The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith
“Where are you even going?”
“I’ll be fine,” she says, still moving backward, though this is clearly not the answer her dad was looking for. She gives a little wave as she reaches the door to the church. Everyone is still eyeing her as if she’s lost her mind, and maybe she has, but she needs to know for sure. She grabs the handle and braves one last glance back at Dad, who looks furious. His hands are on his hips, his forehead creased. She waves again and then steps inside, letting the door close behind her.
The stillness of the church comes as a shock, and Hadley stands there with her back against the cool stone of the wall, waiting for someone—Dad or Charlotte, the wedding planner or a posse of bridesmaids—to come after her. But nobody does, and she suspects this isn’t because Dad understands. How could he? It’s far more likely that he just doesn’t remember how to be this kind of parent anymore. It’s one thing to be the guy who calls on Christmas; it’s another to have to discipline your teenage daughter in front of everyone you know, especially when you’re no longer quite sure of the rules.
Hadley feels guilty for taking advantage of him like this, especially on his wedding day, but it’s like the lens has shifted; her focus is now clear.
All she wants is to get to Oliver.
Downstairs, she hurries to the classroom where she left her bags. As she walks past the mirror she catches a glimpse of herself, looking young and pale and so very uncertain, and she feels her resolve start to crumble. Maybe she’s jumping to conclusions. Maybe she’s wrong about Oliver’s dad. She has no idea where she’s going, and there’s a good possibility that her own father won’t ever forgive her for this.
But when she reaches for her purse the napkin with Oliver’s drawing flutters to the floor, and she finds herself smiling as she stoops to pick it up, running her thumb across the little duck with sneakers and a baseball cap.
Maybe this is a mistake.
But there’s still no place else she’d rather be right now.
11
9:00 AM Eastern Standard Time
2:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time
Hadley is already out the door and across the street, the church bells tolling two o’clock in her wake, before she realizes she has no idea where she’s going. An enormous red bus races past and, surprised, she stumbles backward a few steps before taking off after it. Even without her suitcase—which she left in the church—she’s still too slow, and by the time she makes it around the corner, the bus has already pulled away again.
Panting, she stoops to squint at the bus map that’s plastered at the stop behind a thick pane of glass, though it turns out to be little more than a mystifying tangle of colored lines and unfamiliar names. She bites her lip as she studies it, thinking there must be a better way to crack this code, when she finally spots Paddington in the upper left-hand corner.
It doesn’t look all that far, but then, it’s hard to get a feel for the scale of the thing, and for all Hadley knows, it’s just as likely to be miles away as blocks. There’s not enough detail to pick out any landmarks, and she still has no clue what she’ll do once she gets there; the only thing she remembers Oliver saying about the church is that there’s a statue of Mary out front and that he and his brothers used to get in trouble for climbing it. She glances at the map again. How many churches could there be in such a small patch of London? How many statues?
No matter the distance, she has only ten pounds in her purse, and judging by the cab ride from the airport, that will barely get her from here to the mailbox at the corner. The stubborn map still refuses to give up its secrets, so she decides it’s probably easiest to just ask the driver of the next bus that comes along and hope he’ll be able to point her in the right direction. But after nearly ten minutes of waiting with no sign of a bus, she takes another stab at deciphering the routes, tapping her fingers on the glass with obvious impatience.
“You know the saying, don’t you?” says a man in a soccer jersey. Hadley straightens up, acutely aware of how overdressed she is for a bus ride through London. When she doesn’t respond, the guy continues. “You wait for ages, and then two come along at once.”
“Am I in the right place to get to Paddington?”
“Paddington?” he says. “Yeah, you’re grand.”
When the bus arrives the man smiles encouragingly, so Hadley doesn’t bother asking the driver. But as she watches out the window for signs, she wonders how she’ll know when they’ve arrived, since most stops are labeled by street name rather than area. After a good fifteen minutes of aimless sightseeing, she finally works up the nerve to teeter to the front of the bus and ask which stop is hers.
“Paddington?” the driver says, showing a gold tooth as he grins. “You’re headed in the wrong bloody direction.”
Hadley groans. “Can you tell me which way is the right bloody direction?”
He lets her off near Westminster with directions for how to get to Paddington by tube, and she pauses for a moment on the sidewalk. Her eyes travel up to the sky, where she’s surprised to see a plane flying overhead, and something about the sight of it calms her again. She’s suddenly back in seat 18A beside Oliver, suspended above the water, surrounded by nothing but darkness.
And there on the street corner, it strikes her as something of a miracle that she met him at all. Imagine if she’d been on time for her flight. Or if she’d spent all those hours beside someone else, a complete stranger who, even after so many miles, remained that way. The idea that their paths might have just as easily not crossed leaves her breathless, like a near-miss accident on a highway, and she can’t help marveling at the sheer randomness of it all. Like any survivor of chance, she feels a quick rush of thankfulness, part adrenaline and part hope.
She picks her way through the crowded London streets, keeping an eye out for the tube stop. The city is crooked and twisty, full of curved avenues and winding alleys, like some kind of grand Victorian maze. It’s a beautiful summer Saturday and people fill the sidewalks, carrying bags from the market, pushing strollers, walking dogs, and jogging toward the parks. She passes a boy wearing the same blue shirt Oliver had on earlier and her heart quickens at the sight of it.
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 visibl
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.
12
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-col
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.