Hadley & Grace(95)
“No stwrollewr. No, no, no,” he protests.
So Hadley pushes the empty stroller as Miles dodges and darts and stumbles his way in his drunk toddler way through the crowd. Tillie follows him, huddling over him with her arms held protectively around him like a human bumper. She mutters sorrys and excuse mes as she goes.
Each day she grows to look more like Hadley, stretching taller and her features growing more refined—a shorter, younger replica of her mom, except her eyes, which are still entirely her dad’s.
Grace isn’t sure how she feels about Frank being dead. Hadley’s pretty broken up about it, but each time Grace thinks of him being gone, she can’t help but feel relieved. Frank wouldn’t have stopped until he’d tracked Hadley down, and part of her is thankful they don’t need to worry about it.
Miles face-plants on the sidewalk and lets out a wail. Tillie scoops him up. He is fine and pulling away before she can even check for a scratch.
Mark smiles at her from over Jimmy’s shoulder. He is so different than Miles was as a baby, or maybe it’s Grace who is different as a mother. His beginning was so unlike Miles’s. He came into the world surrounded by devotion and smothered with love.
A strange family—the seven of them—all of them using Melissa’s last name of Jenkins. Hadley’s false papers add three years to her age, making her a whopping forty-two, and Grace takes every opportunity to tease her about it. Hadley makes the appropriate faces of annoyance and acts suitably offended, but Grace can tell it’s an act, her vanity no longer as important as it once was. During that fateful week, something was lost that has not entirely been recovered, in its place ennui that Grace worries is permanent.
A week after they escaped, Mark’s ex-wife did an interview on 60 Minutes as part of a segment they were doing on Hadley and Grace’s great escapade. Her name is Marcia, and she is a handsome woman, blonde and well put together.
She talked about Mark and the day of his death and the package that arrived a few days after. In the package were two letters, one for each of the kids, to be opened when they turned eighteen. It also contained a hundred thousand dollars with a note attached that said, College fund. Attached to the money was a Post-it that said, Please get your son a dog, and Marcia endeared herself to the world when a floppy-eared beagle puppy bounded onto the set.
A lot of the interview focused on the call Mark made the morning of the day he died. Marcia didn’t come right out and say that it was as if he knew he was going to die, but she did say that, looking back on it, it seemed as if he knew things were no longer going to be the same. She cried, and Lesley Stahl handed her a tissue; then she went on to explain how difficult their separation had been. She told Leslie how Mark had resisted the divorce, but then how, on the morning of the day he died, she felt like he had made peace with it.
At that point, she broke down completely, and it was a full minute before she was able to go on, to explain that she thought it was because he might have met someone.
The assumption by the world was that it was Hadley, and the juicy tidbit stoked the already raging fire of fascination with their story.
Since the episode aired, rumors have been floating around about a movie being made. Grace cringes at the idea, certain someone like Angelina Jolie will be cast to play Hadley, while some actress who looks like Nanny McPhee will play her.
Jimmy folds the double stroller into the back of their minivan as Hadley straps Miles into his toddler seat. Tillie and Skipper climb in beside him, and Grace nuzzles Mark’s nose before putting him in his car seat. She climbs into the passenger seat as Jimmy slides into the driver’s seat. She still can’t get used to the left side being the passenger seat, and Jimmy finds it endlessly amusing how she startles each time he makes a turn.
“I get to choose the music,” Tillie says, reaching over the center console to switch the radio to a Namibian grunge station that only plays songs that sound like trash cans being run over by freight trains.
“That’s not music,” Grace protests.
“This coming from a woman who could win a gold medal for worst playlist.”
“Bruce Springsteen is the Boss.”
“The boss of what? Tone-deaf musicians?”
Screeching guitars blast from the speakers, and Grace rolls her eyes, a hidden smile on her face. Jimmy pulls into the traffic waiting to exit the park, and Grace glances back at their almost full van. A single seat remains, a spot between Hadley and Mark in the last row. Perhaps one more? she wonders. Or is that asking too much?
She turns forward again, the sky ethereal blue and eternal through the windshield, and her thoughts spiral back to the moment that started it all, marveling as she often does at the likelihood of two women being in the same spot at the same time to commit the exact same crime.
Coincidence is not something Grace believes in, and the chances of what happened that night are too infinitesimally small for her to simply write off as happenstance. No, it seems to her that some hidden connectivity existed in that moment that profoundly influenced their lives, intertwining their fates and bringing them to this remarkable place and time.
Her eyes burn with the cerulean intensity. Maybe a girl, she thinks, to even things up? Annabelle? Her grandmother’s name.
Might even have already happened. She has been feeling a bit green lately.
Everyone will call her Annie, except Hadley, who will insist on calling her Annabelle. And who knows what Skipper will call her.