The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight (14 page)

For the first time, Hadley regrets not having visited her dad here, if only for this: the aging buildings, so full of character, the roadside stalls, the red telephone booths and black taxis and stone churches. Everything in this city seems old, but charmingly so, like something out of a movie, and if she weren’t racing from a wedding to a funeral and back again, if she weren’t wound quite so tightly at the moment, if every bone in her body weren’t aching to see Oliver, she thinks she might even like to spend some time here.

When she finally spots the red and blue sign for the tube she hurries down the stairs, blinking into the darkness of the underground. It takes her too long to figure out the ticket machines, and she can feel the people in line behind her shifting restlessly. Finally, a woman who looks a bit like the Queen takes pity on her, first telling her which options to choose, then nudging Hadley aside to do it herself.

“Here you go, love,” she says, handing over the ticket. “Enjoy your trip.”

The bus driver told Hadley she’d probably need to switch trains at some point, but as far as she can tell from the map, she can get there directly on the Circle Line. There’s a digital sign that says the tube will arrive in six minutes, so she presses herself into a small wedge of open space on the platform to wait.

Her eyes travel over the advertisements on the walls as she listens to the accents all around her, not just British but French and Italian and others she doesn’t even recognize. There’s a policeman standing nearby wearing a sort of old-fashioned helmet, and a man tossing a soccer ball from one hand to the other. When a little girl begins to cry, her mother bends at the waist and shushes her in another language, something guttural and harsh. The girl bursts into tears all over again.

Nobody is looking at Hadley, not one person, but even so, she’s never felt more visible in her life: too small, too American, too obviously alone and unsure of herself.

She doesn’t want to think about Dad and the wedding she left behind, and she’s not sure she wants to think about Oliver and what she might discover when she finds him. The train is still four minutes away and her head is pounding. The silky fabric of her dress feels far too sticky and the woman beside her is standing much too close. Hadley scrunches her nose against the smell of the place, musty and stale and sour all at once, like fruit gone bad in a small space.

She closes her eyes and thinks of her father’s advice to her when they stood in the elevator in Aspen, the walls collapsing like a house of cards all around her, and she imagines the sky beyond the arched ceiling of the tube stop, above the sidewalk and past the narrow buildings. There’s a pattern to this kind of coping, like a dream repeated night after night, always the same image: a few wispy clouds like a streak of paint across a blue canvas. But now she’s surprised to find something new in the picture that’s forming on the backs of her eyelids, something cutting across the blue sky of her imagination: an airplane.

Her eyes flicker open again as the train comes rushing out of the tunnel.

Hadley’s never sure if things are as small as they seem, or if it’s just her panic that seems to dwarf them. When she thinks back, she often remembers stadiums as little more than gymnasiums; sprawling houses become apartment-sized in her mind because of the sheer number of people packed in. So it’s hard to tell for sure whether the tube is actually smaller than the subway cars back home, which she’s ridden a thousand times with a kind of tentative calm, or whether it’s the knot in her chest that makes it seem like a matchbox car.

Much to her relief, she finds a seat on the end of a row, then immediately closes her eyes again. But it’s not working, and as the train lurches out of the station she remembers the book in her bag and pulls it out, grateful for the distraction. She brushes her thumb across the words on the cover before opening it.

When she was little, Hadley used to sneak into Dad’s office at home, which was lined with bookshelves that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, all of them stacked with peeling paperbacks and hardcovers with cracked spines. She was only six the first time he found her sitting in his armchair with her stuffed elephant and a copy of
A Christmas Carol
, poring over it as intently as if she were considering it for her dissertation.

“What’re you reading?” he’d asked, leaning against the doorframe and taking off his glasses.

“A story.”

“Yeah?” he asked, trying not to smile. “What story?”

“It’s about a girl and her elephant,” Hadley informed him matter-of-factly.

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “And they go on a trip together, on a bike, but then the elephant runs away, and she cries so hard that someone brings her a flower.”

Dad crossed the room and in a single practiced motion lifted her from the chair—Hadley clinging desperately to the slender book—until, suddenly, she was sitting on his lap.

“What happens next?” he asked.

“The elephant finds her again.”

“And then?”

“He gets a cupcake. And they live happily ever after.”

“That sounds like a great story.”

Hadley squeezed the fraying elephant on her lap. “It was.”

“Do you want me to read you another one?” he asked, gently taking the book from her and flipping to the first page. “It’s about Christmas.”

She settled back into the soft flannel of his shirt, and he began to read.

It wasn’t even the story itself that she loved; she didn’t understand half the words and often felt lost in the winding sentences. It was the gruff sound of her father’s voice, the funny accents he did for each character, the way he let her turn the pages. Every night after dinner they would read together in the stillness of the study. Sometimes Mom would come stand at the door with a dish towel in her hand and a half-smile on her face as she listened, but mostly it was just the two of them.

Even when she was old enough to read herself, they still tackled the classics together, moving from
Anna Karenina
to
Pride and Prejudice
to
The Grapes of Wrath
as if traveling across the globe itself, leaving holes in the bookshelves like missing teeth.

And later, when it started to become clear that she cared more about soccer practice and phone privileges than Jane Austen or Walt Whitman, when the hour turned into a half hour and every night turned into every other, it no longer mattered. The stories had become a part of her by then; they stuck to her bones like a good meal, bloomed inside of her like a garden. They were as deep and meaningful as any other trait Dad had passed along to her: her blue eyes, her straw-colored hair, the sprinkling of freckles across her nose.

Often he would come home with books for her, for Christmas or her birthday, or for no particular occasion at all, some of them early editions with beautiful gold trim, others used paperbacks bought for a dollar or two on a street corner. Mom always looked exasperated, especially when it was a new copy of one that he already had in his study.

“This house is about two dictionaries away from caving in,” she’d say, “and you’re buying duplicates?”

But Hadley understood. It wasn’t that she was meant to read them all. Maybe someday she would, but for now, it was more the gesture itself. He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.

So when he’d given her the worn copy of
Our Mutual Friend
that day in Aspen, after everything that had happened, there was something too familiar in the gesture. She’d been rubbed raw by his departure, and the meaning behind the gift made it hurt all the more. And so Hadley had done what she did best: She simply ignored it.

But now, as the train snakes its way beneath the streets of London, she’s unexpectedly pleased to have it. It’s been years since she’s read anything by Dickens; first, because there were other things to do, better things to do, and then later, she supposed, because she was making some sort of quiet statement against her dad.

People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline. As she leafs through the pages, the rest of it fades away: the flurry of elbows and purses, the woman in a tunic biting her fingernails, the two teenagers with blaring headphones, even the man playing the violin at the other end of the car, its reedy tune working its way through the crowd. The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she’s grounded again.

As she skips from one chapter to the next, Hadley forgets that she ever meant to return the book. The words, of course, are not her father’s, but he’s there in the pages all the same, and the reminder kick-starts something inside her.

Just before her stop she pauses, trying to recall the underlined sentence she’d discovered on the plane earlier. As she thumbs through the book, her eyes skimming for any sign of ink, she’s surprised to find another one.

“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death,” it reads, and Hadley lifts her gaze, feeling a hitch in her chest.

Only this morning the wedding had seemed the worst possible thing in the world, but now she understands that there are far grimmer ceremonies, far worse things that can happen on any given day. And as she exits the train along with the other passengers, past the words
PADDINGTON
STATION
, spelled out in tiles along the wall, she only hopes she’s wrong about what she might discover here.

9:54 AM Eastern Standard Time

2:54 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Outside, the sun has come out of hiding, though the streets are still damp and silvery. Hadley spins in a circle, trying to get her bearings, taking in the white-trimmed pharmacy, the little antique shop, the rows of pale-colored buildings stretching the length of the road. A group of men in rugby shirts emerge bleary-eyed from a pub, and a few women with shopping bags brush past her on the sidewalk.

Hadley glances at her watch; nearly three PM, and she has no idea what to do now that she’s here. As far as she can tell, there are no policemen around, no tourist offices or information booths, no bookstores or Internet cafés. It’s like she’s been dropped into the wilderness of London without a compass or a map, like some sort of ill-conceived challenge on a reality show.

She picks a direction at random and sets off down the street, wishing she’d stopped to change her shoes before bailing on the wedding. There’s a fish ’n’ chips place on the corner, and her stomach rumbles at the smells drifting from the door; the last thing she ate was that pack of pretzels on the plane, and the last time she slept was just before that. She’d like nothing more than to curl up and take a nap right now, but she keeps moving anyway, fueled by a strange mix of fear and longing.

After ten minutes and two emerging blisters, she still hasn’t passed a church. She ducks into a bookshop to ask if anybody knows about a statue of Mary, but the man looks at her so strangely that she backs out again without waiting for an answer.

Along the narrow sidewalks are butcher shops with huge cuts of meat hanging in the windows, clothing stores with mannequins in heels much higher than Hadley’s, pubs and restaurants, even a library that she nearly mistakes for a chapel. But as she circles the neighborhood, there doesn’t seem to be a single church in sight, not one bell tower or steeple, until—quite suddenly—there is.

Emerging from an alleyway, she spots a narrow stone building across the street. She hesitates a moment, blinking at it like a mirage, then rushes forward, buoyed again. But then the bells begin to ring in a way that seems far too joyful for the occasion, and a wedding party spills out onto the steps.

Hadley hadn’t realized she was holding her breath, but it comes rushing out of her now. She waits for the taxis to stop hurrying past and then crosses the street to confirm what she already knows: no funeral, no statue of Mary, no Oliver.

Even so, she can’t seem to pull herself away, and she stands there watching the aftermath of a wedding not unlike the one she just witnessed herself, the flower girls and the bridesmaids, the flashes of the cameras, the friends and family all wreathed in smiles. The bells finish their merry song and the sun slips lower in the sky and still she just stands there. After a long moment, she reaches into her purse. Then she does what she always does when she’s lost: She calls her mother.

Her phone is nearly out of battery power, and her fingers tremble as she punches in the numbers, anxious as she is to hear Mom’s voice. It seems impossible that the last time they talked they had a fight and, even more, that it happened less than twenty-four hours ago. The departures lane at the airport now seems like something from another lifetime.

They’ve always been close, she and Mom, but after Dad left, something shifted. Hadley was angry, furious in a way she hadn’t known was possible. But Mom—Mom was just broken. For weeks she’d moved as if she were underwater, red-eyed and heavy-footed, coming alive again only when the phone rang, her whole body quivering like a tuning fork as she waited to hear that Dad had changed his mind.

But he never did.

In those weeks after Christmas their roles had flip-flopped; it was Hadley who brought Mom dinner every night, who lay awake with worry as she listened to her cry, who made sure there was always a fresh box of Kleenex on the nightstand.

And this was the most unfair part of it all: What Dad had done, he hadn’t just done to him and Mom, and he hadn’t just done to him and Hadley. He’d done it to Hadley and Mom, too, had turned the easy rhythms between them into something brittle and complicated, something that could shatter at any moment. It seemed to Hadley that things would never return to normal, that they were forever meant to pinball between anger and grief, the hole in their house big enough to swallow them both.