The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(29)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

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 visible in her life: too small, too American, too obviously alone and unsure of herself.