Page 80 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
‘Mum said you’ve been emailing,’ he says finally. ‘She waits for them every evening.’
She does? I thought she’d be in bed, seeing them in the morning. I hadn’t realised she’d wait up. That it was something she wanted to read.
‘We have. I have things to say, things that I needed her to know. I... I didn’t have a great time in therapy.’
‘I used to complain about the cost. Five hundred bloody kroners an hour and another one hundred in petrol both ways.’ Dad remarks.Did you think of the cost to me?I let the silence settle around us again.
‘The car,’ I hear myself saying, fortified by Cornflakes’s body lying heavy on my lap. ‘I hated being left in the car outside the ice rink.’ I look at my puppy so I’m not sure if Dad looks at me or not. He replies with some delay.
‘I let you stay in the car because I wanted to keep you safe. Those boys in hockey class were bullying you, and if they saw you carrying on—’
‘Stimming. It’s calledstimming.’
‘Right.’ He takes a moment. ‘Iknow that. But iftheysaw it, things would have gotten worse.’
‘You could have talked to their parents.’
‘We thought they might turn on you even more if we brought it up. Made a big thing of it. We thought it would run its course.’
Well, it did, I think.A ten-year course.
‘So you locked me up. Away.’ I struggle to talk. As if it’s my turn to introduce myself in a new group, palms sweating, but I know that I’m right. Before, I didn’t: everything felt wrong, but I assumed it was me.
‘We did it because we loved you. We thought it was the right thing to do,’ Dad says.
Then he is quiet.
‘Let me go and top up these drinks,’ I say because that’s something people say in quiet pockets of air. In the kitchen I message Lina to please come over and that she can bring Tim if he’s around. I need someone to talk about the weather, current politics or the national hockey teams.
The minute they arrive the atmosphere changes.Mutual relief.
‘You friends are very nice, Sophia,’ my dad tells me as they leave an hour later.
‘I should have visited before,’ Dad says. ‘You really have been running quite the business here—it’s successful, it’s working. And I like what you’ve done with the inside.’ His hand sweeps in a half-circle motion, toward the shop.
‘Thank you, Dad.’
He doesn’t hug me when he leaves. He ruffles Cornflakes’s furry tummy for a long time at the doorstep then pats my shoulder. I feel like we are closer—but we still have some way to go.
‘Righto, then. Bye.’
Edith
London
My neurologist told me that a new study found there to be twenty-seven human emotions. He told me this as he warned that I may be experiencing a shortening in range, perhaps only really feeling happiness, anger, sadness and contentment. Or, he said, I could be finding myself within a mix of them and not always a rational one.How wrong was he,I think now. How very wrong. Look at me skilfully singling out just the one pesky emotion.Regret.
‘I’ll read the last one you sent, yeah?’ Blade says, and I want to cover my eyes like a child, but then I think that this is what I want, isn’t it? I want it to happen now because in a few years I may stop talking about mössas and Hornton Street and start talking about a naïve woman who didn’t come to meet Sven when she should have, who chose the wrong man and ended up alone for a lifetime. So I shush it and keep my hands in my lap.
S,
I know you would do anything for me—for us. I know it will hurt you, and so I cannot face telling you in person. Or with lengthy words. I’m sorry. I can’t take Blade with me. I’m not allowed tobring him out of the country without his father’s permission. He is promising to come back and be involved, that this has been a wake-up call. He’d come back into both of our lives, then. And I feel I have to give him a chance, to give Blade a chance at a life with both his parents.
I’m sorry.
Blade stops, folds the letter up and waits for me.
‘I got as far as that small alleyway next to the church. Then I stopped. I wasn’t going to meet him but I desperately wanted to move closer so that I could get a look at him. But if he saw me hovering he might have thought I could be persuaded. I couldn’t allow myself to be persuaded. Because I couldn’t leave you behind. But I also couldn’t bring you.’
