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She switches off her phone and shakes her head. What was she thinking, she asks herself, letting that kid into her private space, handing him her door keys?
The car slides in front of a small hotel down a glitzy backstreet somewhere in Kensington. The driver opens her door for her and passes her battered backpack to her as if it were a thousand-dollar piece of Mulberry leather. The hotel is shiny and fancy and pale and everything that Jessica would have expected it to be, given that Amber had chosen it for her. Once inside, she finds she has a small double room overlooking a dank back alley, but the bathroom is dove-gray-veined marble from floor to ceiling with a rainfall shower head, the bed is fat with pillows, and there is a small mini-bar and a big TV screen. After a full day of travel she does not need a nice view, she just needs a hot shower and a good bed.
Jessica puts her hand on the metal cap of a miniature bottle of whiskey and is about twist it off but stops. She shuts her eyes and sighs loudly, then glances down at her belly. She remembers Luke’s words on Saturday and thinks, whatever’s in there, if there is anything in there, it’s not real. It’s just fairy dust and goo. It won’t be a baby unless she wants it to be a baby. She puts the miniature down and picks up the remote, kicks off her boots, and immerses herself in the soft density of the hotel bed and a soothingly narrated documentary about Madagascan wildlife.
Five minutes later, and still fully dressed, she is asleep.
There is a message from Amber on Jessica’s phone when she wakes up suddenly and horribly the next morning.
Car coming at 9am to take you to Essex. It’s a two-hour drive.
The time is currently four forty-five a.m. and she is half delirious with jet lag. She makes herself black coffee from the little Nespresso machine and glugs lukewarm mineral water from the bottle. Through the gap in the curtains, she sees specks of rain on the windowpane, the dark sky beyond. Everyone in America is getting ready for bed, everyone here is still fast asleep, and for a minute she feels like the only person in the world. She pulls on her boots and her leather jacket, locates her key card, and heads downstairs.
The woman at the front desk smiles at her and says, “Good morning.”
“Hi,” says Jessica. “Is there anywhere near here that’s open all hours? For something to eat?”
“Not really,” she replies. “There’s a Tesco Express round the corner, that’s open twenty-four hours.”
“What’s a Tesco Express?”
“It’s a supermarket. Or there’s an all-night diner, but it’s about a twenty-minute walk.”
“Yeah. That’s fine. Which direction?”
The receptionist tells her where to go and Jessica heads out into the damp early morning, her heavy boots splashing up the dirty water of shallow puddles as she walks. Her head spins with everything, with tiredness, with hunger, with loneliness, with fear.
Her whole life has been a slow-motion multiple pileup. She lives on the edges of everything, at the sharp pointy corner of existence between normality and extraordinariness where she is neither one thing nor, truly, the other. She can do extraordinary things, but she doesn’t like doing them. But she can’t be normal either, she’s too broken, too other. As she walks, she tries to imagine her hands gripping the handlebar of a stroller, a baby wrapped in soft layers of clothing held together with tiny buttons fastened by her own loving fingers. But the pictures in her head soon warp and twist, those same hands lifting the stroller and hurling it a hundred feet, two hundred feet through the air, those hands picking up grown men and throwing them against walls, those same hands lifting hunks of solid metal, upending cars, smashing through walls as the filthy engines inside her push her on.
She shakes her head. No. She’s no mother, and there is surely no baby.
Even with that thought, she sees that London looks pretty as a Christmas card in the predawn gloom. The streetlights here glow a soft golden white through rusty trees, the houses are white and sit in neat rows around tiny garden squares framed with wrought iron railings. And then the diner emerges mirage-like from the sodium gloom of a wide dual-lane road, all chrome and gray velvet, and it comes alive as she opens the door to the hiss and splutter of a gigantic coffee machine behind the bar and to the chatter of rich-looking studenty types at banquettes and some older folk talking fast in languages that Jessica doesn’t understand. She stares at a huge basket of oranges behind the bar until someone seats her. She peruses the paper menu, ponders something called “bubble and squeak” for a long moment before ordering steak and eggs and a large Americano. Then she turns to stare through the window, feeling the oddness of everything, the dull ache of emptiness, until suddenly her attention is diverted to a figure reflected in the glass, standing right next to her.
She swivels her head and it’s her. The girl in the silver puffer coat.
The girl slides into the next booth along and stares at Jessica.
“Hi,” she says. It’s the first time she’s spoken.
“What the…?” Jessica looks around from left to right and behind to see if anyone can see this child. “What the heck is this? What are you doing here?”
“I’m on vacation.”
“What? That’s—don’t be crazy. Where’s your mom?”
“I’m just waiting for her.”
Jessica looks around again, then narrows her eyes at the small girl. “How old are you?”
“I’m five.”
“That’s very young to be sitting on your own in a diner, don’t you think?”
“I’m not on my own. I’m with you.”
“Yeah, but…” Jessica pinches the bridge of her nose. “Why are you here? What’s going on? Are you even…real?”
