Wrong Place Wrong Time

by Gillian McAllister

Both phases of parenthood – the newborn years and the almost-adult ones – are bookended by sleep deprivation, though for different reasons.

This cannot be happening. She needs a stiff drink, to go back in time, to be sick. Her whole body begins to tremble out here in the absurd, confusing cold.

The tears for the future. And the tears for yesterday, and what she didn’t see coming.

Panic rises up through her body, a great pressure with nowhere to go. She’s going to be sick again.

She’d thought motherhood was so boring at the time, so unrewarding, the hours and hours dedicated to the same tasks in a variety of orders. But it wasn’t, she now knows; to say so is like saying breathing is boring.

The panic begins again, a tide of anxiety that goes out to sea but always, always returns.

She always found motherhood so hard. It had been such a shock. Such a vast reduction in the time available to her. She did nothing well, not work nor parenting. She put out fires in both for what felt like a decade straight, has only recently emerged. But maybe the damage is already done.

It seems to happen when a huge force is exerted on the body. Ward and Johnson think the force would have to be stronger than gravity to create a time loop.

To figure out the events leading up to it, and to intervene. And then, one day, when she manages that, she will wake up, and it won’t be yesterday.

Anything. Jen doesn’t like that word. Anything implies all sorts. It implies crimes, it implies murder.

If sleeping might be what makes her wake up in yesterday, then she simply won’t do it.

They are here, tonight, together, even if they might part again tomorrow, like two passengers on two trains going in opposite directions.

At the beginning, the love she had felt for him had been eclipsed by how hard it had been in the early days, and it wasn’t any longer.

You can never hear enough that your children are good.

People are always more confessional in private.

It is so therapeutic, not having to deal with the consequences of her actions.

She doesn’t want to go home. Doesn’t want to go back to the scene of the crime, doesn’t want to sit in the house failing to work everything out.

She thinks about what the implications are for the changes she makes today. She wishes she understood it.

I think you will go onward from the day you solve it, and only changes from that day forward will remain. They will wipe the rest. That’s just my feeling.”

“Coppers, when it comes down to it, can be pretty neatly divided into two types: those who can kill when they need to, and those who can’t.”

She’s let her own insecurities about being stupid turn his intellectualism into something to be laughed off.

A woman who can connect and connect and connect with her son, but it doesn’t matter, it won’t last.

“Kelly and Ezra and Joseph – they go way back, don’t they?”

How sinister it is to relive your life backward. To see things you hadn’t at the time. To realize the horrible significance of events you had no idea were playing out around you.

For all her intentions, it has descended into the domestic she wanted to avoid. She can’t help being emotional with him.

Jen hates this tone of his. It provokes an ancient emotion in her. Her body wants to run, she wants to escape: fear.

“Thank you,” Ryan says thickly. “I mean . . . in some ways, Kelly taught me a lot. I guess the best criminals do.”

The kind of desperate behavior of somebody unhinged, somebody abusing their power.

The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.

What makes somebody commit a crime? Well, maybe it’s about her mothering of him. After all, does every action a child performs not begin with their mother?

“Sometimes,” he says gently, when she’s finished, “the emotions of living something the first time prevent us from seeing the true picture, don’t they?” He rubs at his beard. “If I could go back – the things in my life that I would just stand and truly, fully witness, if I knew how they were going to turn out . . .”

Some people laugh to hide their shame, they laugh instead of saying I feel embarrassed and small.

She suddenly finds, in the passenger seat next to the man she has pledged to love forever, that she can’t answer a single one of these questions.

Ryan no longer wants to change the world. Ryan wants to be with Jen. Jen, whose father is a facilitator of the organized-crime group he’s investigating.

We only think of the bad things that happen, rather than those that, through fortune, pass us by.