The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(14)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

6

12:43 AM Eastern Standard Time

5:43 AM Greenwich Mean Time

Hadley in sleep: drifting, dreaming. In the small, faraway corners of her mind—humming, even as the rest of her has gone limp with exhaustion—she’s on another flight, the one she missed, three hours farther along and seated beside a middle-aged man with a twitching mustache who sneezes and flinches his way across the Atlantic, never saying a word to her as she grows ever more anxious, her hand pressed against the window, where beyond the glass there is nothing but nothing but nothing.

She opens her eyes, awake all at once, to find Oliver’s face just inches from her own, watchful and quiet, his expression unreadable. Hadley brings a hand to her heart, startled, before it registers that her head is on his shoulder.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, pulling away. The plane is almost completely dark now, and it seems everyone on the flight is asleep. Even the television screens have gone black again, and Hadley pulls her tingling wrist from where it was wedged between them and squints at her watch, which is still, unhelpfully, on New York time. She runs a hand through her hair and then glances sideways at Oliver’s shirt, relieved there’s no sign of any drool, especially when he hands her a napkin.

“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.