They drove on in silence for a while, the car warming up as their dodgy air conditioning failed to compete with the rising sun.
She and Jack had already had a row after she’d admitted being a bit nervous about seeing Sonny.
The reason they were currently driving down to Cornwall was to pick up their thirteen-year-old son, who, at the end of her tether, Stella had sent to stay with her parents for a fortnight.
Jack had sighed and replied, quite haughtily in Stella’s opinion, ‘Well, it should never have got this far in the first place! We should have dealt with it at home.’
‘You can keep saying that, Jack, but you weren’t there. You’re never there to see what a pain he is. You waltz in the door at seven thirty when it’s practically bedtime anyway.’
‘I do not waltz in the door.’
Stella had wanted to say that he very much did waltz in the door, but they’d been over this a thousand times already. That was how her and Jack’s relationship had been for the last few weeks. She’d tried countless times to explain to him the unrelenting frustration of every night trying to force their thirteen-year-old to get off his phone and do his homework, Stella’s own deadlines pressing down on her, stress mounting. Until the evening that Sonny had sworn he was doing his physics project but was just hiding his phone behind half a papier-mâché Vesuvius. Furious, Stella had whipped the phone off him, deleted the game he was playing and every other one and changed the password to her iTunes account so he couldn’t download anything else.
‘You stupid bitch!’ Sonny had shouted at her and then he’d looked immediately at the floor, his face rigid.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Silence.
‘Apologise. Now!’ Stella said, hands on her hips, eyes wide.
Still silence.
Time hung paused in the air.
‘Apologise.’ Nothing.
She could feel her heart rate rising. ‘If you don’t apologise, Sonny, by the time I count to three—’ The words came out of her mouth almost on instinct. As if she was so tired and stressed her brain had resorted to a time when she was guaranteed control. To when Sonny was a little kid and more than happy to apologise if it meant he’d get to keep his chocolate buttons.
Right now, Stella had no idea what she would do when she got to three. She should have used the deleting of the apps as bait but such strategy was easy in hindsight, all she could do now was start counting. ‘One.’
Sonny’s eyes stayed fixed on the ground.
Please just say sorry.
‘Two.’
His jaw clenched.
Stella took a breath in through her nose. She contemplated ‘two and a half’ but knew she was putting it off for her own benefit.
‘Three,’ she said.
Sonny looked up, stared her straight in the eye. Then the corner of his lip turned up in the smallest hint of a smirk, his expression saying, ‘What you gonna do now, Mum?’
For the first time ever, Stella had felt the urge to slap him round the face. She hadn’t. But it had crossed her mind that in that moment she didn’t like her son one bit. Nor did she know what to do with him. So she had walked away, hands raised in the air, and said, ‘Do you know what, I don’t need this.’ A flash of her own childhood had popped into her head. She imagined what would have happened if she’d looked at her father the way Sonny had just looked at her. It was unthinkable. The thought made her pause and turn, look at Sonny still grinning smugly down at the carpet, and say, ‘You can go to Cornwall. See what a few weeks with Granny and Grandpa does.’ Her father had certainly never taken any crap from her growing up.
So here they were, driving down to Cornwall a fortnight later to pick up Sonny. The morning sun was shimmering like dust in the air, tension thrumming through the car.
Stella glanced across at Jack’s profile. His eyes were fixed on the crawling traffic ahead. She hated that he’d cut her down when she’d mentioned feeling nervous about seeing their son because Jack was who she talked to. He was the person who made her feel better, who helped her think straight. Her wingman.
They didn’t usually fight over things like this, Jack usually took her lead on parenting. But they seemed so busy at the moment, both of them distracted with work, the kids being particularly kid-like, and with the start of the summer holidays they hadn’t had a proper chance to talk it all through. She had thought maybe they might on this five-hour journey, but now it all seemed rather overshadowed by the sudden and strange disappearance of her father.
Stella stared out of the window, repeating the fact over in her head, ‘Dad’s missing.’ But it wouldn’t really lodge properly in her brain, like a moth on a light bulb fruitlessly knock, knock, knocking to get inside. She didn’t want to acknowledge it – there were too many questions to know where to begin.
The traffic started moving again.
Stella felt completely off-kilter. She got her phone out to try and distract herself but immediately remembered the emails on there about a looming work deadline that she couldn’t bring herself to open. Work felt like another life. If she thought too much about it she could sense her normal balance of organised chaos teetering precariously into overwhelming. She stared at her phone. The screensaver was a picture of Rosie and Sonny posing over giant milkshakes piled high with whipped cream and a load of Cadbury’s flakes and Oreos shoved in the top – an after-school treat on Rosie’s birthday. It had all gone a bit pear-shaped after the photo was snapped because Sonny had accidentally on purpose nudged Rosie’s face into the cream, but it was rare to get a picture of the two of them smiling for the camera. Stella clicked the phone off and put it back in her bag. It scared her that she didn’t know if she wanted to see her own son. She had a vision of him at her parents’ house, would he even come down to greet them? Then she thought of the empty sofa cushion where her dad always sat and felt herself go a bit dizzy. Like her brain couldn’t hold all this stress. She pressed her palms to her temples.
‘You OK?’ Jack asked, glancing Stella’s way.
‘I’m not sure.’ Stella took some deep, calming breaths.
Jack frowned. Stella was always sure.
‘Are you going to be sick?’ he asked, panic in his voice. ‘Do you need a cup?’
She had to laugh. ‘No, I don’t need a cup.’
Then from the back seat Rosie shouted, ‘I need to go to the toilet.’
And Stella was back in the moment. Her momentary lapse shaken off by the sharp immediacy of parenting. ‘OK there’s a service station just up here,’ she said, glancing round to reassure Rosie and then back to Jack. ‘I’m fine,’ she added, to dispel his look of nervous concern. ‘Absolutely fine. Dad can’t have gone far. As you say, he doesn’t go anywhere so it won’t be that hard to find him.’ She got ready to undo her seat belt as Jack pulled into the Little Chef.
‘We find him. We get Sonny. We go. It’ll be fine.’
Moira was nervous about her daughter arriving. She always got a little nervous around Stella, wrong-footed, feeling ever more the neurotic mother as she tried to make too many plans for their stay. Did the kids want to go to the new model railway, for example, because tickets were hard to get hold of and the queue without them snaked round the block. Stella’s replies of, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. We’ll decide when we get there,’ would leave Moira wound up like a spring – should she get tickets or not? When they arrived, Stella’s family would breeze into the house in a cloud of barely controlled pandemonium, eat everything in the fridge, traipse sand on the carpet,