It’s hard to really know where this all started.
When I first met my husband? When we had our boy? When we moved to Oak Tree Close? They all vaguely feel like beginnings in some way. But I think the day that properly set the wheels in motion was the late October night I picked up my sixteen-year-old son Danny from his band practice at his mate Scotty’s. The band practice had actually become a sort of party to celebrate Scotty’s seventeenth birthday, which was officially the following week, but Danny would be in America then and I think a few of the others couldn’t make it. So the party was tacked on to the end of their normal Friday night band practice. My husband had dropped him off, and even though he said he didn’t mind going back to get him, I could tell he didn’t want to venture out in the cold again. So I said I’d go.
I hadn’t really wanted Danny to go to the party, but Pete said it was harsh to make the boy miss out just because we were going away the next day. ‘He won’t be able to sleep. He’ll be excited anyway, so he might as well be hanging out with his friends.’ I told him teenagers grow out of that so-excited-I-can’t-sleep routine before a holiday, and besides, him being awake and out partying means we have to be awake – something that, at the age of sixteen, he probably hadn’t quite clocked.
The temperature was falling fast and the light in the car had gone off, making the street lamps along the road seem even brighter, glowing in a thin mist that was starting to spread through the night air. I noticed the house to my left had Halloween decorations strung through the trees – warm-white fairy lights intertwined with a sequence of pumpkins and fake orange leaves. They’d probably just remove the pumpkins once the 31st had passed; that way they’d already have their Christmas lights up, prepped and ready. They put them up early around here, probably because so many of the families jetted off to their holiday homes in December. We’d never done that – a proper British Christmas was what Pete liked and, over the years, I’d grown to like it too. It had never been that much fun with my parents, but I’d got into the swing of things when I had kids of my own. Watching Danny tear open his presents really had been that special kind of magic so many parents talk about, especially when he was younger.
I was drawn out of my seasonal nostalgia by a noise from over near Scotty’s house. The front door had opened and two figures had started walking along the path through the front garden and over towards me.
‘Hi, boys,’ I said, as Danny and Jonathan got in. I’d completely forgotten we were giving Danny’s bandmate and schoolfriend Jonathan Franklin a lift, although since he lived practically opposite us it didn’t really make much of a difference. I was used to ferrying him about, and at least the Franklins often returned the favour.
‘Good party?’ I asked, when neither of them replied to my cheery greeting. I started driving, wondering what on earth was going on. I usually got a ‘Hiya’ at the very least from Danny, and Jonathan wasn’t a rude, unfriendly boy, although he could be a little shy.
There was something else different too, something I realised as I manoeuvred the car out of the tight cul-de-sac and onto Elm Tree Road, which was just one of the many rabbit-warren-like streets that made up our neighbourhood. Danny was in the front with me, his guitar clutched between his legs. He didn’t usually do this, not when we had Jonathan in the car. They’d always sit in the back and talk about things – trivial stuff, like the fact Scotty always played his guitar slightly flat, or something that had happened in maths class and why Mr Redmond was ‘such a prick’. But nothing was said at all. Silent and separated, they just sat as I drove, an awkward tension seeming to radiate off both of them.
‘Is everything OK?’ I asked, and Danny finally stirred, jerking his head towards me as if he’d only just realised I was there. ‘Oh fine, yeah… just tired.’
He wasn’t just tired. I knew something was wrong. But it didn’t look like he was going to elaborate, not while Jonathan was in the car. Nor did he seem keen to hang around when we got home, after his friend had sloped off to his own house over the road. He just disappeared upstairs, swiftly followed by his father, asking if he had everything packed for the flight tomorrow.
And that was that.
He behaved relatively normally the next day, was generally fine in America, if a tad quiet, while we stayed with Pete’s brother. It was only once we returned and the days started to edge into winter that that odd night in the car with the two boys came back into my mind. And everything went spinning off in another direction. A direction that both changed my world and obliterated it.