourth try the buckle clicks. As he pushes it, his eyes fall on his knapsack there on the floor. His knapsack, his bag.
Look in bag.
He waits until they’ve been driving for a while.
Niamh has stopped singing, but now it’s worse. She’s talking and listening to someone. Someone he can’t hear. Someone he can’t see. Niamh nods. She murmurs, “Yes, I understand. Yes, I will.” She cocks her head on one side. She laughs. This is worse than the singing. It’s like she has an imaginary friend, but Lucas knows that just because you can’t see or hear them doesn’t mean they’re not there.
He reaches down and unzips the zipper as slowly as possible. She doesn’t hear him. Maybe she has forgotten that he is here.
With one hand, he digs around inside his bag. Only feels clothes, the clothes that Kat packed for him.
Look in bag.
But nothing in here can help him. His hand digs farther, and then his fingers feel something different. Something sharp. As slowly and carefully as he can, he maneuvers it up through the clothes and then peers down. It’s red, rusted, but he knows what it is.
It’s John’s knife. Matthew had shown it to him when he and Kat came to their house before they all went to Wales.
“What do you think of it?” he had asked. “I got it for John as a present.”
Lucas hadn’t known what to say. It didn’t look like any normal knife to him. It had a strange red c
olor and deep curls carved upon its handle. Momma and Kat had always told him not to touch knives. He wouldn’t want to eat with it or even hold it, but Matthew was very proud and he didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
“It’s pretty cool?” guessing that’s what Matthew would like to hear, and Matthew rumpled his hair and said, “Exactly what I thought.”
How did John’s knife get into his bag? Did Momma put it there?
He doesn’t know. But if his momma did that, there must be a reason.
Niamh has started to sing again.
“When the wind blows . . .” She giggles like the song is a funny one.
Lucas closes his eyes. He wishes he could close his ears against Niamh’s singing.
He tries to sleep.
33
Sael
The radio weather reports grow worse. Drivers are warned to proceed with caution. It’s the word “caution” that gets him. “Caution” because the forecasters don’t really seem to know what’s approaching, only that it is an unusual weather pattern. Not at all typical for this time of year.
“If we were in the States,” he says to Cathal, “the news would be going crazy. Full-blown panic mode.”
Cathal nods but says nothing, keeps his eyes on the road. He looks as tense and unhappy as Sael feels.
It was one of the strangest exchanges Sael has ever had. The man introduced himself as Cathal.
“Niamh’s husband?”
Somewhere, a bell in Sael’s head rang. “Oh yes! Your wife is also pregnant.”
Cathal’s expression was unreadable. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“We lost the baby.”
“Oh my God.” He feels as though he’s been punched. “Katherine never told me.”
“I wonder if she knew. I don’t think Niamh told her. I don’t think she told anyone.” Cathal grimaces.
Sael senses he should get back to the matter at hand. “So how do you know they’re together, and how are we going to find them?”
“Because I’ve tracked her phone.”
“Tracked her phone?”
“I work for a company that specializes in mobile securities. I installed our new app on her phone.” He reddens under the other man’s gaze. “Look, think of me what you will, she’s been in a bad way and I was worried. I woke up and she was gone. I called her, but it went straight to voicemail. Her location showed that she was on her way to Wales. I remember her saying something about Katherine taking a trip there.”
