What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(44)

“Yes please.” She measured tea into a teapot, put the shopping away in the cupboards. The tea brewed and then she and Jacob sat down in the living room, he took a couple of sips and said: “Remind me how this is superior to a nice cup of Tetley?”

She couldn’t really taste the tea herself. She was sweating, and Jacob wasn’t. He was comfortable, right at home. She took a jumper off, to see if she’d feel the cold less that way. Putting on jumpers and turning on the heating only seemed to increase the cold. When she looked at Jacob from the side she could see that he wasn’t her husband. He had no shadow and he didn’t smell like her husband—he didn’t smell of anything—he was warm and he could drink tea and be snarky about the tea, and perhaps she would’ve been more willing to keep him around if he’d been shadowless but smelled right. But the way things were she was too conscious of this person not really being Jacob.

“Sorry, but I think you’d better go,” she said, checking her watch for some reason. It’s twelve-thirty, time for you to go.

He set his cup down on the coffee table. “OK. But if you tell me to leave I won’t come back.”

She patted his knee. “That’s fine. Thanks for understanding.”

He stood up, and so did she. “I’m leaving, but everything that’s between us will stay.”

She couldn’t help laughing at that. “You’re so soppy, Jacob.”

He laughed too, then put an abrupt brake on the laughter. “I didn’t mean it in a soppy way.”

“Er . . . OK . . . Bye . . .”

“Good to see you,” he said, and left the room. She stayed still for hundreds of heartbeats and thousands of shivers but didn’t hear the front door open or close. At twelve-thirty she got up and made sure that he was gone, then she recorded the entire encounter in her notebook and broke a rule of the test by phoning Jacob. If you tell me to leave I won’t come back, now that she thought about it she didn’t like the sound of that. Jacob took a long time to answer the phone; she’d almost given up when his voice came down the line: “J?”

“Jacob! Are you OK?”

“Yeah . . . you?”

“Fine, just . . . Have you seen me at home yet?”

“No. Not yet,” he said. Something else had happened. He’d gone out for a bit and come back to find the front door open (she bit her lip so that she didn’t interrupt him) and an intruder in the hall. Some old black guy talking at him in Portuguese, begging forgiveness for something.

“Did you call the police?”

Jacob was silent.

“You didn’t call the police, Jacob?”

He thought the intruder might have been his dad. “You know, my bio dad. I got him to slow down and he seemed to be talking about how I’d weighed on his conscience.”

“Interesting. Is he still there with you?”

“Nah . . . once I realized who he was or might be or whatever, I told him to get the f*ck out. And guess what he said—”

“He said, ‘OK, but if you tell me to leave I won’t come back’?”

“And I said, ‘Well, you’d best not!’”

“And then he said, ‘I’m leaving, but everything that’s between us will stay’?”

“No, he didn’t say that. And hang on, how did you . . .”

Jacob’s voice fizzed and wavered, stopped altogether, and was replaced by a smoother, happier version. Audio of the second conversation they’d filmed.

“To be honest, Jill, I didn’t think you were going to get adopted. You played too many mind games with the people who tried to take you on . . . when you were together in public you’d act all cowed and hurry to do everything they said, acting as if they beat you at home. And you didn’t eat at home either, did you?”

“No! I’d stuff my face in school so it looked like I wasn’t getting fed. Looking back I was a scary kid,” Jill said, in perfect time with the recording of her own voice.

“But the Akkermans just kept telling you they really liked you, and even when you pulled stunts like that Sabine would say, ‘Nope, sorry and God help us, but we still really like you,’ and she and Karel wouldn’t eat until you ate . . .”

“So then I’d worry that I’d brought them to the brink of collapse and ended up spoon-feeding them rice, two spoons for each of them and then one for me . . . important to keep your strength up when you’ve got parents to feed . . .”

There was no room to ask what had happened; Jacob had been there on the other end of the line but now he was gone and it was a week ago again. The blue wall in front of her was more pacifying than sky, its color more even. Icicles hung from her nostrils; they were long, thin, and pearly gray . . . Like enchanted spindles, Jill thought, but it was only mucus, so she reached for tissues. She and Jacob were talking about the Wallaces now. Jill had always been sure that Jacob would get adopted. It was just a question of his coming across grown-ups who didn’t try to pull the wool over his eyes: Even the whitest of lies made him act out, and then he was discovered not to be “the right fit.” But along came Greg and Petra Wallace, and it was heartwarmingly weird that a pair of super-white Conservative politicians had fallen for Jacob as hard as they had. It took a long time for their foster son to stop anticipating some hidden motive on their part. Jacob had been wary of being dragged out in public with the parental bodies, wary of a fatherly hand settling on his shoulder while reporters took down remarks like, “Take this hardworking young man . . . a far better role model for our disadvantaged youth than some benefits scrounger . . .” Nothing of the kind ever came to pass, and the Wallaces had shown such steadfast and enthusiastic support of all things Jacob that he (and Jill) had had to give in.