Someone Mummy Used to Know
1248 Words
"No," I said.
He didn't look surprised. "Amara —"
"This is my home. I have a job, a school run at three-fifteen, a child who has never been on a plane. You don't get to arrive with your uncle and your succession crisis and tell me to pack a bag."
"I know."
"Then why are you asking."
"Because the car with no plates was here before I was," he said. "Whoever was in it now knows I came. That changes his timeline. Before today he had time. Now he doesn't."
"So by coming here you made it worse."
"I made it real instead of theoretical. We can act now instead of waiting for it to act on us."
I stared at him. "That is a very fine distinction."
"It's the only one I have."
I stood up. Went to the window, not to look at the cars, I already knew the cars were there, just to move, to give the feeling somewhere to go.
"If I went," I said. "What does it actually look like."
"You and Lucas come to Madrid. You stay in the palace under my protection while we address the legal situation around his status and deal with the threat through proper channels."
"The palace. You want to take me to the one place where your uncle has the most access."
"Inside the rooms I control, his reach is limited and watched. Anything he does inside those walls creates a record. Outside —" He paused. "Clara Mendes had no such protection."
I turned from the window. "My mother is in Lagos. She's sixty-three years old and she doesn't deserve to be frightened."
"Already arranged. Before I knocked on your door I made provisions for the people closest to you. Your mother is under security monitoring. If you come with me today she'll be formally relocated within twenty-four hours."
I stared at him. "You arranged that before you even knocked."
"I arranged it because I didn't know how this conversation was going to go. And because regardless of how it went, your mother should not be a variable."
I came back to the table. Sat down.
"If I agreed, which I haven't, I want my own lawyer to look at whatever arrangement is proposed. Every decision about what Lucas knows and when is mine. I want that in writing."
"All of it. Done."
"And me asking questions is not me agreeing. I gather information before I decide. That is how I work."
"I know," he said. "I know enough to know you held a knife and opened the door anyway. You sat when you needed to. You asked the hardest question first. I know the shape of how you think. I always did."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
"Don't say things that are accurate," I said. "It makes this harder."
"I'm sorry."
"No you're not."
The corner of his mouth moved, barely, controlled, the version of a smile he was trying not to show. I'd seen it in a Lisbon café seven years ago when I said something that landed and he tried not to let on. I'd found it charming then.
I looked away before I found it charming now.
My phone rang.
The school's name on the screen. My stomach dropped the way it always drops when school calls mid-morning, immediate, physical, the certainty that something is wrong with my child.
Temperature of 38.2. He was okay. Could I come.
I was already reaching for my bag before I'd hung up.
Adrián stood. "I'll come with —"
"You absolutely will not." I turned and looked at him with everything I had. "He doesn't know you exist. He is not finding out in a school corridor."
I picked up my keys.
"Stay here," I said. "Don't touch anything."
I walked out.
I didn't hurry. I walked at the pace of a woman going to collect a sick child, not running, not panicked, because panicked mothers make sick children worse and because I needed the twenty minutes. I breathed. Organised the morning into compartments the way I always do, each impossible thing in its own box, lid closed, deal with it later. Nothing resolved, but nothing spilling over either.
By the time I reached the school gate I was, on the outside, completely fine.
Lucas was in the welfare room with his coat on and his bag in his lap, talking to the welfare assistant about a game he plays with Kofi at breaktime. He was mid-sentence when I walked in. He saw me and his whole face changed, that particular loosening, the way every part of him settles when the person he trusts most walks through the door. Six years and it still does something to my chest every time.
"I feel sick," he said.
"I know, baby." I put my hand on his forehead. Warm, but not alarmingly so. "Let's go home."
"Can we get the bus?"
"We're walking."
He considered this injustice. Then he took my hand and we went.
He talked the whole way home. Of course he did, Lucas talks when he's well and talks when he's sick and would probably narrate a natural disaster with full commentary. The welfare room chairs. What Kofi said at lunch yesterday. Whether a dog could theoretically go to school.
I answered everything. I held his hand and answered everything and did not think about the man sitting at my kitchen table.
I didn't look at the cars when we got back to the street. Lucas didn't notice them, he was negotiating shoes.
"But I'm sick."
"Sick people still take their shoes off. Juice and the sofa. That's the deal."
He sighed like I'd asked him to carry the building. He took his shoes off.
I took one breath. Then I opened the flat door.
The first thing Lucas saw was the man at my kitchen table.
He stopped. Looked at him. Looked at me. Looked back at him, the focused, unhurried assessment of a six-year-old who takes new information seriously.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Adrián opened his mouth.
"Someone Mummy used to know," I said. Clean and level. The sentence I'd been building in different versions for six years without knowing which version I'd need.
Lucas looked at the man one more time. Then at me.
"Okay. Can I have juice?"
"Go lie on the sofa. I'll bring it."
He went. No further questions. The sofa was more interesting than the stranger at the table, and the juice was more interesting than either.
I poured it without looking at Adrián. I could feel him from the kitchen doorway, watching Lucas the way you watch something you've been thinking about for a very long time and are finally seeing up close for the first time. I didn't look at his face. I wasn't ready to see what was on it.
I took the juice to the sofa. Lucas was already horizontal, Bear tucked under one arm, eyes half-closed. The specific boneless quality of a sick child who has decided to cooperate with being looked after.
I pushed his hair back from his forehead. Still warm. Coming down, maybe. I sat on the edge of the sofa beside him and he shifted to make room without opening his eyes.
A minute passed. Maybe two.
Then he opened his eyes and looked up at me. Then past me, toward the kitchen doorway.
"Mummy," he said, very quietly. "Is that man my dad?"
- Writer
