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-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.
But then, just like that, it was over.
About a month had passed when Mom appeared at Hadley’s bedroom door one morning, decked out in her now familiar uniform of a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of Dad’s old flannel pajama pants, much too long and far too big for her.
“Enough of this,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Hadley frowned. “What?”
“Pack your bags, kid,” Mom said, sounding almost like herself again. “We’re going on a trip.”
It was late January, and outside everything was as bleak as it was inside. But by the time they stepped off the plane in Arizona, Hadley could already see something in Mom beginning to unfold, that part of her that had been clenched too tight, that had been curled up in a little ball inside her. They spent a long weekend by the pool at the resort, their skin turning brown and their hair going blonder in the sun. At night they watched movies and ate burgers and played miniature golf, and though she kept waiting for Mom to crumble, to drop the act and melt into a little puddle of tears the way she’d been doing for weeks, it never happened. It occurred to Hadley that if this was how life was going to be from now on—just one long girls’ weekend—then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.