Page 41 of Statistically Speaking
I laugh a little at that. He’s so right.
“Well, sometimes it’s good to have people in your life who care enough about you to boss you around. Is that when you saw a counselor?”
“Yeah, and it was so good for me. She helped me understand my problems—that the loss of my mum had affected me so much more than I ever thought it had. That everything was tangled up together, that I was grieving for her, for my baby, for my relationship. It was the making of me, really.”
I reach up to stroke his cheek, see the sheen of tears in his eyes. Lean in to kiss him briefly.
“See,” he says, smiling sadly, “we all have secrets. Now you know something about me that nobody else here does.”
“That makes me feel special,” I reply, finding that I like the feeling.
“Good. I think you are. The big question, though, remains—do you still fancy me, now you know I’m not the one hundred percent pure alpha male beefcake you signed up for?”
We look at each other, and there is a sense of openness, of sharing, that I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. I push aside my own concerns, my worries, my insecurities, my cowardly fear of where this might all be leading, and reply, “I don’t think I’ve ever found you more attractive.”
“What? What about that time when I took my top off on the cricket field last summer term, and you were almost salivating?”
I whack him on the arm but remember it vividly. I blushed whenever I thought about it for days afterward.
“Even more than then. Thank you. For listening, and for talking, and for just... being you, I suppose.”
“Being me is one of the things I’m best at. Have you finished with your food? Do you want to get out of here?”
“I do,” I reply, grinning. “Let’s go home. Let’s go to bed. Let’s make each other happy. Let’s enjoy the simple stuff for a while after all this complicated stuff.”
“You know me,” he says, winking, “I’m always up for the simple stuff.”
Chapter 17
Eighteen Years of Missing Her
The day of October 3 falls on a Saturday. I wake up with Karim by my side, his hair in dark tufts and his bare chest slowly rising and falling. He is one of those people who kicks all the covers off himself at night and wakes up cold. I look at him for a moment, syncing my breathing with his, trying to calm my own heart rate.
I have been trapped in anxiety dreams all night long. Dreams where my fingers have turned into actual sausages that are too big to operate a keyboard. Dreams where I have forgotten my phone passcode and get locked out so many times my phone actually explodes in my hands like a grenade, leaving me with bloody stumps. Dreams where I am in hospital and nobody will let me out of bed to check my emails, tying me to the headboard with surgical stockings.
Over and over I have woken up, slicked in sweat, exhausted and drained. It has been about as much fun as it sounds.
I slide out of bed as quietly and softly as I can, trying not to disturb him as I pull the duvet up over his sleeping form. I put on a robe, creep out of the room, and stand alone inthe lounge. I need coffee, I tell myself, and go through the motions of putting a pod in the machine, pressing the button, and realizing too late that I haven’t put a cup on the stand.
I clean up the mess, do it all again, sip brown liquid that I do not taste, so hot it scalds my lips.
It is 5:54 a.m., and I know there is zero chance of me getting back to sleep. I give in and go out onto the balcony. It is raining heavily, the sky is dark, the sea a black, roiling smudge that stretches on forever.
I open my phone, relieved to find that the passcode is the same as it always has been, relieved that my fingers are not made of minced meat, that nothing explodes.
I check my emails, hands shaking, forgetting to breathe until I wheeze. I have imagined this moment so many times. Pictured getting a notification, opening it, seeing that she has found me on the register. That she has agreed to contact. That my details have now been passed on to her so she can get in touch.
In my wilder moments of fantasy, everything has happened at once—there is already an email there from her, inviting me into her life. It is chatty, and friendly, and curious—just the way I hoped it would be. Understanding and nonjudgmental and full of colorful details about how good her life has been.
We will arrange to meet, and that meeting will be the beginning of something wondrous that will make me whole again.
That, of course, was fantasy—and this is reality. This is a cold, wet pre-dawn morning, and there is nothing. Nothing at all.
I sit down and I go slack. I hadn’t realized how scrunched up I was until I’m not, and then suddenly I feel like all my muscles have stopped working.
She is eighteen today. Only eighteen. She probably has other things on her mind. She probably isn’t even out of bed yet. I have been in too much of a rush, and I need to be more rational about this.
I sit, that hope-killing phone on my lap, and I remember that day eighteen years ago. The aching agony. The fatigue. Geoff with a G, and the Irish midwife, and the blood and the gore and the sheer perfection of my baby. I remember her ten tiny fingers, her ten tiny toes. I feel tears on my face, and I let them be. I am sad. I am allowed to cry. I wish that I had a mother to console me, to tell me that everything will be fine. But now, as it was then, I do not.
