He arches his back in a stretch, then squints blearily at his watch. “Almost there.”
Hadley nods, relieved that they’re right on schedule, though a part of her also can’t help wishing for more time. In spite of everything—the crowded quarters and the cramped seats, the smells that have been drifting up and down the length of the cabin for hours now—she doesn’t feel quite ready to step off this plane, where it’s been so easy to lose herself in conversation, to forget all that she left behind and all that’s still ahead.
The man in front of them pushes open his window shade and a column of whiteness—so startlingly bright that Hadley brings a hand to her eyes—streams in all around them, snuffing out the darkness, stripping away whatever was left of last night’s magic. Hadley reaches over to nudge open her own window shade, the spell now officially broken. Outside, the sky is a blinding blue, striped with clouds like layers on a cake. After so many hours in the dark, it almost hurts to look for too long.
It’s only four AM in New York, and when the pilot’s voice comes over the PA it sounds far too cheerful for the early hour. “Well, folks,” he says, “we’re making our final descent into Heathrow. The weather looks good down in London; twenty-two degrees and partly sunny with a chance of showers later. We’ll be on the ground in just under twenty minutes, so please fasten your seat belts. It’s been a pleasure flying with you, and I hope you enjoy your stay.”
Hadley turns to Oliver. “What’s that in Fahrenheit?”
“Warm,” he says, and in that moment she feels too warm herself; perhaps it’s the forecast, or the sun beating at the window, or maybe just the proximity of the boy at her side, his shirt wrinkled and his cheeks a ruddy pink. She stretches to reach the nozzle on the panel above her, twisting it all the way to the left and then closing her eyes against the thin jet of cool air.
“So,” he says, cracking his knuckles one at a time.
“So.”
They look at each other sideways, and something about the expression on his face—an uncertainty that mirrors her own—makes Hadley want to cry. There’s no real distinction between last night and this morning, of course—just dark bleeding into light—but even so, everything feels horribly different. She thinks of the way they stood together near the bathroom, how it seemed like they’d been on the brink of something, of everything, like the whole world was changing as they huddled together in the dark. And now here they are, like two polite strangers, like she’d only ever imagined the rest of it. She wishes they could turn around again and fly back in the other direction, circling the globe backward, chasing the night they left behind.
“Do you think,” she says, the words emerging thickly, “we might have used up all our conversation last night?”
“Not possible,” says Oliver, and the way he says it, his mouth turned up in a smile, his voice full of warmth, unwinds the knot in Hadley’s stomach. “We haven’t even gotten to the really important stuff yet.”
“Like what?” she asks, trying to arrange her face in a way that disguises the relief she feels. “Like what’s so great about Dickens?”
“Not at all,” he says. “More like the plight of koalas. Or the fact that Venice is sinking.” He pauses, waiting for this to register, and when Hadley says nothing, he slaps his knee for emphasis. “Sinking! The whole city! Can you believe it?”
She frowns in mock seriousness. “That does sound pretty important.”
“It is,” Oliver insists. “And don’t even get me started on the size of our carbon footprint after this trip. Or the difference between crocodiles and alligators. Or the longest recorded flight of a chicken.”
“Please tell me you don’t actually know that.”
“Thirteen seconds,” he says, leaning forward to look past her and out the window. “This is a total disaster. We’re nearly to Heathrow and we haven’t even properly discussed flying chickens.” He jabs a finger at the window. “And see those clouds?”
“Hard to miss,” Hadley says; the plane is now almost fully enveloped in fog, the grayness pressing up against the windows as the plane dips lower and lower.
“Those are cumulus clouds. Did you know that?”
“I’m sure I should.”
“They’re the best ones.”
“How come?”
“Because they look the way clouds are supposed to look, the way you draw them when you’re a kid. Which is nice, you know? I mean, the sun never looks the way you drew it.”
“Like a wheel with spokes?”
“Exactly. And my family certainly never looked the way I drew them.”
“Stick figures?”
“Come on now,” he says. “Give me a little credit. They had hands and feet, too.”
“That looked like mittens?”
“But it’s nice, isn’t it? When something matches up like that?” He bobs his head with a satisfied smile. “Cumulus clouds. Best clouds ever.”
Hadley shrugs. “I guess I never really thought about it.”
“Well, then, see?” Oliver says. “There’s loads more to talk about. We’ve only just gotten started.”
Beyond the window the clouds are bottoming out, and the plane lowers itself gently into the silvery sky below. Hadley feels a rush of illogical relief at the sight of the ground, though it’s still too far away to make any sense, just a collection of quilted fields and shapeless buildings, the faint tracings of roads running through them like gray threads.
Oliver yawns and leans his head back against the seat. “I guess we probably should have slept more,” he says. “I’m pretty knackered.”
Hadley gives him a blank look.
“Tired,” he says, flattening the vowels and notching his voice up an octave so that he sounds American, though his accent has a vaguely Southern twang to it.
“I feel like I’ve embarked on some kind of foreign-language course.”
“Learn to speak British in just seven short hours!” Oliver says in his best announcer’s voice. “How could you pass up an advert like that?”
“Commercial,” she says, rolling her eyes. “How could you pass up a commercial like that?”
But Oliver only grins. “See how much you’ve learned already?”
They’ve nearly forgotten the old woman beside them, who’s been sleeping for so long that it’s the absence of her muffled snoring that finally startles them into looking over.
“What did I miss?” she asks, reaching for her purse, from which she carefully removes her glasses, a bottle of eye drops, and the small tin of mints.
“We’re almost there,” Hadley tells her. “But you’re lucky you slept. It was a long flight.”
“It was,” Oliver says, and though he’s facing away from her, Hadley can hear the smile in his voice. “It felt like forever.”
The woman stops what she’s doing, the eyeglasses dangling between her thumb and forefinger, and beams at them. “I told you,” she says simply, then returns to the contents of her purse. Hadley, feeling the full meaning of her statement, avoids Oliver’s searching look as the flight attendants do one last sweep of the aisle, reminding people to put their seat backs up, fasten their safety belts, and tuck away their bags.
“Looks like we could even be a few minutes early,” Oliver says. “So unless customs is a complete nightmare, you might actually have a shot at making this thing. Where’s the wedding?”
Hadley leans forward and pulls the Dickens book from her bag again, slipping the invitation out from near the back, where she has pressed it for safekeeping. “The Kensington Arms Hotel,” she says. “Sounds swanky.”
Oliver leans over to look at the elegant calligraphy scrawled across the cream-colored invitation. “That’s the reception,” he says, pointing just above it. “The ceremony’s at St Barnabas Church.”
“Is that close?”
“To Heathrow?” He shakes his head. “Not exactly. But nothing really is. You should be okay if you hurry.”
“Where’s yours?”
His jaw tightens. “Paddington.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near where I grew up,” he says. “West London.”
“Sounds nice,” she offers, but he doesn’t smile.
“It’s the church we used to go to as kids,” he says. “I haven’t been there in ages. I used to always get in trouble for climbing the statue of Mary out front.”
“Nice,” Hadley says, tucking the wedding invitation back inside the book and then shutting it a bit too hard, causing Oliver to flinch. He watches her shove it back into her bag.
“So will you still give it back to him?”
“I don’t know,” she says truthfully. “Probably.”
He considers this for a moment. “Will you at least wait till after the wedding?”
Hadley hadn’t planned on it. In fact, she’d envisioned herself marching right up to him before the ceremony and handing it over, mutinously, triumphantly. It was the only thing he’d given her since he left—really given her; not a gift mailed out for her birthday or Christmas, but something he’d handed to her himself—and there was something satisfying in the idea of giving it right back. If she was going to be made to attend his stupid wedding, then she was going to do it her way.
But Oliver is watching her with a look of great earnestness, and she can’t help feeling a bit uncomfortable beneath his hopeful gaze. Her voice wavers when she answers. “I’ll think about it,” she says, then adds, “I might not get there in time anyway.”
Their eyes drift to the window to chart their progress, and Hadley pushes down a wave of panic; not so much for the landing itself, but for all that begins and ends with it. Out the window, the ground is rushing up to meet them, making everything—all the blurry shapes below—suddenly clear, the churches and the fences and the fast-food restaurants, even the scattered sheep in an isolated field, and she watches it all draw closer, wrapping a hand tightly around her seat belt, bracing herself as if arriving were no better than crashing.
The wheels hit the ground with one bounce, then two, before the velocity of the landing pins them firmly to the runway and they’re shot forward like a blown cork, all wind and engines and rushing noise, and a sense of momentum so strong that Hadley wonders if they’ll be able to stop at all. But they do, of course they do, and everything goes quiet again; after traveling nearly five hundred miles per hour for almost seven hours, they now commence crawling to the gate with all the unhurried speed of an apple cart.
Their runway fans out to join others like a giant maze, until they’re all swallowed by an apron of asphalt stretching as far as Hadley can see, interrupted only by radio towers and rows of planes and the great hulking terminal, which sits bleakly beneath the low gray sky. So this is London, she thinks. Her back is still to Oliver, but she finds herself glued to the window by some invisible force, unable to turn and face him without quite knowing why.
As they pull up to the gate, she can see the ramp stretched out to meet them, and the plane slips into position gracefully, locking on with a small shudder. But even once they’re firmly anchored in place, once the engines are cut and the seat-belt lights go off with a ping, Hadley remains still. There’s a collective hum of noise at her back as the rest of the passengers stand to collect their baggage, and Oliver waits a moment before lightly touching her arm. She whirls around.
“Ready?” he asks, and she shakes her head, just barely, but enough to make him smile. “Me, neither,” he admits, standing up anyway.
Just before it’s their turn to file out of the row, Oliver reaches into his pocket and pulls out a purplish bill. He sets it on the seat he’s been occupying for the past seven hours, where it sits limply, looking a bit lost against the busy pattern of the cloth.
“What’s that for?” Hadley asks.
“The whiskey, remember?”
“Right,” she says, peering closer. “There’s no way it was worth twenty pounds, though.”
He shrugs. “Thievery surcharge.”
“What if someone takes it?”
Oliver bends down and grabs both ends of the seat belt, which he fastens over the bill so that it looks as if it’s tucked in. “There,” he says, standing back to admire his work. “Safety first.”
Ahead of them, the old woman takes a few small, birdlike steps out into the aisle before pausing to peer up at the overhead bins. Oliver moves quickly to help, ignoring the crowd of people behind them as he pulls down her battered suitcase and then waits patiently while she gets herself situated.
“Thank you,” she says, beaming at him. “You’re such a nice boy.” She moves to begin walking, then hesitates, as if she’s forgotten something, and looks back again. “You remind me of my husband,” she says to Oliver, who shakes his head in protest. But the woman has already begun to pivot around again, in a series of tiny, incremental steps, like the minute hand on a clock, and when she’s finally pointed in the right direction she begins her slow shuffle up the aisle, leaving the two of them to watch her go.
“Hope that was a compliment,” Oliver says, looking a bit sheepish.
“They’ve been married fifty-two years,” Hadley reminds him.
He gives her a sideways glance as she reaches for her suitcase. “Thought you didn’t think much of marriage.”
“I don’t,” she says, heading toward the exit.
When he catches up to her on the walkway, neither of them says a word, but Hadley feels it anyway, bearing down on them like a freight train: the moment when they’ll have to say good-bye. And for the first time in hours, she feels suddenly shy. Beside her, Oliver is craning his neck to read the signs for customs, already thinking about the next thing, already moving on. Because that’s what you do on planes. You share an armrest with someone for a few hours. You exchange stories about your life, an amusing anecdote or two, maybe even a joke. You comment on the weather and remark about the terrible food. You listen to him snore. And then you say good-bye.
So why does she feel so completely unprepared for this next part?
She should be worrying about finding a taxi and making it to the church on time, seeing her dad again and meeting Charlotte. But what she’s thinking about instead is Oliver, and this realization—this reluctance to let go—throws everything into sudden doubt. What if she’s gotten it all wrong, these last hours? What if it isn’t as she thought?
Already, everything is different. Already, Oliver feels a million miles away.
When they reach the end of the corridor they’re greeted by the tail end of a long queue, where their fellow passengers stand with bags strewn at their feet, restless and grumbling. As she drops her backpack, Hadley does a mental tally of all that she packed inside, trying to remember whether she threw in a pen that could be used to capture a phone number or an e-mail address, some scrap of information about him, an insurance policy against forgetting. But she feels frozen inside of herself, trapped by her inability to say anything that won’t come out sounding vaguely desperate.
Oliver yawns and stretches, his hands high and his back arched, then drops his elbow casually onto her shoulder, pretending to use her for support. But the weight of his arm feels like it just might be the thing to unbalance her, and she swallows hard before looking up at him, uncharacteristically flustered.
“Are you taking a cab?” she asks, and he shakes his head and reclaims his arm.
“Tube,” he says. “It’s not far from the station.”
Hadley wonders whether he’s talking about the church or his house, whether he’s heading home to shower and change or going straight to the wedding. She hates the fact that she won’t know. It feels like the last day of school, the final night at summer camp, like everything is coming to an abrupt and dizzying end.
To her surprise, he lowers his face so it’s level with hers, then narrows his eyes and touches a finger lightly to her cheek.
“Eyelash,” he says, rubbing his thumb to get rid of it.
“What about my wish?”
“I made
it for you,” he says with a smile so crooked it makes her heart dip.
Is it possible she’s only known him for ten hours?
“I wished for a speedy trip through customs,” he tells her. “Otherwise, you don’t have a shot in hell at making this thing.”
Hadley glances at the clock on the concrete wall above them and realizes he’s right; it’s already 10:08, less than two hours before the wedding is scheduled to begin. And here she is, stuck in customs, her hair tangled and her dress wadded up in her bag. She tries to picture herself walking down the aisle, but something about the image refuses to match up with her current state.
She sighs. “Does this usually take long?”
“Not now that I’ve made my wish,” Oliver says, and then, as if it were just that simple, the line begins to move. He gives her a triumphant look as he steps forward, and Hadley trails after him, shaking her head.
“If that’s all it takes, you couldn’t have wished for a million dollars?”
“A million pounds,” he says. “You’re in London now. And no. Who’d want to deal with the taxes?”
“What taxes?”
“On your million pounds. At least eighty-eight percent of that would probably go straight to the Queen.”
Hadley gives him a long look. “Eighty-eight percent, huh?”
“The numbers never lie,” he says with a grin.
When they reach the point where the line forks, they’re greeted by a joyless customs official in a blue suit who’s leaning against the metal railing and pointing to a sign that indicates which direction they’re meant to go.
“EU citizens to the right, all others to the left,” he repeats over and over again, his voice thin and reedy and mostly lost to the thrum of the crowd. “EU citizens to the right…”
Hadley and Oliver exchange a look, and all her uncertainty disappears. Because it’s there in his face, a fleeting reluctance that matches her own. They stand there together for a long time, for too long, for what seems like forever, each unwilling to part ways, letting the people behind them stream past like a river around rocks.
“Sir,” says the customs official, breaking off mid-mantra to put a hand on Oliver’s back, shepherding him forward, urging him away. “I’m going to have to ask you to keep moving so you don’t hold up the line.”