The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight (10 page)

Her suitcase rocks back and forth unsteadily as she hurries past the checkpoint and toward the baggage claim, deciding that the apple she grabbed from the fridge at home doesn’t really count as a farm product. It’s now 10:42, and if she doesn’t manage to get a cab in the next few minutes there’s pretty much no chance she’ll make the ceremony. But she’s not thinking about that yet. She’s thinking only of Oliver, and when she emerges into the baggage area—a sea of people, all crowded behind a black rope, holding signs and waiting for friends and family—her heart sinks.

The room is enormous, with dozens of carousels bearing brightly colored suitcases, and all around them, fanned out in every direction, hundreds upon hundreds of people, each of them searching for something: for people or rides or directions, for things lost and found. Hadley wheels in a circle, her bags feeling like they weigh a thousand pounds, her shirt sticking to her back, her hair falling across her eyes. There are children and grandparents, limo drivers and airport officials, a guy with a Starbucks apron and three monks in red robes. A million people, it seems, and none of them Oliver.

She backs up against a wall and sets down her things, forgetting even to worry about the crush of people. Her mind is too busy with the possibilities. It could have been anything, really. His line could have taken longer. He could have been held up at customs. He might have emerged earlier and assumed that
she’d
gone ahead. They could have crossed paths and not even noticed.

He might simply have left.

But still, she waits.

The giant clock above the flight board stares down at her accusingly, and Hadley tries to ignore the mounting sense of panic that’s ballooning inside her. How could he not have said good-bye? Or was that what he’d meant by the kiss? Still, after all those hours, all those moments between them, how could that just be it?

She realizes she doesn’t even know his last name.

The very last place she wants to go right now is to a wedding. She can almost feel the last of her energy receding, like water spiraling down a drain. But as the minutes tick by, it’s becoming harder to ignore the fact that she’s going to miss the ceremony. With some amount of effort, she peels herself away from the wall to make one last sweep of the place, her feet heavy as she paces the enormous terminal; but Oliver, with his blue shirt and untidy hair, is nowhere to be found.

And so, with nothing more to be done, Hadley finally makes her way out through the sliding doors and into the gray London haze, feeling satisfied at least that the sun didn’t have the audacity to show up this morning.

5:48 AM Eastern Standard Time

10:48 AM Greenwich Mean Time

The line for taxis is almost comically long, and Hadley drags her suitcase to the end of it with a groan, falling in behind a family of Americans wearing matching red T-shirts and talking much too loud. Heathrow has turned out to be no less busy than
JFK
, though without the Fourth of July as an excuse, and she waits numbly as the line creeps forward, the lack of sleep finally beginning to catch up to her. Everything seems to blur as her gaze moves from the queue ahead of her to the departing buses to the line of black taxis waiting their turn, as solemn and silent as a funeral procession.

“It can’t be worse than New York,” she’d said earlier when Oliver had warned her about Heathrow, but he only shook his head.

“A logistics nightmare of epic proportions,” he’d called it, and of course he’d been right.

She gives her head a little shake, as if trying to rid her ear of water.
He’s gone
, she tells herself again.
It’s just as simple as that
. But even so, she keeps her back to the terminal, resisting the urge to turn around and look for him one more time.

Someone once told her there’s a formula for how long it takes to get over someone, that it’s half as long as the time you’ve been together. Hadley has her doubts about how accurate this could possibly be, a calculation so simple for something as complicated as heartbreak. After all, her parents had been married almost twenty years, and it took Dad only a few short months to fall for someone else. And when Mitchell had dumped Hadley after a whole semester, it took her only about ten days to feel done with him entirely. Still, she takes comfort in the knowledge that she’s known Oliver for only a matter of hours, meaning this knot in her chest should be gone by the end of the day, at the very latest.

When it’s finally her turn at the front of the line, she digs through her bag for the address of the church while the cabbie—a tiny man with a beard so long and white that he looks a bit like a garden gnome—tosses her suitcase roughly into the trunk without so much as a pause in conversation as he jabbers away into his hands-free phone. Once again, Hadley tries not to think about the condition of the dress she’ll soon be forced to put on. She hands over the address and the cabbie climbs back into the car without any sort of acknowledgment of his new passenger.

“How long will it take?” she asks as she slips into the backseat, and he halts his steady chatter just long enough to let out a sharp bark of a laugh.

“Long time,” he says, then pulls out into the slow crawl of traffic.

“Super,” Hadley says under her breath.

Out the window, the landscape scrolls by from behind a gauzy layer of mist and rain. There’s a grayness here that seems to hang over everything, and even though the wedding will be indoors, Hadley finds herself softening toward Charlotte for a moment; anybody would be disappointed with this sort of weather on her wedding day, even if she was British and had spent a lifetime learning not to expect anything else. There’s always that tiny piece of hope that this day—
your
day—will be the one to turn out differently.

When the cab pulls onto the motorway, the low-slung buildings start to give way to narrow brick homes, which stand shoulder to shoulder amid spindly antennae and cluttered yards. Hadley wants to ask whether this is part of London proper, but she has a feeling her driver would be a less than enthusiastic tour guide. If Oliver were here, he’d undoubtedly be telling her stories about everything they passed, though there’d be enough outlandish tales and not-quite-truths sprinkled in there to keep her on her toes, too, to make her wonder whether any of it was really true at all.

On the plane he’d told her about trips to South Africa and Argentina and India with his family, and Hadley had folded her arms as she listened, wishing she were on her way to somewhere like that. It wasn’t such a leap, from where she was sitting. There on the plane, it wasn’t so very hard to imagine they could be headed somewhere together.

“Which was your favorite?” she’d asked. “Of all the places you’ve been?”

He seemed to consider this for a moment before that one telltale dimple appeared on his face. “Connecticut.”

Hadley laughed. “I bet,” she said. “Who’d want to go to Buenos Aires when you could see New Haven?”

“What about you?”

“Alaska, probably. Or Hawaii.”

Oliver looked impressed. “Not bad. The two most far-flung states.”

“I’ve been to all but one, actually.”

“You’re kidding.”

Hadley shook her head. “Nope, we used to take a lot of family road trips when I was younger.”

“So you drove to Hawaii? How was that?”

She grinned. “We thought it made more sense to fly to that one, actually.”

“So which one have you missed?”

“North Dakota.”

“How come?”

She shrugged. “Just haven’t made it there yet, I guess.”

“I wonder how long it would take to drive there from Connecticut.”

Hadley laughed. “Can you even drive on the right side of the road?”

“Yes,” Oliver said, flashing her a look of mock anger. “I know it’s shocking to think that I might be able to operate a vehicle on the
wrong
side of the road, but I’m actually quite good. You’ll see when we take our big road trip to North Dakota one day.”

“I can’t wait,” Hadley said, reminding herself that it was only a joke. Still, the idea of the two of them crossing the country together, listening to music as the horizon rolled past, had been enough to make her smile.

“So what’s your favorite place
outside
of the States?” he asked. “I know it’s absurd to think there might be somewhere else in the world as wonderful as, say, New Jersey, but…”

“This is my first time overseas, actually.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“Lot of pressure, then.”

“On what?”

“London.”

“My expectations aren’t particularly high.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “So if you could go anywhere else in the world, where would it be?”

Hadley thought about this for a moment. “Maybe Australia. Or Paris. How about you?”

Oliver had looked at her as if it were obvious, the faintest hint of a grin at the corners of his mouth.

“North Dakota,” he’d said.

Now Hadley presses her forehead against the window of the taxi and once again finds herself smiling at the thought of him. He’s like a song she can’t get out of her head. Hard as she tries, the melody of their meeting runs through her mind on an endless loop, each time as surprisingly sweet as the last, like a lullaby, like a hymn, and she doesn’t think she could ever get tired of hearing it.

She watches with bleary eyes as the world rushes past, and tries her best to stay awake. Her phone rings four times before she realizes it’s not the cabbie’s, and when she finally fishes it out of her bag and sees that it’s her dad, she hesitates for a moment before answering.

“I’m in a taxi,” she says by way of greeting, then cranes her neck to check the clock on the dashboard. Her stomach does a little somersault when she sees that it’s already 11:24.

Dad sighs, and Hadley imagines him in his tux, pacing the halls of the church. She wonders if he wishes she hadn’t come after all. There are so many more important things for him to be worrying about today—flowers and programs and seating arrangements—that Hadley’s missed flight and the fact that she’s running late must seem more of a headache than anything else.

“Do you know if you’re close?” he asks, and she covers the mouthpiece and clears her throat loudly. The driver flinches, quite obviously annoyed at being interrupted.

“Excuse me, sir,” she says. “Do you know how far now?”

He puffs out his cheeks, then heaves a sigh. “Twenty minutes,” he says. “Thirty. Eh, twenty-five. Thirty, maybe. Thirty.”

Hadley frowns and returns the phone to her ear. “I think maybe a half hour.”

“Damn it,” Dad says. “Charlotte’s gonna have a stroke.”

“You can start without me.”

“It’s a wedding, Hadley,” he says. “It’s not like skipping the previews at the cinema.”

Hadley bites her lip to keep from saying “movie theater.”

“Look,” Dad says, “tell the driver you’ll give him an extra twenty quid if he can get you here in twenty minutes. I’ll talk to the minister and see if we can stall for a bit, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, looking doubtfully at the driver.

“And don’t worry—Charlotte’s friends are on standby,” Dad says, and Hadley can once again hear the humor in his voice, that trace of laughter behind his words that she remembers from when she was little.

“For what?”

“For you,” he says cheerfully. “See you soon.”

The driver seems to perk up quite a bit at the idea of a bonus, and after striking a bargain he turns off the motorway and onto a series of smaller roads lined with colorful buildings, an assortment of pubs and markets and little boutiques. Hadley wonders if she should try to start getting ready in the car, but this seems far too daunting an endeavor, and so instead she just looks out the window, biting her fingernails and trying not to think about anything at all. It seems almost easier to go into this blindfolded. Like a man about to be shot.

She glances down at the phone in her lap, then flips it open to try to call her mom. But it goes straight to voice mail, and she snaps it shut again with a heavy feeling. A quick calculation tells her it’s still early in Connecticut, and Mom—being a bear of a sleeper, completely oblivious to the world until she’s had a shower and a massive amount of coffee—is probably still in bed. Somehow, despite their uneven parting, Hadley suspects her mother’s voice might be just the thing to make her feel better, and she wishes for nothing more than to hear it right now.

The cabbie is true to his word; at exactly 11:46, they pull up to an enormous church with a red roof and a steeple so high the very top of it is lost to the mist. The front doors are open, and two round-faced men in tuxes hover in the doorway.

Hadley sifts through the stack of brightly colored bills her mom exchanged for her, handing over what seems like an awful lot for a ride from the airport, plus the extra twenty she promised, which leaves her with only ten pounds. After stepping out into the rain to heave her suitcase from the trunk, the driver pulls away in the taxi, and Hadley simply stands there for a moment, peering up at the church.

From inside she can hear the deep peals of an organ, and in the doorway the two ushers shuffle their stacks of programs and smile at her expectantly. But she spots another door along the brick wall out front and sets off in that direction instead. The only thing worse than walking down the aisle would be to accidentally do it too early, wearing a wrinkled jean skirt and toting a red suitcase.

The door leads to a small garden with a stone statue of a saint, currently occupied by three pigeons. Hadley wheels her suitcase along the side of the building until she comes across another door, and when she shoves it open with her shoulder the sound of the music fills the garden. She looks right and then left down the hallway before taking off toward the back of the church, where she runs into a small woman wearing a little hat with feathers.

“Sorry,” Hadley says, half whispering. “I’m looking for… the groom?”

“Ah, you must be Hadley!” the woman says. “I’m so glad you made it. Don’t worry, dear. The girls are waiting for you downstairs.” She says
girls
as if it rhymes with
carols
, and Hadley realizes this must be the bride’s mother, from Scotland. Now that Dad and Charlotte are getting married, Hadley wonders if she’s supposed to consider this woman—this total stranger—a grandmother of sorts. She’s struck a bit speechless by the idea of it, wondering what other new family members she might be acquiring once the day’s events are set in motion. But before she has a chance to say anything, the woman makes a little flapping motion with her hands.