Her eyes flicker open again as the train comes rushing out of the tunnel.
Hadley's never sure if things are as small as they seem, or if it's just her panic that seems to dwarf them. When she thinks back, she often remembers stadiums as little more than gymnasiums; sprawling houses become apartment-sized in her mind because of the sheer number of people packed in. So it's hard to tell for sure whether the tube is actually smaller than the subway cars back home, which she's ridden a thousand times with a kind of tentative calm, or whether it's the knot in her chest that makes it seem like a matchbox car.
Much to her relief, she finds a seat on the end of a row, then immediately closes her eyes again. But it's not working, and as the train lurches out of the station she remembers the book in her bag and pulls it out, grateful for the distraction. She brushes her thumb across the words on the cover before opening it.
When she was little, Hadley used to sneak into Dad's office at home, which was lined with bookshelves that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, all of them stacked with peeling paperbacks and hardcovers with cracked spines. She was only six the first time he found her sitting in his armchair with her stuffed elephant and a copy of A Christmas Carol, poring over it as intently as if she were considering it for her dissertation.
"What're you reading?" he'd asked, leaning against the doorframe and taking off his glasses.
"A story."
"Yeah?" he asked, trying not to smile. "What story?"
"It's about a girl and her elephant," Hadley informed him matter-of-factly.
"Is that right?"
"Yes," she said. "And they go on a trip together, on a bike, but then the elephant runs away, and she cries so hard that someone brings her a flower."
Dad crossed the room and in a single practiced motion lifted her from the chair—Hadley clinging desperately to the slender book—until, suddenly, she was sitting on his lap.
"What happens next?" he asked.
"The elephant finds her again."
"And then?"
"He gets a cupcake. And they live happily ever after."
"That sounds like a great story."
Hadley squeezed the fraying elephant on her lap. "It was."
"Do you want me to read you another one?" he asked, gently taking the book from her and flipping to the first page. "It's about Christmas."
She settled back into the soft flannel of his shirt, and he began to read.
It wasn't even the story itself that she loved; she didn't understand half the words and often felt lost in the winding sentences. It was the gruff sound of her father's voice, the funny accents he did for each character, the way he let her turn the pages. Every night after dinner they would read together in the stillness of the study. Sometimes Mom would come stand at the door with a dish towel in her hand and a half-smile on her face as she listened, but mostly it was just the two of them.
Even when she was old enough to read herself, they still tackled the classics together, moving from Anna Karenina to Pride and Prejudice to The Grapes of Wrath as if traveling across the globe itself, leaving holes in the bookshelves like missing teeth.
And later, when it started to become clear that she cared more about soccer practice and phone privileges than Jane Austen or Walt Whitman, when the hour turned into a half hour and every night turned into every other, it no longer mattered. The stories had become a part of her by then; they stuck to her bones like a good meal, bloomed inside of her like a garden. They were as deep and meaningful as any other trait Dad had passed along to her: her blue eyes, her straw-colored hair, the sprinkling of freckles across her nose.
