And I see him.Davey.
From across the other side of the platform, waiting for a train heading in the opposite direction. Or at least, it looks sort of like him. I’d put Davey out of my mind, or at least attempted to, and I have been very good at not hallucinating him recently on any other train journey, and yet…now…there’s a man standing on the other side of the platform waiting for a train and it looks like Davey. It looks so much like Davey that I stop speaking, stop listening to George as he continues berating Joan, making himself laugh.
George’s hand is wrapped around mine and I’m convincing myself that I’m mental, that this isn’t Davey, that this can’t be Davey. But all the same I slowly extricate my hand from George’s. He uses the moment to check his watch, and I was going topretend I had a scratch but I don’t even bother. I only ever saw Davey on our video calls and in the few photos he sent me, so I’m trying to compare this man standing in front of me—albeit across the platform—to the one in the photos from so many months ago. God, it really looks like him. His hair is so much shorter, like it’s been shaved off and is just growing back a little wildly. He has two huge rucksacks next to him and is unscrewing the lid on a water bottle. He tips his head back to drink and then someone asks him the time and he smiles as they thank him and he mouths, “You’re welcome” in that way only Americans seem to, and everything around me stills.
That smile. Dear God, I think it’s actually him. I move, back away from George, and then, without really knowing what I’m doing, I run fast, barreling through people. Behind me I hear George cry my name, but I don’t stop. I take the stairs two at a time, run through the passageway that divides the platforms, that divides us, slide through people as I get to the turn, begin the descent to the other platform.
People are coming up the stairs, which means only one thing—there’s a train in the station and it’s just let people out. I could scream. I run faster, through people heading toward me, begging them to move, and I land on the platform. He’s gone. But the train is still in the station. I run along the platform to where he was standing about halfway down. I’m guessing now that he was standing right here. I start looking in the carriages. The doors are still open. I should get on, although it’s madness…I should get on. But I don’t. Instead I look further down the platform, where people are moving and…Maybe he’s not on the train, maybe he’s moved further along, waiting for the next one. I run toward the crowd, glancing around me for a tall blond man with two rucksacks. I strain my eyes to look inside as I’m almost running again. And the doors close. “No. Shit! No.” Everything’s happening so fast—too fast.
And then I see him. He’s typing something on his phone. I stare. If I was clever, I’d bang on the window, but I’m not clever. I don’t even move. I just watch him typing. I don’t have any time left to pull my phone out of my little bag—to call him, text him, tell him to look up. So instead I stare at the man I never met, finally in front of me in the flesh. Because I am so entirely sure it’s him. And sensing he’s being watched…he looks up and directly at me.
His phone lowers and there’s no recognition in his face, and I think,It’s not him. This is it, Hannah, you have lost the plot one hundred percent.The train starts moving and the man stops looking through me, looks at me, smiles and then the lightning bolt of recognition hits him, he visibly inhales, the train moves, and then I watch him mouth, “Hannah,” as his eyes widen in shock. And then he’s gone, carried away into the tunnel.
I’m so in shock that I simply stare at the empty spot where he was, and I don’t even have the time or the brainpower to wonder what he’s doing here, why he hasn’t messaged me or…anything. We left things so strangely before. Behind me I hear my name and I turn. I don’t know why I expect it to be Davey when he’s heading into the darkness of the Underground, but I do expect it to be him and I hate myself because of the disappointment that hits me when I see it’s George.
“Hannah,” he says again. “What the hell?”
“I…I thought. I thought we might be on the wrong platform.”
He looks around, as if the platform might provide the answer to my madness.
“No. We were on the right platform.” He stares at me.
I nod. “OK.”
“You just left without me,” he says. “Were you going to get on a train without me?”
“No,” I say. “No, I wasn’t getting on the train. I wouldn’t have done that.”
He looks hurt, disappointed, confused. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I say, shock reverberating through my mind. I can’t think of anything else to say, so I repeat my lie. “I thought we were on the wrong platform.”
George opens his mouth to say something. Closes it. Shakes his head a bit. He goes to put his hands in his pockets as he assesses me, but he can’t, as they’re rammed with all my stuff. He lets his hands hang limply by his sides. He ran all the way over the bridge and down the platform and the man isn’t even out of breath, hasn’t even broken a sweat. “Shall we get back on the right platform?” he asks quietly.
“Yes.” I nod. He reaches out for my hand. And I look one last time into the darkness of the tunnel that carried Davey out of reach. And then I take George’s hand.
—
It takes me the entire length of the journey to Kew Gardens to get my thoughts together. In that time I don’t speak to George, don’t look at my phone. I just stare ahead as the train stops and starts at stations and carries on, shooting us through darkness and then light, darkness and then light, over and over until we arrive at Kew.
It’s only as I’m sitting down watching the civil ceremony that I’m able to form coherent thoughts. Davey is well. He looked well. He looked a bit different, but he looked well. He had rucksacks. Does he live here? Has he just this second moved here? Has he been here a few weeks already and is now leaving—going back to the US? That thought hits me fast and furiously and if I hadn’t already been sitting on a chair, I would have stumbled. What if it wasn’t him? But it was. I’m sure it was. He said my name.He said my name.
Chapter 33
Davey
it was hannah.It was actually Hannah. I’m so stunned I don’t know what to do. Should I go back? I should go back. I should. But she’ll be long gone by now. I missed my stop anyway and had to turn around a few stations up and double back until I found the right station. I stare, totally confused, at the Tube map up above me on the wall of the next train that I catch, seeing it, but not seeing it. The colored lines mean nothing to me and someone points me in the direction of where I’m headed, toward the Gatwick Express.
It’s only as I’m sitting on the express train taking me toward the airport that I can finally pull myself together, try to work out what happened,howit happened. Hannah was on the Underground platform at the same time I was. Hannah was in front of the train window, in front of me for the few moments I was standing there…She was there too. I can’t get my head around that. If I believed in fate, I’d say that was meant to happen. But if it was meant to happen, wouldn’t she have gotten on the train, or wouldn’t I have stood there longer, or wouldn’t the train have been delayed—anything that enabled us to actually…meet?
I sit back. I can’t close my eyes to sleep in case I miss the stop again, so I stare wildly around me. Exhaustion comes so much quicker these days.
I’m leaving already. My time in England was short and I managed to cram a lot in, even visiting Cornwall for a weekend. In a way I needed to prove to myself I could still do all the things I could have done before the chemo wiped me out. It still wipes me out, but I needed this. I’ve beaten cancer and I’m unstoppable. Until around 4P.M., when I need to nap for twenty minutes. Not every day. Just some. And after that I’m unstoppable again.
Cornwall was a long way to travel for such a short time, but it was worth it. The turquoise of the sea in St. Ives blew me away. It’s part of my roots, my DNA, but I don’t have any living relatives there now, and I fought loneliness while eating Cornish pasties in Falmouth and ice cream on the harbor wall in Padstow.
And then I went up to Whitstable. I’d like to say it was for some real tourist reason, but I went because Hannah talked about it so much that I had to see what she saw, and where she grew up. I sat on the pebbles in that little coastal town and looked out across the end of the Thames where it fell away into the sea.
