The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight (16 page)

“I didn’t realize,” she says again. “I’m so sorry.”

He nods at the stone bench a few feet away, the rough surface still damp from the earlier rain. They walk over together, heads bowed, the mournful sound of an organ starting up inside the church. Just as she’s about to sit, Oliver motions for her to wait, then whips his jacket off and lays it on the bench.

“Your dress,” he says by way of explanation, and Hadley glances down at herself, frowning at the purple silk as if she’s never seen it before. Something about the gesture cracks her heart open further, the idea that he’d think of something so trivial at a time like this; doesn’t he know she couldn’t care less about the stupid dress? That she’d gladly curl up on the grass for him, make a bed out of the dirt?

Unable to find the words to refuse him, she sits down, brushing her fingers along the soft folds of his jacket. Oliver stands above her, rolling up first one sleeve and then the other, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the garden.

“Do you need to get back?” Hadley asks, and he shrugs, leaving a few inches between them as he joins her on the bench.

“Probably,” he says, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

But he doesn’t move, and after a moment Hadley finds herself pitched forward as well, both of them studying the grass at their feet with unnatural intensity. She feels she probably owes him some sort of explanation for showing up here, but he doesn’t ask for one, so they just remain there like that, the silence stretching between them.

Back home in Connecticut, there’s a bird bath just outside her kitchen window, which Hadley used to look out at while doing the dishes. The most frequent visitors were a pair of sparrows who used to fight for their turn, one hopping around the edge and chirping loudly as the other bathed, and then vice versa. Occasionally one would dart at the other, and both would flap their wings and lurch backward again, making ripples in the water. But although they generally spent the entire time squabbling, they always arrived together, and they always left together.

One morning she was surprised to see only one of the birds. It landed lightly on the stone lip of the bath and danced around the edge without touching the water, rotating its rounded head this way and that with a sense of bewilderment so pitiful that Hadley had leaned to the window and peered up at the sky, though she knew it would be empty.

There’s something of that in Oliver now, a reckless confusion that makes him seem more lost than sad. Hadley’s never been this close to death before. The only three missing branches of her own family tree belong to grandparents who died before she was born, or when she was too little to mark their absence. Somehow, she’d always expected this sort of grief to resemble something from a movie, all streaming tears and choking sobs. But here in this garden, there’s no shaking of fists at the sky; nobody has fallen to their knees, and nobody is cursing the heavens.

Instead, Oliver looks like he might throw up. There’s a grayish tinge to his face, a lack of color that’s all the more startling against his dark suit, and he blinks at her without expression. His eyes have a wounded look, like he’s been hurt somewhere but can’t quite locate the source of the pain, and he pulls in a ragged breath.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says eventually.

“No,” Hadley says, shaking her head. “I’m sorry I just assumed….”

They fall quiet again.

After a moment, Oliver sighs. “This is a little weird, right?”

“Which part?”

“I don’t know,” he says with a small smile. “You showing up at my father’s funeral?”

“Oh,” she says. “That.”

He reaches down and yanks a few blades of grass from the ground, tearing at them absently. “Really, though, it’s the whole thing. I think maybe the Irish had it right, turning it into a celebration. Because this kind of thing”—he jerks his chin in the direction of the church—“this kind of thing is completely mad.”

Beside him, Hadley picks at the hem of her dress, unsure what to say.

“Not that there’d be much to celebrate anyway,” he says bitterly, letting the pieces of grass flutter back to the ground. “He was a complete arse. No use pretending otherwise now.”

Hadley looks up in surprise, but Oliver seems relieved.

“I’ve been thinking that all morning,” he says. “For the last eighteen years, really.” He looks at her and smiles. “You’re sort of dangerous, you know?”

She stares at him. “Me?”

“Yeah,” he says, sitting back. “I’m way too honest with you.”

A small bird lands on the fountain in the middle of the garden, and they watch as it pecks at the stone in vain. There’s no water there, only a cracked layer of dirt, and after a moment the bird flies away again, turns into a distant speck in the sky.

“How did it happen?” Hadley asks quietly, but Oliver doesn’t answer; he doesn’t even look at her. Through the fruit trees lining the fence, she can see people beginning to walk to their cars, dark as shadows. Above them the sky has gone flat and gray again.

After a moment he clears his throat. “How was the wedding?”

“What?”

“The wedding. How did it go?”

She shrugs. “Fine.”

“Come on,” he says with a pleading look, and Hadley sighs.

“Turns out, Charlotte’s nice,” she offers, folding her hands in her lap. “Annoyingly nice.”

Oliver grins, looking more like the version of himself she met on the plane. “What about your dad?”

“He seems happy,” she tells him, her voice thick. She can’t bring herself to mention the baby, as if speaking of it might somehow make it so. Instead, she remembers the book, and reaches for the bag beside her. “I didn’t return it.”

He glances over, his eyes coming to rest on the cover.

“I read a little on the way over,” she says. “It’s actually kind of good.”

Oliver reaches for it, thumbing the pages as he’d done on the plane. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

“Someone was talking about a funeral in Paddington,” she says, and Oliver flinches at the word
funeral
. “And I don’t know. I just had a feeling.”

He nods, gently shutting the book again. “My father had a first edition of this one,” he says, his mouth twisting into a frown. “He kept it on a high shelf in his study, and I remember always staring up at it as a kid, knowing it was worth a lot.”

He hands the book back to Hadley, who hugs it to her chest, waiting for him to continue.

“I always thought it was only worth something to him for the wrong reasons,” he says, his voice softer now. “I never saw him reading anything but legal briefs. But every once in a while, completely out of the blue, he’d quote some passage.” He laughs, a humorless sound. “It was so out of character. Like a singing butcher or something. A tap-dancing accountant.”

“Maybe he wasn’t what you thought….”

Oliver looks at her sharply. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“I don’t want to talk about him,” he says, his eyes flashing. He rubs at his forehead, then rakes a hand through his hair. A breeze bends the grass at their feet, lifting the heavy air from their shoulders. From inside the church, the music from the organ ends abruptly, as if it’s been interrupted.

“You say you can be honest with me?” Hadley asks after a moment, addressing Oliver’s rounded shoulders, and he twists to look at her. “Fine. Then talk to me. Be honest.”

“About what?”

“Anything you want.”

To her surprise, he kisses her then. Not like the kiss at the airport, which was soft and sweet and full of farewell. This kiss is something more urgent, something more desperate; he presses his lips hard against hers, and Hadley closes her eyes and leans in, kissing him back until, just as suddenly, he breaks away again, and they sit staring at each other.

“That’s not what I meant,” Hadley says, and Oliver gives her a crooked smile.

“You said to be honest. That was the most honest thing I’ve done all day.”

“I meant about your dad,” she says, though in spite of herself, she can feel the color rising to her cheeks. “Maybe it’ll help to talk about it. If you just—”

“What? Say that I miss him? That I’m completely gutted? That this is the worst day of my life?” He stands abruptly and, for a brief and frightening moment, Hadley thinks he’s going to walk away. But instead, he begins pacing back and forth in front of the bench, tall and lean and handsome in his shirtsleeves. He pauses, spinning to face her, and she can see the anger scrawled across his face. “Look, today? This week? Everything about it has been fake. You think your dad is so awful for what
he
did? At least
your
dad was honest. Your dad had the guts
not
to stick around. And I know that’s rubbish, too, but from what it sounds like, he’s happy and your mum’s happy, and so you’re all better off in the end anyway.”

All except me
, Hadley thinks, but she remains quiet. Oliver begins to walk again, and her eyes follow his progress like a game of tennis, back and forth and back and forth.

“But
my
dad? He cheated on my mum for years. Your dad had one affair, and that turned into love, right? It turned into marriage. It was out in the open, and it set you all free. Mine had about a dozen affairs, maybe more, and the worst part is, we all knew. And nobody talked about it. Somewhere along the line, someone made the decision that we’d all just be quietly miserable, and so that’s what we did. But we knew,” he says, his shoulders sagging. “We knew.”

“Oliver,” she says, but he shakes his head.

“So no,” he says with a little shrug. “I don’t want to talk about my dad. He was a bloody jerk, not just because of the affairs, but in a million other ways, too. And I’ve spent my whole life pretending it’s fine, for my mother’s sake. But now he’s gone, and I’m done pretending.” His hands are balled into fists at his sides, and his mouth is pressed into a thin line. “Is that honest enough for you?”

“Oliver,” she says again, setting aside the book and rising to her feet.

“It’s fine,” he says. “I’m fine.”

From a distance comes the sound of his name being called, and a moment later a girl with dark hair and even darker sunglasses appears at the gate. She can’t be much older than Hadley, but there’s a confidence to her, a sense of ease that makes Hadley feel immediately disheveled by comparison.

The girl stops short when she sees them, clearly surprised.

“It’s almost time, Ollie,” she says, pushing her sunglasses up onto her head. “The procession’s about ready to leave.”

Oliver’s eyes are still on Hadley. “One minute,” he says without looking away, and the girl hesitates, like she might be about to say something more, but then turns around again with a small shrug.

When she’s gone, Hadley forces herself to meet Oliver’s eyes again. Something about the girl’s arrival has broken the spell of the garden, and now she’s keenly aware of the voices beyond the hedge, of the car doors slamming, of a dog barking in the distance.

Still, he doesn’t move.

“I’m sorry,” Hadley says softly. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” Oliver says, and she blinks at him, straining to hear the words inside that word, beneath it or around it:
Don’t go
or
Please stay
or
I’m sorry, too
. But all he says is: “It’s okay.”

She shifts from one foot to the other, her heels sinking into the soft dirt. “I should go,” she says, but her eyes say
I’m trying
, and her hands, trembling in an effort not to reach out, say
Please
.

“Right,” he says. “Me, too.”

Neither of them moves, and Hadley realizes she’s holding her breath.

Ask me to stay
.

“Good to see you again,” he says stiffly, and to her dismay, he holds out a hand. She takes it gingerly, and they hover there like that, halfway between a grip and a shake, their knotted palms swaying between them until Oliver finally lets go.

“Good luck,” she says, though with what, she’s not entirely sure.

“Thanks,” he says with a nod. He reaches for his jacket and slings it over his shoulder without bothering to brush it off. As he turns to cross the garden, Hadley’s stomach churns. She closes her eyes against the flood of words that never reached her, all those things left unsaid.

And when she opens them again, he’s gone.

Her purse is still on the bench, and as she moves to pick it up again she finds herself sinking down onto the damp stone, folding wearily like the survivor of some great storm. She shouldn’t have come. That much is clear to her now. The sun is dipping lower in the sky, and though she has somewhere else to be right now, whatever momentum was propelling her before now seems to have disappeared entirely.

She reaches beside her for the copy of
Our Mutual Friend
and leafs through it absently. When it opens to one of the dog-eared pages, she notices that the corner of the fold reaches halfway down the page like an arrow, its point landing at the top of a line of dialogue: “No one is useless in this world,” it reads, “who lightens the burden of it for any one else.”

A few minutes later, when she makes her way back past the church, Hadley can see the family still huddled in the open doorway. Oliver’s back is to her, his jacket still resting on his shoulder, and the girl, the one who discovered them, stands just beside him. There’s something protective about the way her hand rests on his elbow, and the sight of it makes Hadley walk a bit faster, her cheeks reddening without her quite understanding why. She hurries past the pair of them, past the statue with its unwavering gaze, past the church and the steeple and the row of black sedans lined up and ready to lead them to the cemetery.

At the last moment, almost as an afterthought, she places the book on the hood of the car in front. And then, before anyone can stop her, she takes off down the road again.

11:11 AM Eastern Standard Time

4:11 PM Greenwich Mean Time

If she were pressed for any sort of specific information about her journey back to Kensington—at what point she switched tubes, who was sitting next to her, how long it took—Hadley would have had a difficult time coming up with answers. To say that the trip was a blur suggests that she could recall at least some of it, no matter how fuzzy, but when she finally steps out into the sunlight again at the Kensington stop, she’s struck by the uncomfortable sensation of having skipped through time like a stone.