The Geography of You and Me

35

On a gray Saturday morning in London—which arrived on the heels of a gray Friday, and before that a gray Thursday as well—Lucy sat in the kitchen of their new house and watched her mom finish brewing a pot of tea.

“Is it like this all year?” she asked, frowning at the window, which was crowded by a low-hanging sky. It had been only two weeks since they’d gotten to town, but already Lucy had nearly forgotten what the sun felt like; everything here was raw and damp and the air still had a bite to it that felt more like winter than spring.

Mom nodded as she carried two mugs to the table. “Growing up, I never really even noticed. But after all these years away, I admit I’m finding it rather dreary.” She paused to take a long sip of tea. It was just the two of them, as it usually was these days. “I was trying to convince your father that a trip someplace warm was in order, but he’s too busy with work at the moment.” She looked over at the oven clock. “Even on a Saturday morning, it would seem.”

It was true. Dad had been working even longer hours than usual since they’d arrived in London, but Lucy didn’t mind. It meant they had less time to travel without her, and that Mom was around more often. To everyone’s surprise, including her own, she wasn’t even bothered when they canceled their plans to be in New York for the summer. Dad couldn’t get away for long enough to make the trip worth it, Mom had no real interest in returning, and, much to everyone’s delight, her brothers had both managed to get internships in London, so for the first time in ages, they’d all be over here together. And that was just fine with Lucy. There were times when she missed New York—the familiarity of it, and her own deep knowledge of the place—but really, there was nothing pulling her back there anymore.

Mom was still talking about escaping the monotonous London weather. “I told him we should go to Athens for the weekend, but he swears he can’t get away right now, even just for a couple of days.”

“Greece,” Lucy murmured, warming her hands on the mug. “Sounds nice.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Not as nice as Paris, though.”

Mom glanced up, her brow furrowed. “Paris?”

“I’ve always wanted to go,” Lucy said with a shrug. “I don’t know why. There’s just something about it, you know?”

“I know,” Mom said, watching her with a curious expression. “I would have loved to take you. Why didn’t you ever ask?”

Lucy frowned. “Ask what?”

“To come along with us.”

“Because,” Lucy said, grasping about for the words. She felt suddenly ill-equipped for this conversation. “Because you and Dad were always doing your own thing.”

Mom’s eyes softened. “We didn’t want to disrupt your lives,” she said. “Always pulling you and your brothers out of school just so we could travel. That would have been impractical at best, and irresponsible at worst.” When she saw the look on Lucy’s face, she laughed gently. “I do realize that sounds a bit hypocritical now, given our recent track record, but really, we just didn’t think you’d like our kinds of trips. We weren’t exactly going to Disneyland, you know.”

“I know,” Lucy said. “And we would have cramped your style.”

“Not possible,” she said, her mouth flickering briefly—the faintest hint of a smile—before she pressed her lips into a straight line, matching Lucy’s more solemn expression. She reached out and patted her hand. “But darling, I wish I’d known. I wish you would have asked to come along.”

“What?” Lucy said, lifting her eyes. “Just like that?”

Mom smiled in a way that made Lucy wonder whether they were still talking about the same thing. “Maybe,” she said, giving her hand a squeeze. “You can’t know the answer until you ask the question.”

And so she did.

A week later, on another gray Saturday morning, Dad waved good-bye from the doorway as they climbed into a black taxi. At St. Pancras station, under the enormous glass dome, they boarded a train that would take them out of London and under the English Channel, only to emerge just a few hours later into the blinding sunlight of the French countryside. When they arrived at Gare du Nord and Lucy stepped off the train, her very first thought was Finally, which had nothing to do with the length of the trip and everything to do with all the years leading up to it.

On the train, Mom had made a list of her favorite sights in Paris, and in the cab ride to the hotel, Lucy went through with a pen and crossed out half of them.

“No museums,” she said. “No tours. No lines.”

Mom raised her eyebrows. “So what then?”

“Just walking.”

“And eating, I hope.”

Lucy grinned. “And eating.”

And so they set out across the twisting streets under a mottled gray sky. Every so often, the wind shifted and the sun broke through in a dazzling column, throwing a spotlight on the city’s many landmarks so that Lucy couldn’t help feeling like it was a show being put on just for her.

It was impossible to take it all in as they wound their way through Pigalle and up toward Montmartre, the white dome of Sacré Coeur rising at the top of it. They wove through cobblestone streets on slanted hills, past little shops selling truffles and thick loaves of bread, cafés filled with people sipping their coffee as they watched the rest of the world stroll by. At the top, they leaned against a railing and looked out over all of Paris, the Eiffel Tower winking in the sun.

Later, as they made their way over to Notre Dame, Lucy’s mind wandered to Owen, as it so often did these days, and to their conversation on the roof all those months ago. On the metro, she closed her eyes and tried to picture the brass star at the foot of the great cathedral, but all she could see was a different star: the rough chalky lines on the black surface of the roof.

When they first saw the great cathedral, Lucy drew in a sharp breath and forgot to let it go. The clouds had scattered, and in the sunlight it was even more beautiful than she could have imagined, huge and imposing, yet somehow still delicate and unbelievably intricate. The huge carved arches, the spiraling windows, the leering gargoyles—she tipped her head back to take it all in, her heart pounding at the scope of it.

“You’d think it wouldn’t feel so big after living in New York,” Mom said quietly, squinting up at it. “Not with all those skyscrapers. But this is so much grander. It still gets me every single time.”

She rummaged through her bag for the camera, fussing with the settings before backing up a few steps to try to take in the whole thing all at once.

“Be right back,” Lucy said, picking her way around all the pigeons and the people, the benches and the trees, the lines for tours and the vendors selling guides, until she was standing in the thick of it, near the heavy doors at the entrance. Just a few feet away on the pavement, she spotted the worn bronze star, set inside an etched circle with the words Point Zero written along the edge.

If you were looking up at the church, as most people were, you might have missed it. But Lucy had known exactly where it would be. When she got there, she hesitated, but only for a moment, and then she stepped onto it slowly, as if on the edge of something unknowable: one toe first, then the other.

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever stood in the exact center of anything before, but there she was, in the middle of Paris. Above her, an airplane whistled past, and in the eaves of the cathedral, a few pigeons were watching her along with the gargoyles. But they were the only ones. Nobody else was looking when she closed her eyes and made her wish.

When her mother found her, Lucy was still standing there on the star, and Mom only glanced at it and then looked away again, the significance of the spot clearly lost on her. Lucy took a small amount of pride in this, that she knew something about this city that her mother didn’t. She stared down at the lines that arced around her sneakers. It was a small circle, but it was all hers.

“Sure you don’t want to take a tour?” Mom asked, nodding at the line that stretched the whole length of the building, and Lucy shook her head, stepping carefully off the star. Instead, they walked around the back of the building, where the spindly columns faced out over the fork in the River Seine. They crossed bridges and passed through small islands in a slow pilgrimage, and when they reached the other side, they ducked into a little bookshop with sagging shelves that smelled of paper and leather and dust, where Lucy picked out a small volume of The Little Prince.

Outside, there was a man selling watercolors on the bank of the river, and Mom paused to flip through them. They were small and delicately made, showing Notre Dame from all different angles and in every possible type of weather: gray skies and blue, rain and snow and sun.

“This one is lovely,” Mom said to Lucy, who was standing nearby, already scanning the first page of her book. In the painting, the church glowed under a sun as powerful as the one that beat down on them now, which made everything a shade brighter than it had any right to be.

“We have that one in a magnet, too,” the man said, reaching for a crate underneath his little table. “And a postcard.”

Lucy froze, staring at her book.

“What do you think, Luce?” Mom asked, and there was a strained note to her voice. “Need a postcard for anyone?”

When she finally raised her eyes, Lucy was surprised to see a trace of hope in the way her mother was watching her, and all at once she understood.

She knew about Owen.

Not just the postcards but the rest of it, too. She must have known the real reason she was going out in San Francisco that night. She must have realized why she’d muddled through the week in Napa in such a fog. She must have listened from the kitchen as Lucy said good-bye to Liam that day, and she must have understood the real reason. She must have known it all; if not the specifics, then at least the general idea of it.

And for the first time in a long time, Lucy didn’t feel so alone.

The painter was still holding out a postcard, his hand wavering just slightly, and her eyes pricked with tears as she reached for it.

“You can’t know the answer until you ask the question,” Mom said with a smile, but Lucy was still looking at the man.

“Thank you,” she said to him as she took the card, though really, the words were meant for her mother; Lucy knew she’d figure that out, too.

All the next day, as they walked along the River Seine and explored the Left Bank, Lucy thought about the postcard that was pressed between the pages of The Little Prince. On the train ride home that evening, her mother slept in the seat beside her while Lucy chewed on her pen, staring at the blank space on the back. It wasn’t until she was home that night that she finally wrote something, the simplest and truest thing she could think to say: Wish you were here.

She didn’t have his address in San Francisco. For all she knew, he might not even be there anymore. They could have gone back to Tahoe or somewhere else entirely by now. The logical thing would be to e-mail him, but how could she ask for his address without saying all those things that had been building up since their fight: Hello and I’m sorry and I didn’t mean it and I miss you and Why couldn’t you just have kissed me? There was something far too instant about an e-mail, and the knowledge that he could be opening it only minutes after she hit Send and choose not to respond—or worse, choose to delete it—was almost too much to bear.

She’d rather send the postcard floating out into the world and hope for the best.

After school the next day, she sat at the kitchen counter and dialed the main number to their old building in New York. As she listened to it ring, she pictured the front desk in the lobby and felt a twinge of homesickness. She closed her eyes, waiting for someone to pick up, and when he did, she was quick to recognize the voice.

“George,” she cried out, and there was a brief silence on the other end.

“Uh…”

“It’s Lucy,” she explained quickly. “Lucy Patterson.”

“Lucy P,” he said in a booming voice. “How’s my girl?”

She smiled into the phone. “I’m good,” she told him. “We’re in London now. I miss you guys.”

“We miss you, too,” he said. “Not the same without you around here. Any chance you’ll be back for the summer? Or what about those brothers of yours?”

“I don’t think so,” she told him. “Looks like we’re all going to be over here, actually.”

“Well, that’ll be nice,” he said. “Not often all five of you are in the same place.”

Lucy smiled. “I know,” she said. “It’s crazy, right?”

“So, what,” George said, “are you just calling to catch up on some of the gossip around here? Because I’ve got some great stories.…”

“I’m sure you do,” she said, laughing. “But I think my dad would have a heart attack over the phone bill if you told me even half of them. I’m actually calling because I have a favor to ask. You don’t happen to have a forwarding address for the Buckleys, do you?”

There was a brief pause. “That super?”

She nodded, though he couldn’t see her. “Yup.”

“I’m not even going to ask,” he said. “Talk about gossip…”

“C’mon, George.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, and there was typing in the background. “It’s in Pennsylvania.”

Lucy blinked. “Really? I guess they haven’t sold the house yet.”

“I don’t know. But it’s all I’ve got. You want it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Just let me grab a pen.”

As she searched through the drawer beneath the phone, she thought about the other possibility. That the house had been sold, and they just hadn’t updated the building with their new information. After all, it had been more than six months since they’d left, and it was doubtful they were getting much mail there anymore. She glanced at the postcard on the counter, suddenly deflated. Maybe it would never find its way to Owen, who could be anywhere by now. Maybe it wasn’t even worth trying.

But on the other end of the phone, George let out a short cough. “Ready?” he asked, just as Lucy’s fingers brushed against a pencil. She took a deep breath and positioned it above the paper.

“Ready,” she said.

36

No car ride is ever truly silent. There’s always something—the soft swish of the windshield wipers, the rumble of the tires, the hum of the engine—to break it up. But here now, somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, with his dad at the wheel of a too-small rental car, there was a quiet between them that was as absolute as Owen had ever experienced.

On the trip out west, and then again on the way up the coast from San Francisco to Seattle, there’d been times when they’d switched off the radio, letting whoever wasn’t driving have a chance to sleep. Other times, they’d driven for long stretches without talking, simply watching the road disappear beneath the car. But those had been comfortable silences, punctuated by stray thoughts and occasional laughter, easily set aside with the clearing of a throat.

This, however, was different. It was a brittle quiet, sharp around the edges, and the stiffness of it had settled into every corner of the tiny car, making Owen shift uncomfortably in his seat. Back at the rental place, he’d offered to drive. He knew Dad hadn’t slept on the plane—a crowded red-eye from Seattle to Philadelphia—and he was slumped against the counter, rubbing at his bleary eyes. But he’d shaken his head.

“It’s fine,” he said, his voice gruff. “I’ve got it.”

As they drove out of the airport, Owen was thinking about the oddness of this trip. It was meant to be a good thing. When they’d learned that the house had finally sold, they’d toasted with mugs of apple juice. Afterward, in the backyard of their new home in Seattle, they’d circled the yard together, making plans and pointing out all the things they’d do to the place once they had money again.

But there’s no such thing as a completely fresh start. Everything new arrives on the heels of something old, and every beginning comes at the cost of an ending. It wasn’t just that they’d have to close up the Pennsylvania house, to sign the papers and collect their things; they’d also have to face their ghosts and say their good-byes. They’d have to look the past—the one they’d been running from all these months—right in the eye.

And Owen wasn’t so sure they were ready for that.

“We should stop on the way,” Dad had announced on the plane, just after they’d landed. All around them, people had shot to their feet, gathering their bags from the overhead bins, but Owen and his father remained seated. “Before we go to the house.”

“Stop where?” Owen asked, but as soon as he said it, he knew. “Oh. Right. Yeah.”

They’d last visited his mother’s grave on their way out of New York, the two of them standing with bent heads and folded hands and blank eyes. There hadn’t been any tears. They were saving those, each of them, for the moments when it felt like she was truly with them, which wasn’t there on the windswept hill, on a chilly September day, where there was only the rough headstone and the clipped grass and the vast emptiness of a sprawling cemetery.

But today they would go back. It was supposed to be their first and only stop on the way to the house, but when a gas station loomed up ahead, hugging the highway on the right, Dad wrenched the wheel in its direction without explanation. Owen craned his neck to check the gauge, which of course showed that the tank was completely full; they couldn’t have been twelve miles out of the airport. Instead of pulling up to one of the pumps, Dad parked the car in front of the mini-mart, then stepped out without a word.

Owen sat up a bit straighter in his seat, watching his father disappear inside, and a few minutes later, Dad emerged with a bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane. He set them carefully in the backseat, the car door dinging, and then climbed back in and started the engine. Neither of them said a word as they eased back out onto the highway.

As they drew closer, the sights becoming familiar again, the car was still filled with a palpable dread, but it had at least started to feel as if they were in this together, which of course they were. At a stoplight, Dad even gave him a grim smile. It was part apology and part acknowledgment; it was all he had to offer at the moment, and Owen could tell it cost him a lot.

They turned in at the gated entrance to the cemetery, which stretched across a series of gentle hills, all of them dashed with gray headstones like an elaborate message in Morse code. It was 10:24 AM on a Wednesday, and the place was mostly empty. Owen was grateful for that. The first time they’d come, it had been for the funeral, and they’d both been raw with grief. The second time, just two months later, there was a numbness to the visit. Now there were months and months and miles and miles behind them, and Owen wasn’t sure how to feel. After parking the car, they followed a narrow path through some of the older gravestones, and while his mouth was dry and his hands were damp, his careful heart did nothing but beat in time with his careful footsteps.

When they arrived, they both stopped a few feet short of her headstone, which was simple, her name written in block letters across the top. Owen looked at it for a long time, waiting for his lump of a heart to do some sort of trick, something appropriate to the moment: He waited for it to leap or bound or skip or sink; he waited for it to be extraordinarily heavy or unexpectedly light; he waited for it to seize up or slow down. But it just kept ticking the way it always did, the way it was meant to, as well-behaved and predictable as its owner.

Dad was standing a few feet away, still gripping the bouquet. “Do you think she’d be okay with it?” he asked after some time had passed, and Owen looked over sharply. It had been nearly an hour since either of them had spoken. “We could have stayed, you know. We could have just gotten over ourselves and lived in the house. I’d have found a job eventually, I’m sure. But taking off like that…” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I think she wouldn’t have minded the New York part, if that had worked, but I’m not sure about the rest of it.”

“She’d have been fine with it,” Owen said quietly. “She loved the years you were on the road.”

Dad’s frown deepened. “Yeah, but we were adults.”

“Barely.”

“We were having an adventure.”

“So are we,” Owen said with a little smile.

“I’ve had you in four different schools this year. She would’ve hated that. She would’ve wanted you to have a normal senior year.”

“None of this is normal,” Owen said, his eyes on the grave. “Or maybe all of it is. It’s kind of hard to tell anymore.”

They stood there for a long time. A couple of squirrels darted past, using the gravestones in their game of hide-and-seek, and when the wind picked up, rustling the cellophane on the bouquet, Dad glanced down, surprised to find it still in his arms. He took a step forward and laid it on the stone, then backpedaled until he was at Owen’s side.

“Let’s go,” he said, and though his voice was soft, Owen could still hear the unspoken word at the end of it: home.

It was a short drive, not nearly long enough to recover from their last stop and prepare themselves for the next. When they pulled onto their old street, Owen could see Dad’s fingers tense on the wheel, and as the house came into sight, he was overcome by a wave of sadness more powerful than anything he’d felt at the cemetery. Even from here, he could already tell: It was the same house; it just wasn’t their home anymore.

Maybe it had started the moment she died, or maybe it was when they left. But now, as they parked out front and Owen stepped out of the car, he could see that the transition was complete. This house that they’d all loved, the house his parents had always dreamed of—with its green siding and white trim and wraparound porch—had been left empty for too long. One of their neighbors had been checking in on it from time to time, and there had been a few scattered showings with the real estate agent, but for the most part, it had simply sat here through seven months without them, through a Halloween without trick-or-treaters, a Thanksgiving without the smell of turkey, a Christmas without the uneven lights Dad always put up around the windows.

When they opened the door, they were suddenly like strangers, like neighbors, like visitors. The house was cold, the air gone out of the place, and as they moved through it, Owen realized that in spite of all the stuff—the furniture and the utensils and the curtains, the picture frames and the bedding and the books—the real measures of their lives here were now well and truly gone.

On the kitchen table, there was a sloping pile of mail. It was a mess of catalogs and bills and envelopes, most of it probably junk, but Owen also knew that his college letters would be in there, too. If he’d wanted to, he could have checked online already; the schools had sent him long chains of user names and passwords, instructions with dates and times, but Owen hadn’t been in a rush. Soon enough, his shapeless future would start to mold itself into something more concrete. In the meantime, he was in no hurry.

Over the past months, their neighbor—an elderly man who used to bring them fresh-cut flowers from his garden every spring—had been forwarding batches of mail each time they settled somewhere long enough to let him know. But when they found out the house had sold, Dad called and said he could stop. They’d be there soon to collect the rest themselves.

And now here they were.

Dad walked over to the pile, trailing his fingers across the top, and Owen could see that he was glad for the distraction, for something to focus on before the walls of the house could close in around them.

“Big moment,” he said quietly, and Owen felt a brief urge to laugh. Standing in their old house, just after a visit to his mother’s grave, he thought this seemed like the smallest moment possible.

“I guess,” he managed, and Dad nudged the pile.

“Should we go fishing?”

“Only if you think we’ll catch something.”

“I have a pretty good feeling,” he said, tossing a catalog aside as he started to go through the stack. The first envelope he pulled out was large and rectangular, and it had the UC Berkeley emblem in the corner. When Dad held it up in the square of light from the window, Owen could see the dust motes floating around it. “Looks promising,” Dad said, sliding it across the table. “Let’s see what else we’ve got.”

Before long, there were six envelopes stacked neatly between them, all of them roughly the same size and thickness. They stared at them for a few moments, and Owen blinked a few times.

“Well,” he said finally.

Dad grinned. “Well.”

For other kids his age, Owen knew this was a big deal. The arrival of a thick envelope, the unveiling of the acceptance letter, the jumping up and down, the anticipation about what the next year would bring. But though he tried to summon some kind of joy, that lightness you were supposed to feel at moments like these, his stubborn heart refused to budge.

Solemnly, he slid a finger under the flap of each envelope, and one by one he wrestled the papers out to find the same answer each time: yes, yes, yes. First Berkeley, then UCLA, then Portland and San Diego and Santa Barbara. With each one, he passed the letter over to his father, but it wasn’t until he got to the University of Washington that he realized Dad was crying, his blond head bent over the pile.

Owen paused, stiffening, waiting for him to say it: She should have been here or She would have loved this or She would have been so proud. But instead, Dad looked up with a blurry smile.

“Six for six,” he said, shaking his head. “Where the hell did you come from, anyway?”

Owen grinned, looking around the kitchen. “From right here, actually.”

“Well, as much as I miss this place,” Dad said, “I’m glad we won’t be so far apart next year.” He gestured at the pile. “Same time zone, no matter what.”

There was a hitch in Owen’s chest. “No matter what,” he said.

“And it’ll be nice to head into graduation knowing you’ve got some options.”

Owen lowered his gaze. “Dad.”

“No, I mean it,” he said, leaning forward on the table. “You know how many kids will be standing up there onstage in a total panic? And you’ve got all these choices.” He glanced at the letters and shook his head. “All six. Six.”

“I know,” Owen said. “I’m just not sure.…”

“She would have been so proud,” he said finally, inevitably, standing up and placing a large palm on Owen’s shoulder. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of his head. “And so am I.”

There was nothing for Owen to do but nod. “Thanks.”

As Dad walked out of the kitchen to begin taking stock of the rest of the house, Owen sat and listened to his footsteps on the echoing floorboards. Out the window, a cloud drifted by, snuffing out the sun, and the room went abruptly dim. On the wall, the familiar clock ticked its familiar rhythm, and when Owen took a deep breath, he almost expected the faint scent of cigarette smoke.

But of course, there was nothing.

He reached for the stack of acceptance letters, shuffling them into a neat pile. Then he set them aside and grabbed the rest of the mail. As he sorted through old Christmas and birthday cards, bills and coupons and glossy magazines, he couldn’t help wondering whether his friends—if you could even still call them that—had gotten their letters, too. Both of them lived in this neighborhood, and it was strange to think that at this very moment, they were only blocks away, with no idea that Owen was nearby.

Last year, they’d hardly talked about college, and Owen knew he was the only one with dreams of getting out of Pennsylvania. But even if they ended up staying closer to home, Casey and Josh would still likely be splitting up, too, each going their separate ways, and it struck Owen now as inevitable, this distance between them. It would have happened anyway. He just happened to leave a year early. Even if nothing had changed at all, everything would still be about to; even if he’d stayed, they’d still be getting ready to say good-bye. They’d each go off to college, losing themselves in their new lives, seeing each other only at Thanksgiving or Christmas or during the summer. And then it would all go back to normal the way it always did with lifelong friends. As if no time had passed at all.

The point wasn’t the distance. It was the homecoming.

He turned over a catalog in his hands, staring at the photograph on the front: a mother and father and their young son. The perfect family. When he looked up again, he realized he wasn’t ready to venture any farther into the house just yet. He didn’t want to think about college or graduation, his mother or his father, Seattle or Pennsylvania or anywhere in between.

Instead, he reached for his phone. He would call his friends, and they would go for pizza at their favorite place, and he’d tell them about all of it: New York and Chicago, the endless roads through Iowa and Nebraska, the snow in Lake Tahoe, the diner where he’d worked, the months in San Francisco and their new house in Seattle.

He dialed Casey’s number first, and as the phone began to ring in his hand, he sifted absently through the mail, raking over the pile. He was nearly to the bottom when he spotted it: a postcard of Paris. Without thinking, he snapped the phone shut, hanging up before anyone could answer, and then he sat there staring at it in the fading light of the kitchen: the cathedral at the very center of the city.

Even before he flipped it over to find the note, he was thinking the very same thing: that he wished more than anything that she was here, too. And just like that, his heart—that dead thing inside of him—came to life again.

37

Lucy’s first instinct, when the elevator jolted to a stop, was to laugh.

Even before the floor had quit vibrating beneath their feet, hovering midway between the second and third floors of the Liberty department store, her three fellow travelers—an old man in a sweater vest and a young mother with her son, who couldn’t have been older than three—were giving her strange looks, as if she’d already cracked under the pressure of the situation, just four seconds in.

“The lift is stuck,” the little boy pointed out, tilting his head back to take in the ornate wooden carvings along the ceiling. The lights were still on, and when the woman hit the red button, a crackling voice was quick to come over the speaker.

“Are you in need of assistance?” someone asked in a clipped English accent.

“It’s stuck,” the boy said with more force this time. He accompanied this with a little stamp of his foot.

“We seem to have stopped,” his mother said, her mouth close to the speaker.

“Right,” said the voice. “We’re looking into it. Be back with you straightaway.”

Lucy was still shaking her head, unable to get rid of the smile on her face. The woman gave her a look as if to suggest she wasn’t taking this quite seriously enough, but she was quickly distracted by her son, who had started to cry, great heaving sobs that made his shoulders rise and fall. It built to such a pitch in the small space that the old man actually clapped his hands over his ears.

“Would anyone like a mint?” Lucy asked, digging through her bag, and the man glanced over at her, lowering his hands again.

“You’re prepared,” he said, and she smiled.

“Not my first rodeo,” she told him, still amused by the unlikeliness of the situation. Only a few minutes ago, she’d been trailing her mother through the fourth floor of the airy store, running her fingers absently over the endless bolts of brightly colored fabrics. But she’d soon grown bored, and when she spotted a directory that advertised a haberdashery on the third floor, she decided she had to see it. She knew there would only be hats, and she’d probably be far more interested in the travel accessories and notebooks found farther down, but how often did you get to visit a haberdashery? There were stairs across the store, but the elevator was right there, and she she’d stepped in without thinking about it.

And now here she was—stuck once again.

Only this time, it all seemed sort of funny. The old man was tapping his fingers against the wooden panels, and the woman was fanning herself with her hand, though it wasn’t particularly hot—was, in fact, practically cold compared to the last elevator Lucy had been stuck inside—and the little boy was hiccupping now, fat tears still rolling down his rosy cheeks. It was all just so unlikely, that she should find herself in this situation twice in such a short amount of time, and the only person she wanted to tell—the only person who would really appreciate it—was Owen.

It had been two weeks since she’d sent the postcard, and she hadn’t heard back. Not that she’d expected to; even if he wasn’t still angry after their argument in San Francisco, and even if he wasn’t still with Paisley, it had been sent off to a place he hadn’t lived in nine months. And it struck her now—with a kind of jarring obviousness—that a postcard was just about the stupidest possible form of communication. There were so many things that could go wrong, so many ways it could have gotten lost, so many opportunities for it to go astray. It was almost as if she hadn’t wanted it to reach him. Suddenly, dropping that postcard in the mail seemed about as useful as throwing a paper airplane out of a window. It was a coward’s move, a way of doing something without really doing much of anything.

Beside her, the old man raised his wiry eyebrows to the ceiling and then thumped a hand to his chest, a hollow sound that seemed to vibrate in the crowded space.

Lucy looked at him with alarm. “Are you okay?”

“Heart problems,” he muttered.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Lucy suggested, trying not to sound panicky, but he shook his head.

“Not mine,” he said. “My wife’s.”

Lucy exchanged a look with the other woman, who only shrugged.

“I snuck off to buy her some perfume,” he explained, his eyes swimming. “She’s downstairs looking at fabrics. She’ll be worried when she can’t find me, and her heart…”

Lucy put a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be fine,” she said, surprised by the emotion in her voice. “I’m sure they’ll have us out soon.”

There was a lump in her throat as she watched him fidget with the buttons on his vest, and it struck her as the truest form of kindness, the most basic sort of love: to be worried about the one who was worrying about you.

Only seven minutes had passed, but they were slow minutes, long and unhurried. She thought of Owen again, and how quickly he’d made the time pass when they’d been stuck. Without him, it felt like something was missing.

She should have been braver. She should have e-mailed him. It wouldn’t have mattered if he didn’t write back; that wasn’t the point. The old man worrying about his wife didn’t know if she was worried about him, too. He wasn’t thinking about himself at all. He was too busy loving her simply because she was out there somewhere.

The little boy banged a fist against the wall, and they all paused to listen for a moment, but there was no response.

“Come on,” Lucy muttered, glaring at the speaker. She shifted from one foot to the other, jangly and on edge, then sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. The minute she stepped out of this elevator, she knew that any sense of urgency would drain away. But right now, in a wood-paneled box with three strangers who were not Owen, she wanted nothing more than to reach him somehow.

The last time, when they’d been in this together, the opening of the doors had felt like the breaking of some spell. But this time, as the elevator cranked to life again, moving downward in a motion that felt sudden after eight long minutes of being suspended, there was only relief. Lucy’s eyes flickered open and she blinked a few times, meeting the gaze of the old man, which was suddenly peaceful: He was on his way home.

She envied him that.

On the ground floor, the doors opened with two short dings, and there was a small knot of people waiting for them: the store manager with his patterned tie, a maintenance man in a khaki shirt, an elderly woman with a halo of white hair, who rushed to embrace the old man, and finally Lucy’s mother, who shook her head from side to side with a slow smile.

“Let’s try not to make this too much of a habit,” she said, slinging an arm over Lucy’s shoulders. “You okay?”

Lucy nodded absently as her mother launched into her side of the saga, how she’d been looking for Lucy when she saw the maintenance man hurry past with the manager, and she’d had an inkling her daughter might be involved. So she’d dropped the fabric she was thinking about buying, then followed them down to the ground floor to wait.

“I think you should seriously consider using the stairs from now on,” she was saying. “You don’t seem to have the best luck in this area.”

Normally, Lucy would have made a joke here. She would have been reveling in the hard-won attention of her mother, so rare before and now—still sort of unbelievably—so normal. She didn’t know if it was her father’s new job or the fact that they were in a new country, or maybe it was just that they all missed her brothers, who were so far away, but whatever the reason, they were suddenly a family again: eating dinners together, traveling on weekends, going to museums, joking and laughing and being there. Maybe they’d only needed a change of scenery. Or maybe they’d needed to leave home in order to find it.

But right now, Lucy was too distracted to enjoy their newfound complicity. She was busy collecting the right words, which were too many to fit on a postcard, and too heavy for such a slim piece of cardboard. She carried them with her as they walked out the wooden doors of the building and through the winding streets of the West End to Oxford Circus, where they caught the Central Line to Notting Hill Gate and emerged from the tube stop beneath a steely London sky, then wove up Portobello Road past buildings painted the color of Easter eggs and stalls selling everything imaginable, all the way to the little brick mews house tucked like a jewel in the center of this city she’d so quickly grown to love.

As she walked upstairs, the words multiplied with each step—there was suddenly so much to say!—and she realized she’d been carrying them with her even longer than that, at least since San Francisco, but maybe even since Edinburgh or New York, and she hurried up the last few steps, ready to set them down, one by one, across a blank screen, to say the honest thing, the truest words she could find: that even though she’d been the one stuck inside that elevator, all she’d been able to think about was him walking around outside of it; that it wasn’t her heart she was worrying about—it was his.

But when she flipped open her computer, she was pulled up short by the sight of his name, and it was her own heart that once again needed rescuing.

38

For a long time after he sent the e-mail, Owen just sat there, trying to decide whether or not to panic.

The house was quiet. It was Saturday, but Dad had been eager to get back to work after their trip. He’d set out this morning with a look of great contentment, clearly thrilled at the prospect of spending a day with a hammer in hand after a week of bubble wrap and cardboard boxes and duct tape.

“There’s very little in this world that can’t be cured by bashing in some nails,” he used to say, and Owen knew he needed that more than ever today, after too much time spent clearing away the last reminders of their previous life.

He’d left earlier than usual after putting in a load of laundry, and now Owen could hear the thumping of the washing machine downstairs, which was an encouraging sign. For months, they’d been living in temporary spaces like a couple of teenagers; there was always toothpaste in the sink and crumbs in the kitchen and a layer of grime over pretty much every appliance. But seeing the old house in Pennsylvania must have jolted something in him. After getting back from the airport last night, Owen had watched his father tear around the house, picking up dirty socks and scrubbing at the grout around the faucets. It wasn’t quite up to Mom’s standards yet, but it was getting closer.

Now Owen sat listening as the wash cycle ended and the machine beeped, the sound carrying upstairs. Out the window, a car slid past, and a few birds called back and forth, but otherwise there was nothing: just Owen, alone in his room, staring at his computer screen and trying to figure out what he’d been thinking.

There was no logical explanation for the e-mail he’d just sent, and he was suddenly remembering why, until now, he’d always stuck to postcards. With those, there was still time to change your mind: just after putting the pen down, or on the way to the mailbox, or at any point in between. But there was nothing to be done about the e-mail. With one click, it had gone flying across the miles, straight to Lucy’s computer, and there was no getting it back.

He closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead as the rain started up outside. It always seemed to be half raining here, something between a mist and drizzle, so that it felt like the sky was spitting at you. Owen watched for a few minutes, his thoughts wiped clean by the weather, then he stood up, grabbed his rain jacket, and headed outside.

At the corner, he caught a bus, watching the rain make patterns on the windows, and when he stepped off again downtown about twenty minutes later, the sun was trying its best to emerge, trimming the clouds in gold.

The fish market was crowded, as it had been that first weekend when he’d come here with his dad, the two of them standing at the edge as they took it all in: the slap of fish on paper, the people shouting their orders, the guy playing harmonica off to one side. There were fish flying through the air as vendors in stained aprons tossed them as casually as you would a baseball, and the smell of it made his eyes burn, but Owen had loved it right away, just as he’d loved this city from the moment they’d arrived. It wasn’t exactly home—not yet—but when they flew in last night, he’d looked out the window of the plane at the orange lights of the city, bounded by water and mountains, and he’d felt something deep within him settle.

For the first time in all their travels, he thought he could see a future here.

He’d told his friends that just a few days ago, over an enormous pizza, and they’d asked him about the ferries and the fish market and the university, and when he was done, they told him about their plans for next year, skipping like a record over the other things, the holes in his life that had caused holes in their friendship, before they stopped talking altogether and simply played video games until it got too late and they parted with promises to stay in touch better.

“It’s all you,” Josh teased him. “You’re the weak link here.”

“It’s my phone,” Owen had said with a grin. “It’s completely worthless. I’ll have to send you a postcard instead.”

They both laughed; they couldn’t have possibly known he was serious.

Now he left the chaos of the market behind, heading toward the water, and as he walked, he thought back to what Lucy had said about New York, how the only way to truly know the place was to see it from the ground up. When the gray waters of Puget Sound came into sight, dotted with ferries, he found himself thinking about the marina in San Francisco and the path along the Hudson River in New York, and how in all of these very different places, this was something that rarely changed: the same blue-gray water, the same rise and fall of the waves, the same smells of salt and fish.

He wondered if the harbor in Edinburgh was the same, too.

He hoped it was.

The rain picked up again, and Owen pulled at his hood.

He needed to figure out what to do about the e-mail.

The problem, of course, wasn’t so much what he’d written; it was what he was going to do about her response.

He didn’t regret what he’d said. After finding her postcard from Paris, he’d carried it with him all week, tucked in his back pocket like a good-luck charm, something to buoy him whenever he felt he was sinking under the weight of the task at hand: the dismantling of all of their memories. And by the time he’d gotten back to Seattle last night, he’d written and rewritten the e-mail in his mind enough times to know it by heart.

He apologized for what happened in San Francisco and explained that he’d ended things with Paisley and admitted that he thought of Lucy all the time even though they hadn’t been in touch.

I miss you, he’d written at the end. And I wish you were here, too.

That was when he should have hit Send.

But for some reason, he found himself writing one last line: By the way, I’m not sure if you’re still planning to be in New York for the summer, but I’ll actually be there the first week of June, so let me know and maybe we could meet up.…

And that, right there, was the problem.

Because not only did Owen have no plans whatsoever to be in New York City the first week of June, he also had no money and no way of getting there.

And no idea what he’d do if—against all odds—she actually wanted to see him.

There were so many things to worry about: the chance that she might be angry with him, the odds that she was still with Liam, the sheer ridiculousness of the suggestion, and most of all, the possibility that she might say yes.

But deep down, he knew that his biggest worry wasn’t any of these things.

It was much worse.

His biggest worry was that she’d say no.

39

Lucy stared at the computer for a long time before lifting her fingers to the keyboard, and with a pounding heart, she punched at three different letters, one at a time, watching nervously as they appeared across the screen:

Yes.