by Sharon Sant
The words had come as unexpectedly from his mouth as they had to Ellen’s ears. It was not what he had intended to say. But now they were out there, he desperately wanted to hear them returned.
Her gaze went to the window where the sun climbed steadily into a clear sky. ‘This is not fair.’
‘Then go.’ His voice had a harder edge now. ‘I don’t ask you to come around.’
Without another word, she gathered her things and left.
Jacob had not expected Ellen to return that day, but when Luca arrived after lunch she was with him. She avoided eye contact and it was clear she had been crying. It pained him to see her upset and he wished he could undo what had been done, but without causing much bigger problems, he couldn’t. In her absence, Jacob had mulled over all that she had said, both about them and the dream. While he was still clueless about their relationship, he did have some ideas about their search.
‘Has Ellen told you about her dream?’ Jacob asked Luca as they went into the parlour.
‘She mentioned it,’ Luca replied, carefully glancing from him to Ellen and back again.
‘I made some notes,’ Jacob said, ignoring his questioning look. He pulled out a spiral-bound notepad. ‘The main things were a beach, palm trees, a lot of people and cars…’
‘I still don’t know,’ Luca said uncertainly, ‘it doesn’t sound as though it narrows the list down much to me.’
‘But it’s a start,’ Jacob replied briskly. ‘We know it’s by the sea, so that rules out all the inland cities. And we know there’s a big population -’
‘We knew that before,’ Luca cut in. ‘You’re staking a lot on a dream.’
Jacob ran a hand through his still uncombed hair. ‘We haven’t got much else to go on, so why not? If we’re wrong, at least by searching these first we’ve knocked some places off the list.’
Luca had no argument for this logic. Ellen sat on the sofa, her attention drawn to the blazing afternoon outside the window. Jacob glanced across at her, his mind briefly cast back to another time when they had snuggled together on that same sofa watching some old film and not caring how dreary it was. How had things become so complicated?
‘So we make a list first of all the big cities by the sea,’ Jacob continued, shaking his melancholy. ‘Only ones with warm climates, though, hot enough for palm trees, so that gets rid of some too.’
‘St Ives, then?’ Luca smiled. ‘That’s not too bad; I can stretch to St Ives.’
‘Funny,’ Jacob frowned.
‘Come on, mate, this is mind numbing enough, you can’t expect me not to have a bit of a laugh.’
‘Yeah, but that wasn’t actually humorous.’
Jacob’s mum popped her head round the door. ‘You want some drinks in here?’
‘That would be nice, Mrs L,’ Luca replied. ‘It’s boiling again out there.’ He waved a hand at the bright window.
Maggie’s eyes fell on the forlorn figure occupying the sofa. ‘Ellen,’ she said gently, ‘would you be able to give me a hand?’
Ellen nodded and followed her out of the room.
‘What’s the deal with you two?’ Luca asked as soon as they had gone.
‘Don’t know what you mean,’ Jacob replied, looking down his list.
‘I’m not stupid. She’s hardly said a word on the way over and her face is a mess. You’re being weird as well.’
‘Thanks,’ Jacob said looking up from his notes.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Forget it, Luca. I thought we might get back together and she doesn’t want to. End of.’ Jacob flicked on the laptop to signal that the discussion was over.
When Maggie and Ellen returned with drinks, Jacob and Luca were hunched over the old dining table looking at the laptop together in silence. Ellen and his mum had been gone for a while and Jacob looked up to see that Ellen had shed fresh tears. He could guess, with no special powers, that he had been the topic of conversation between them. How much Ellen had told his mum, however, was something that he couldn’t guess and wasn’t particularly bothered about right then.
Maggie put down the tray and closed the door quietly, giving Ellen a tender look before she did. Catching it elicited the slightest pang of jealousy in Jacob. He wondered if his mum wished she had Ellen for a daughter instead of him for a son. She was everything his mother wanted: kind, constant, loyal and - more importantly - present. He was a disappointment, and could only continue to be. Brushing away such thoughts, he tried to focus on the task of narrowing down their search.
‘So… big cities on the coast, lots of cars, palm trees… Where do we start?’
‘Australia? America? Mexico?’ Luca ventured.
Jacob brought up maps of the countries as they named them and wrote down a list of the possible candidates. When they had finished it filled four pages, and there was a nagging uncertainty that they had still missed some out. Ellen scanned the list.
‘I think America,’ she said tentatively.
‘What makes you think that?’ Luca asked.
She shrugged. ‘Just a feeling.’
Luca was about to question this when Jacob interrupted. ‘I suppose we’ve been working on your feelings all day, we might as well go with this one as well.’
Ellen looked at him sharply, not sure whether there was a barbed sarcasm to his voice or whether she had just imagined it. He simply flipped to the list of cities in America and typed the first search term into the laptop.
The afternoon had been a subdued affair. Luca and Ellen left early evening, politely refusing Maggie’s offer to cook dinner for them. Jacob wolfed down his meal and returned to his bedroom to research, where he continued until well after ten.
Maggie put her head around his door to find him lying on his front with the screen turned to him. ‘What’s so important that you can’t sit with us for a while?’ she smiled.
Jacob looked up and rubbed his eyes. ‘Just messing about.’
‘Seems a bit intense to be just messing about,’ she observed. ‘All three of you are spending a lot of time around that laptop.’
‘We’re looking at stuff.’
‘If I didn’t know you better,’ she said, ‘I’d think you were planning to go off travelling with Luca.’
Jacob sat up. ‘What makes you think that?’
Let me see… You’re both planning something, I can tell. You had a list of cities earlier. And Ellen seems to be very upset about something, so I presume she isn’t invited. Doesn’t take a genius.’
‘We’re not going travelling.’
She sighed. ‘It’s a shame about you and Ellen, too,’ she said, perching herself on the end of Jacob’s bed. ‘I honestly thought you might have settled down with her.’
‘Mum, we were fifteen.’
‘So? Plenty of good marriages have been made from childhood sweethearts.’ Jacob cringed at the phrase childhood sweethearts. It seemed to imply a pair of soppy kids, some living embodiment of a corny greetings card illustration, something they most definitely weren’t.
‘You’re not going to get back together, then?’ she pressed.
‘I don’t think so.’ Jacob’s voice held a note of bitterness and Maggie backed away from the discussion.
‘Are you coming down for a while?’
‘In a bit.’
Maggie ruffled his hair and left him, but when she returned later to ask again, he was asleep on the bed with the laptop still open in front of him. The screensaver was on. With a quick glance at her son, and then back at the screen, she pressed a key. With a jolt, she saw that the page he was looking at was a list of records from the Miami Police Department. She closed the lid and took it downstairs to show her husband.
Jacob woke to find the early morning sun streaming in through his window. The air in his room was already stuffy and the day promised to be as hot as those that had gone before. He was still in the clothes he had worn the previous day and it took him a few moments to remember that he had fallen asleep resear
ching. He looked across the room to see that the laptop had been moved onto his drawers and groaned. Who had moved it and how much had they seen? Silently cursing himself for not being more careful, he went to the bathroom and splashed some water in his face to wake up. He peered at his reflection. The mirror was another Astraen novelty and these days he hardly recognised himself. All he did know, as he looked more closely, was that his eyes were an ominous colour. They hadn’t been clear since he had left home, but if he thought that returning would bring back the luminous shade of blue that always signalled contentment, he was wrong. If anything, coming back had been harder on his nerves than being away. He caught another handful from the tap and rubbed it through his hair. The mood he was in, it was as close as he was going to get to a wash.
Nobody mentioned the laptop at breakfast, although Jacob could detect a tension in the air, something unspoken. He ate some toast as quickly as possible and headed back to his room to begin his research again.
A while later he heard a knock at the front door and the sound of Luca’s voice as it was answered. He waited for him to come upstairs. The search had resulted in another fruitless morning and Jacob felt he would be glad of some company to distract him from his fraying temper. But the minutes ticked by and he was surprised to see that Luca didn’t appear. Finally, he decided to go downstairs and find out what had happened to him.
Luca was in the kitchen, cornered by Jacob’s mum who appeared to be earnestly questioning him. Jacob couldn’t tell what was being said and as soon as they heard him enter the room they were silenced, Maggie looking guilty and Luca giving every impression that he needed rescuing.
‘Everything alright?’ Jacob tried to sound nonchalant.
‘Yes…’ Jacob thought his mum sounded like she was casting around for an excuse. ‘I was just asking Luca about his mum’s plumber.’
‘Plumber?’ Jacob was barely able to hide his smirk. He hoped that his mum didn’t harbour any aspirations to become a spy, because she’d be rubbish. Irritated though he was, the situation was so amusing that he found it a welcome relief from the torturous morning he’d endured glued to the screen of the laptop. ‘And have you filled my mum in on your plumber?’ he asked Luca.
Luca sidled past Maggie in a way that looked like a desperate bid for freedom. ‘Yep, I think we’re done, aren’t we, Mrs L?’
She nodded, but as Jacob and Luca left the room together, she called: ‘I’ll speak to your mum later, Luca.’
‘Please, God, don’t,’ he muttered under his breath.
‘What was that about?’ Jacob asked as they climbed the stairs.
‘I’ll tell you in a minute. You’re not going to like it.’
They reached the safety of Jacob’s room and he shut the door.
‘Go on,’ Jacob said.
‘She saw what was on your laptop last night. You were looking at police records?’
Jacob nodded. ‘I must have fallen asleep with it on. Stupid thing to do.’
‘Yep,’ Luca agreed.’ ‘She wants to know why you’ve been spending all your time looking at stuff like police records and she thinks I can tell her.’
‘So what did you tell her?’
‘She caught me off guard. I told her I didn’t know anything about it. She didn’t believe me, though. And she seems to have this idea that we’re planning to go off travelling, too. Where did she get that from?’
‘She said that to me last night. Thinks she’s figured it all out somehow. She’s figured something out, but it’s not right, of course. The problems start if she does get on the right track.’
‘I think the right track in this case would take some pretty creative thinking.’
‘I suppose it would,’ Jacob agreed.
Luca sniggered. ‘The look on her face when you walked in.’
Jacob’s quick grin faded. This was his mum, after all, and she was just looking out for him. ‘I hate it, all this lying.’
Luca stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Couldn’t you fix it, like you did when you left for Astrae?’
‘Implant memories? Not while Dad is ill. I need them to be able to contact me this time. Besides, coming home to all that has been a nightmare, harder than I thought.’
‘Ellen told me about your dad. Why didn’t you say anything?’ Luca settled himself on the edge of Jacob’s bed.
Jacob shrugged. ‘Mum and Dad weren’t telling people so I couldn’t really. Ellen guessed it herself,’ he said, going to the window.
‘Can’t you do something?’
‘Ellen asked me the same thing… it’s complicated,’ Jacob said, his gaze on the street where the tarmac of the road shimmered in the heat and gardens burst with colour.
Luca frowned. ‘Surely it can’t be that complicated. You have powers, he’s ill, you sort it.’
Jacob turned to face him. ‘Remember when I was in the coma?’
Luca nodded, wondering where the conversation was headed. That time had been a difficult one for everyone who knew Jacob and it wasn’t something anyone liked to dwell on. The only good thing that had come from it, for Luca, was the newly discovered desire to pursue a career in medicine.
‘My powers are limited,’ Jacob continued. ‘As long as I don’t disrupt the natural order of the universe, I’m good. If I mess around, then…’
Luca’s eyes widened. ‘So that’s what caused the coma? But you were in an accident…’
‘That’s where it gets complicated.’ Jacob leaned back against the windowsill. He paused, wondering where to start the explanation. ‘It’s like this: the timeline we’re on now is not the one I started out on.’
Luca gazed at him, incomprehension on his face.
‘There was another time,’ Jacob resumed patiently, ‘when Mum and Dad were killed in that car accident, but I wasn’t there with them. The reason I ended up with them was that I tried to fix time so that I could save them.’
Luca’s mouth dropped open. ‘Whoa… you can time travel?’
‘It tends to go a bit wrong, though,’ Jacob replied with a wry smile.
‘But you can… this is massive!’
‘You don’t understand. Even though it’s possible, doesn’t mean I’m allowed to do it. There’s some natural law that’s way bigger than me that doesn’t like it… which is why I’m a bit scared to mess around now.’
‘But he’s your dad…’
‘Death is in the natural order, even if we don’t like it. Of course, I think about it every day. I might still try, but I have to be sure it won’t backfire again before I do.’
Luca fell silent for a moment. ‘So, what else can you do?’
Jacob smiled with obvious pride. ‘Pretty much anything, so long as it’s allowed.’
‘For someone who can do pretty much anything, you don’t do much,’ Luca remarked.
‘Alright then, maybe not anything. Because there are consequences to most things I do, even if they are small, I try not to mess too much. The point of the Watcher is to watch, and only interfere if he must,’ Jacob said, recalling words Dae had spoken to him long ago. ‘My powers are weaker on Earth too. And if there’s someone who matches me out there trying to block me…’
‘Makash?’
Jacob nodded. ‘Then that makes it even more difficult to do anything effectively.’
‘I think I get it,’ Luca said. ‘I suppose that means we should get this baby fired up,’ he patted the laptop, ‘and get searching.’
‘Ok. What time’s Ellen coming over?’
Luca shifted uncomfortably.
‘She’s not coming over?’ Jacob asked.
‘She says she doesn’t want to come over again, at least, not for this…’
Jacob grimaced, his eyes swirling grey, bitterness washing through him. But then he saw how uncomfortable Luca seemed with the situation and decided to try to curb his emotions, at least while his friend was around. Right now, he needed all the friends he could get. ‘I can’t blame her, it’s a complete pain,’ h
e replied, a bit too cheerfully.
The morning came and went; the room mostly in silence as they read down lists, occasionally discussing some promising titbit of information in subdued tones. Jacob felt more keenly the need for discretion and was careful to keep a look out for eavesdropping parents. Around midday there was a tap at the door and Maggie peered around it. Jacob slammed the lid on the laptop a bit too quickly but she pretended not to notice.
‘You two want some lunch?’
‘We can get some ourselves later,’ Jacob said, putting on a bright smile.
‘It’s no bother,’ his mum insisted. ‘I’m going with your father to the hospital in an hour so I can make something, but I won’t be joining you.’
‘Hospital? Is he alright?’ Jacob straightened up, concern now etched in his features.
‘Routine appointment. The oncologist wants to see how he’s doing.’
Jacob and Luca exchanged glances.
‘If you want to go with them,’ Luca said, guessing Jacob’s intentions, ‘I’ve got plenty of stuff I can be doing at home.’
Jacob looked across at his mum. She was so tiny, so fragile; she carried such a burden. But at the same time she was so stubborn in her refusal to share it. He wondered if she wanted him there. Even if he did nothing but sit in a corridor and wait, though, it felt right that he should be.
‘Is that alright, Mum?’ he asked in a small voice.
She paused. ‘I suppose so,’ she said finally. ‘If you’re sure you can drag yourself away from your project…’ she ended with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, glancing at the laptop.
‘Don’t worry about lunch, Mrs L, my mum will have cooked enough gnocchi to feed half of Naples, so I’ll grab some at home.’ He turned to Jacob. ‘I’ll call you later.’
Jacob nodded.
At the front door, Luca clapped Jacob on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, mate. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’