Page 39 of Statistically Speaking
“I don’t know,” I say simply. “I think... I think it’s opened up all kinds of feelings in me that I’ve hidden away for years. I think it’s taken away any certainty I had. I think it’s made me... want to know more. But I’m still not sure it’s right to try to insert myself into her life. I didn’t even feel it was right with you two, when I was convinced that Katie was her. I don’t want to cause any damage. I feel like I’ve caused enough already. Truth be told, no matter how sorted I look on the surface, I’m still a bit of a disaster zone myself.”
“All parents are, Gemma,” Erin replies gently. “It’s a little secret we all have. Nobody is sorted.”
“Even someone who arranges her pens and counts dance steps out loud!” adds Katie. Damn. I didn’t know I’d been doing it out loud.
“How’s this for a plan,” says Erin. “We order in a pizza, crack open a bottle of wine, and look at how it all works?”
“How what all works?”
“How the Adoption Contact Register works. You can sign up. You can choose to not sign up. But I think it would be good to know your options.”
I nod and think she may be right. I can look, at least. I could fill out a form, maybe. It doesn’t mean that I will find my daughter.
It just means that I could.
Chapter 16
Two Secrets Shared
“So, did you register, then? Did you sign up?”
Karim is gazing at me intently, his glass of Coke halfway to his lips. We have driven out to a countryside pub for dinner, and we are sitting in the garden together, beneath a gazebo. The evening is mild—and warm, as long as you are sheltered from the wind. Fairy lights are strewn across the roof, and it is cozy and Christmassy, even at this time of year.
“I did, yes,” I reply, keeping my hands clasped between my knees because I know they are trembling.
It is a few days after I danced it out with Erin and Katie, and I have finally told him all about it. I have given him the abridged History of Me, sticking to the facts, not letting my emotions spill over into what is already a difficult accounting. He is now up to date, and I am exhausted. I have talked about myself more in the last week than I have for the rest of my life, and I am not that interesting.
Now I feel laid bare, like a wire stripped of its insulation. My nerves are raw and jagged, and I look around at all theother tables nearby. I have already calculated that the outdoor capacity of the pub is forty-eight, and there are only twelve of us here. I look back at Karim and remain silent.
He has listened carefully to my sad tale and now seems to want to know more. Which is understandable but also disturbing—I was steeled to say my piece, but hadn’t quite prepared myself for any further probing. I tell myself that it is fine, that he is friend not foe, that it will all be okay.
Of course, part of me doesn’t believe that. Part of me thinks that Karim will hear all of this and disapprove. Think badly of me. Judge me and find me wanting. At the very least, that he will decide I am way too messy and complicated and screwed up to waste any more time on.
That thought process in itself is bad enough—but the fact that I might actually be relieved if he walks away is even worse.
If he walks away, I will be hurt. But I have been hurt before, and I know I will recover. If he stays, if we carry on with this thing we have together, then I will get in deeper and deeper and the hurt will grow bigger and bigger. It has already become so much more than I expected it to. More than I planned. How will I cope when it all goes wrong?
“And what happens next, then?” he asks quietly, rudely interrupting my internal catastrophizing.
“Well, I’ve registered my details and what I know about her—the dates and places and names and stuff. Obviously, I don’t know what her name is now. When she was born I didn’t want to choose a name for her; I just thought that was the job of the people who were adopting her, and—well, I suppose I didn’t want to make her even more real.
“So, I signed up and said that I would be open to being contacted, and now I wait. She can go on there when she is eighteen, and then—well. I don’t know what happens then.”
It had been simple to fill in, that form. A straightforward act of bureaucracy, submitted to the General Register Office, which bizarrely turned out to be just down the road from us in Southport.
Simple, but not—those dates, those times, those names, all so heavily laden with history, with emotion. And the final kicker—the question that asks you if you wish to be contacted or if you do not; a delete-as-appropriate option that hides a world of potential pain and rejection. The same option is given on the form for adopted people as well—once they are eighteen, they can register and specifically say that they don’t want to be contacted.
Such clear-cut options for something that is so very complex.
Katie won’t register when she turns eighteen because she says she isn’t interested in her birth parents yet. She knows their names and knows the details that would allow her to contact them, but doesn’t feel the need. That might change, but for now she is content to keep her distance.
It might be the same with my daughter—or it might be that she registers but says she doesn’t want to be contacted. In which case, it’s game over unless I wanted to work with some kind of tracing agency or whatever—which I don’t. I would have to respect that wish.
I explain a little of this to Karim, and he nods, processing it all, before replying: “And she’s eighteen in a few days’ time—that’s tough, Gemma, isn’t it? That waiting. And tough if she does register but says she doesn’t want to hear from you?”
“I suppose it is. But I’ve been through tougher.”
I am trying to sound calm, but even I hear the waver in my voice, feel a tremor in my lower lip.
