The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight (7 page)

“What’s this for?”

He nods at it, and when she looks again, she sees that he’s drawn one of the ducks from the movie.

“Is this your usual medium?” she asks. “Pen on napkin?”

He smiles. “I added the baseball cap and trainers so that he’d look more American.”

“How thoughtful. Though we usually just call them sneakers,” she says, the end of the sentence swallowed by a yawn. She tucks the napkin in the top of her bag. “You don’t sleep on planes?”

He shrugs. “Normally I do.”

“But not tonight?”

He shakes his head. “Apparently not.”

“Sorry,” she says again, but he waves it off.

“You looked peaceful.”

“I don’t
feel
peaceful,” she says. “But it’s probably good that I slept now, so I don’t do it during the ceremony tomorrow.”

Oliver looks at his own watch. “You mean today.”

“Right,” she says, then makes a face. “I’m a bridesmaid.”

“That’s nice.”

“Not if I miss the ceremony.”

“Well, there’s always the reception.”

“True,” she says, yawning again. “I can’t wait to sit all by myself and watch my dad dance with a woman I’ve never met before.”

“You’ve never met her?” Oliver asks, his words tugged up at the end of the sentence by his accent.

“Nope.”

“Wow,” he says. “So I take it you aren’t all that close?”

“Me and my dad? We used to be.”

“And then?”

“And then your stupid country swallowed him whole.”

Oliver laughs a small, uncertain laugh.

“He went over to teach for a semester at Oxford,” Hadley explains. “And then he didn’t come back.”

“When?”

“Almost two years ago.”

“And that’s when he met this woman?”

“Bingo.”

Oliver shakes his head. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah,” Hadley says, a word far too insignificant to convey anything close to just how awful it was, just how awful it still
is
. But though she’s told a longer version of the story a thousand times before to a thousand different people, she gets the feeling that Oliver might understand better than anyone else. It’s something about the way he’s looking at her, his eyes punching a neat little hole in her heart. She’s knows it’s not real: It’s the illusion of closeness, the false confidence of a hushed and darkened plane, but she doesn’t mind. For the moment, at least, it feels real.

“You must’ve been shattered,” he says. “And your mum, too.”

“At first, yeah. She hardly got out of bed. But I think she bounced back quicker than I did.”

“How?” he asks. “How do you bounce back from
that
?”

“I don’t know,” Hadley says truthfully. “She really believes that they’re better off this way. That it was meant to work out like this. She has someone new and he has someone new and they’re both happier now. It’s just me who’s not thrilled. Especially about meeting
his
someone new.”

“Even though she’s not so new anymore.”

“
Especially
because she’s not so new anymore. It makes it ten times more intense and awkward, and that’s the last thing I want. I keep picturing walking into the reception all by myself and everyone staring at me. The melodramatic American daughter who refused to meet the new stepmother.” Hadley crinkles her nose. “Stepmother. God.”

Oliver frowns. “I think it’s brave.”

“What?”

“That you’re going. That you’re facing up to it. That you’re moving on. It’s brave.”

“It doesn’t feel that way.”

“That’s because you’re in the middle of it,” he says. “But you’ll see.”

She studies him carefully. “And what about you?”

“What
about
me?”

“I suppose you’re not dreading yours half as much as I’m dreading mine?”

“Don’t be too sure,” he says stiffly. He’d been sitting close, his body angled toward hers, but now he moves away again, just barely, but enough so that she notices.

Hadley leans forward as he leans back, as if the two of them are joined by some invisible force. It’s not as if her father’s wedding is a particularly cheery subject for her, and she told him about that, didn’t she? “So will you get to see your parents while you’re home?”

He nods.

“That’ll be nice,” she says. “Are you guys close?”

He opens his mouth, then closes it again when the beverage cart comes rolling down the aisle, the cans making bright noises as they clink against one another, the bottles rattling. The flight attendant steps on the brake once she’s past their row, locking it into place, then turns her back to them to begin taking orders.

It happens quickly, so quickly that Hadley almost doesn’t see it at all: Oliver reaches into the pocket of his jeans for a coin, which he thumbs into the aisle with a quick snap of his wrist. Then he reaches across the sleeping woman, grabbing the coin with his left hand and snaking his right one into the cart, emerging with two miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s wrapped in his fist. He tucks them into his pocket, along with the coin, just seconds before the flight attendant twists back in their direction.

“Can I get you anything?” she asks, her eyes sweeping across Hadley’s stricken face, Oliver’s flushed cheeks, and the old woman still snoring with vigor at the end of the row.

“I’m okay,” Hadley manages.

“Me, too,” Oliver says. “Cheers, though.”

When the flight attendant is gone again, the cart moving safely away, Hadley stares at him openmouthed. He pulls the bottles out and hands one to her, then twists the cap off the other with a shrug.

“Sorry,” he says. “I just thought if we were going to do the whole ‘talking about our families’ thing, a bit of whiskey might be in order.”

Hadley blinks at the bottle in her hand. “You planning to work this off or something?”

Oliver cracks a smile. “Ten years’ hard labor?”

“I was thinking something more along the lines of washing dishes,” she jokes, passing the bottle back to him. “Or maybe carrying luggage.”

“I’m assuming you’ll make me do that anyway,” he says. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave a tenner on the seat when I go. I didn’t want a hassle, even though I’m eighteen and we must be closer to London than to New York at this point. You like whiskey?”

Hadley shakes her head.

“Have you ever tried it?”

“No.”

“Give it a go,” he says, offering it to her again. “Just a sip.”

She unscrews the cap and brings the bottle to her mouth, already grimacing as the smell reaches her nose, harsh and smoky and far too strong. The liquid burns her throat as it goes down, and she coughs hard, her eyes watering, then screws the cap on and hands the bottle back to him.

“It’s like licking a campfire,” she says, making a face. “That’s awful.”

Oliver laughs as he finishes off his bottle.

“Okay, so now you’ve got your whiskey,” she says. “Does that mean we get to talk about your family?”

“Why do you care?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

He sighs, a sound that comes out almost like a groan. “Let’s see,” he says eventually. “I have three older brothers—”

“Do they all still live in England?”

“Right. Three older brothers who still live in England,” he says, unscrewing the cap on the second bottle of whiskey. “What else? My dad wasn’t happy when I chose Yale over Oxford, but my mum was really pleased because she went to uni in America, too.”

“Is that why he didn’t come over with you at the start of school?”

Oliver gives her a pained look, like he’d rather be anywhere but here, then finishes off the last of the whiskey. “You ask an awful lot of questions.”

“I told you that my dad left us for another woman and that I haven’t seen him in over a year,” she says. “Come on. I’m pretty sure there’s no family drama that could top that.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” he says. “That you haven’t seen him in so long. I thought you just hadn’t met
her
.”

Now it’s Hadley’s turn to fidget in her seat. “We talk on the phone,” she says. “But I’m still too angry to see him.”

“Does he know that?”

“That I’m angry?”

Oliver nods.

“Of course,” she says, then tilts her head at him. “But we’re not talking about me, remember?”

“I just find it interesting,” he says, “that you’re so open about it. Everyone’s always wound up about something in my family, but nobody ever says anything.”

“Maybe you’d be better off if you did.”

“Maybe.”

Hadley realizes they’ve been whispering, leaning close in the shadows cast by the yellow reading light of the man in front of them. It almost feels as if they’re alone, as if they could be anywhere, on a park bench somewhere or in a restaurant, miles below, with their feet firmly on the ground. She’s close enough to see a small scar above his eye, the ghost of a beard along his jawline, the astonishing length of his eyelashes. Without even really meaning to, she finds herself leaning away, and Oliver looks startled by her sudden movement.

“Sorry,” he says, sitting up and pulling his hand back from the armrest. “I forgot you get claustrophobic. You must be dying.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Actually, it hasn’t been so bad.”

He juts his chin at the window, where the shade’s still pulled down. “I still think it would help if you could see outside. It feels small in here even to me with no windows.”

“That’s my dad’s trick,” Hadley tells him. “The first time it happened, he told me to imagine the sky. But that only helps when the sky’s
above
you.”

“Right,” Oliver says. “Makes sense.”

They both fall silent, studying their hands as the quiet stretches between them.

“I used to be afraid of the dark,” Oliver says after a moment. “And not just when I was little. It lasted till I was nearly eleven.”

Hadley glances over, not sure what to say. His face looks more boyish now, less angular, his eyes rounder. She has a sudden urge to put her hand over his, but she stops herself.

“My brothers teased me like mad, switching off the lights whenever I walked into a room and then howling about it. And my dad just
hated
it. He had absolutely no sympathy. I remember I’d go into my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night and he’d tell me to stop being such a little girl. Or he’d tell me stories about monsters in the wardrobe, just to wind me up. His only advice was always just ‘Grow up.’ A real gem, right?”

“Parents aren’t always right about everything,” Hadley says. “Sometimes it just takes a while to figure that out.”

“But then there was this one night,” he continues, “when I woke up and he was plugging in a night-light next to my bed. I’m sure he thought I was asleep, or else he’d never be caught dead, but I didn’t say anything, just watched him plug it in and switch it on so there was this little circle of blue light.”

Hadley smiles. “So he came around.”

“In his own way, I guess,” Oliver says. “But I mean, he must’ve bought it earlier in the day, right? He could’ve given it to me when he got back from the shop, or plugged it in before I went to bed. But he had to do it when nobody was watching.” He turns to her, and she’s struck by how sad he looks. “I’m not sure why I told you that.”

“Because I asked,” she says simply.

He draws in a jagged breath, and Hadley can see that his cheeks are flushed. The seat in front of her bobbles as the man readjusts the doughnut-shaped pillow around his neck. The cabin is quiet but for the hum of the air-conditioning, the soft flap of pages being turned, the occasional snuffling and shuffling of passengers trying their best to endure these last hours before landing. Every now and then a patch of turbulence sets the plane rocking gently, like a boat in a storm, and Hadley thinks again of her mother, of the awful things she said to her back in New York. Her eyes fall to the backpack at her feet, and not for the first time, she wishes they weren’t somewhere over the Atlantic right now, so that she might try calling again.

Beside her, Oliver rubs his eyes. “I have a brilliant idea,” he says. “How about we talk about something
other
than our parents?”

Hadley bobs her head. “Definitely.”

But neither of them speaks. A minute ticks by, then another, and as the silence between them swells, they both begin to laugh.

“I’m afraid we might have to discuss the weather if you don’t come up with something more interesting,” he says, and Hadley raises her eyebrows.

“Me?”

He nods. “You.”

“Okay,” she says, cringing even before she’s formed the words, but the question has been blooming inside of her for hours now, and the only thing to do, finally, is to ask it: “Do you have a girlfriend?”

Oliver’s cheeks redden, and the smile she catches as he ducks his head is maddeningly cryptic; it is, Hadley decides, a smile with one of two meanings. The bigger part of her worries that it must be charitable, designed to make her feel less awkward about both the question and the coming answer, but something else keeps her wondering all the same: Maybe—just maybe—it’s something even kinder than that, something full of understanding, a seal on the unspoken agreement between them that something is happening here, that this just might be a kind of beginning.

After a long moment, he shakes his head. “No girlfriend.”

With this, it seems to Hadley that some sort of door has opened, but now that it finally has, she isn’t quite sure how to proceed. “How come?”

He shrugs. “Haven’t met anyone I want to spend fifty-two years with, I guess.”

“There must be a million girls at Yale.”

“Probably more like five or six thousand, actually.”

“Mostly Americans, though, huh?”

Oliver smiles, then leans sideways, bumping her gently with his shoulder. “I like American girls,” he says. “I’ve never dated one, though.”

“That’s not part of your summer research?”

He shakes his head. “Not unless the girl happens to be afraid of mayo, which, as you know, dovetails nicely with my study.”

“Right,” Hadley says, grinning. “So did you have a girlfriend in high school?”

“In secondary school, yes. She was nice. Quite fond of video games and pizza deliveries.”

“Very funny,” Hadley says.