The Geography of You and Me (12 page)

“Let me guess.…”

Owen bristled. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, but Dad held up both hands in defense.

“By all means,” he said. “Take your time, Romeo.”

“It’s not like that,” Owen insisted, pulling open the door of the shop, but as he made his way over to the display of postcards, he realized he wasn’t so sure. Pretty much everything else in his rearview mirror had disappeared at this point. But somehow Lucy remained, the one sturdy thing in all that quicksand.

He thought of her now as he flipped through the display of postcards: the chipped nail polish on her toes, the way her hair fell across her shoulders, the funny little slope of her nose, which seemed to catch the freckles before they could slide off.

He’d only seen her once more before he left, just two short days after their run-in by the mailboxes. After a morning spent packing—squeezing what they could into their ancient red Honda and then lugging the rest out to the curb—Dad went out to take care of some last-minute things with Sam, who didn’t seem particularly heartbroken about their quick departure. He’d already lined up
a new building manager, who would be moving into the basement just as soon as they cleared out.

But for the moment, it was still theirs, and as Owen stood alone amid the remaining boxes, he glanced at the microwave clock for what felt like the millionth time that day. When he saw that it was after three, he hurried up to the lobby.

He didn’t have to wait long. He sat on the bench between the two elevators, ignoring Darrell’s inquiring looks from behind the front desk, and when she came whirling through the revolving doors in her school uniform, he shot to his feet.

“Hey,” she said, drawing out the word long and slow, a look of confusion in her eyes as she approached him. There was a streak of blue pen near the collar of her white blouse, and he was momentarily distracted by it.

“Hey,” he said, forcing his eyes up to hers.

She shifted her backpack from one shoulder to the other. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” he said, then shook his head. “Well… something.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“So… it’s not just you.”

“What’s not?” she asked with a frown.

“I’m actually moving, too,” he said, and she hesitated a moment, then let out a short laugh. But when she saw that he wasn’t kidding, her mouth snapped back into a straight line.

“Seriously?” she asked, her eyes wide.

He nodded. “Seriously.”

They sat there for a long time as he explained everything—about Sam and the water pipes, about their house in Pennsylvania that was still for sale, about wanting to move forward instead of backward. At some point—he couldn’t be sure when—they both sat down on the bench, while on either side of them, the elevators scissored open and closed, making the people inside appear and then disappear.

After a while, Lucy reached for her backpack, which was slouched at her feet, then pulled out a pen and a scrap of notebook paper, holding them out for him.

“I don’t know where we’ll end up,” he said, but she shook her head.

“Just give me your e-mail address.”

“I don’t have a smartphone,” he said, digging in his pocket to show her. “I have a very, very dumb phone. In fact, it’s kind of an idiot.”

“Well, then there’s always your computer,” she said, handing him the pen and paper anyway. “Or, you know… postcards.”

He couldn’t tell if she was joking, but he smiled at this anyway. “Who doesn’t like getting a piece of cardboard in the mail?”

She laughed, then motioned at the mailroom behind her. “You know where to find me.”

“And if you go to London?”

“I’ll e-mail you my new address.”

“And hopefully I’ll get it.”

“Right,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll just keep sending e-mails into the void and hope maybe your dumb phone gets a little bit smarter.”

“Doubtful,” he said, as he scribbled his address onto the scrap of paper. He’d never been much for instant communication or social networking. It was true that he’d need his computer for college applications, and he’d probably have to get in touch with his old guidance counselor by e-mail at some point, but beyond that, he couldn’t imagine being particularly plugged in on this trip.

He’d never really had a reason to keep in touch with anyone before. Everyone he knew had always lived within shouting distance. But it was starting to become clear that this wasn’t a big strength of his, this whole communication thing. In the weeks since they left Pennsylvania, Casey and Josh had e-mailed him several times, but Owen hadn’t been able to bring himself to write back. And since there were no other places to find him online, no additional outposts in the endless maze of the Internet, that was pretty much it for them: radio silence—the line gone well and truly dead. He’d never been on Twitter and was one of the last people he knew who had managed to avoid Facebook. He was a firm believer in having more friends in real life than online, though he didn’t have very many of either at the moment.

Even so, when he handed back the paper, his heart beat fast at the thought that he might hear from Lucy. She
folded it carefully, then tucked it into the front pocket of her bag with a smile, the kind of perfectly ordinary smile he suspected would take a very long time to forget.

So far on the trip, none of the motels they’d stayed at had any sort of Internet access, except for one that was charging way too much for it, so he’d checked his e-mail for the first time only yesterday, in a sandwich shop in Indianapolis that doubled as an Internet café. While his dad stood in line to get a couple of subs, Owen sat hunched beside a guy looking up instructions for how to make guacamole. There was only one e-mail from Lucy, who had written to say that they would no longer be going to London. Apparently, her father had missed out on the job there but was offered a different position instead. So they were now moving to Edinburgh.

I’m looking forward to wearing a kilt and learning to play the bagpipes
, she wrote.
My very, very English mother is having a heart attack, but I think it’ll be a nice change of scenery. And I’m excited to finally be Somewhere. I hope your Somewhere is living up to expectations, too. Hope to hear from you soon. Otherwise, will send word when I have my new address. And in the meantime, I’ll be sure to give your regards to the Loch Ness Monster.

Now, in the cramped souvenir shop in Chicago, Owen grabbed a photo of Lake Michigan—sweeping out from the skyline in a brilliant and seemingly endless blue—and thought for a moment before scrawling a few words on the back:
Wish Nessie were here
.

When he looked up, he was surprised to find that Dad was right beside him. Owen, lost in his own head, hadn’t even heard him come in, and his first instinct was to cup a hand around the postcard. But it was too late.

“Who’s Nessie?” Dad asked, looking genuinely puzzled, and Owen swallowed back a laugh.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, slipping the postcard into his pocket. “You don’t know her.”

They walked over to the checkout together, where a girl with a pierced nose and a streak of pink in her hair was beaming at them for no particular reason.

“And how are you today?” she asked while punching a few things into a computer. “You must be traveling.”

“We are,” Dad said, smiling back.

“Where are you off to?”

Owen handed her a few crumpled bills. “Out west somewhere.”

“Awesome,” she said, bobbing her head. “I’m from California. Can’t get more west than that.”

“Not in this country, anyway,” Dad agreed. “Where in California?”

“Lake Tahoe,” she said. “So it barely counts. It’s just over the Nevada border. But it’s a great place. Mountains. Trees. The lake, obviously.” She held up Owen’s postcard before sliding it into a plastic bag. “This lake here might be a lot bigger, but the color doesn’t even compare. Tahoe is so blue it looks fake.”

Dad gave Owen a sideways glance. “It sounds pretty nice.”

“It is,” she said. “You should check it out.”

“Hey, do you have any postcard stamps?” Owen asked, realizing he’d used his last one in Indiana.

“I think so,” she said, opening the register and lifting the little tray of bills. She dug around with a frown, and then the too-bright smile returned to her face. “Got ’em,” she said, holding up a little packet. “How many do you need?”

“Just one,” Owen mumbled, but Dad clapped him on the back.

“Oh, let’s not kid ourselves, son,” he said cheerfully. “I think you’re going to need more than one.”

Owen felt his cheeks burn. “I’ll take ten,” he said, unable to look up.

“Great,” said the clerk. “U.S. or international?”

“U.S.,” he said, but as soon as he did, a little flash of recognition went through him. Soon, he realized, he would need international stamps. Soon, she’d be an ocean away.

When they finished paying, they started for the car in silence. Owen was grateful for this, his mind still busy with the idea that he’d soon need a special stamp just to send Lucy a postcard. It was a small thing, he knew. In fact, there were few things smaller. But something about it felt big all the same.

If you were to draw a map of the two of them, of where they started out and where they would both end up, the
lines would be shooting away from each other like magnets spun around on their poles. And it occurred to Owen that there was something deeply flawed about this, that there should be circles or angles or turns, anything that might make it possible for the two lines to meet again. Instead, they were both headed in the exact opposite directions. The map was as good as a door swinging shut. And the geography of the thing—the geography of
them
—was completely and hopelessly wrong.

During breakfast on her fourth morning
in Edinburgh, just before the start of the fourth day at her new school, a postcard came spinning across the table in Lucy’s direction. She lowered her spoon, watching as it bumped up against her glass of orange juice and came to a stop, the light glinting off the photo: a cornflower-blue lake surrounded by a ring of mountains, like teeth around a yawning mouth.

“That got stuck in a catalog from yesterday’s mail,” Dad said, sitting down across the table. Mom looked up from her newspaper—the
Herald Scotland
, which was only a placeholder until she managed to sort out her subscription to the
New York Times
—and her eyes landed on the postcard.

“It seems your daughter has fallen for a traveling salesman,” she said to Dad, who was too busy with his copy of
The Guardian
to respond.

“He’s just a friend,” Lucy said a bit too quickly, sliding the postcard toward the edge of the table and then lifting
the corner to take a quick peek, like a poker player guarding his cards.

“Well, I think it’s romantic,” Mom said. “Nobody writes each other anymore. It’s all just e-mails and faxes.”

Dad glanced up. “Nobody faxes anymore, either.”

“Another lost art,” Mom said with an exaggerated sigh, and he winked at her.

“I’ll fax you anytime.”

Lucy groaned. “Please stop.”

But it was true. There were never any e-mails from him. No letters, either. It was always, always the postcards—several a week, when he was still on the road, places she could track on a map as he’d moved steadily west—but lately there’d hardly even been any of those. Now that Owen and his father were planning to stay in Lake Tahoe—as he’d written to tell her two weeks ago—Lucy understood that the postcard gimmick had probably run its course. She also realized that any mail from him might be slower in coming now that she was all the way in Scotland, almost five thousand miles from the little lake town that straddled the border between California and Nevada. But she’d hoped they’d at least move the conversation over to e-mail. She never imagined the whole thing might just taper off entirely.

This was the first she’d heard from him in more than a week, in spite of the three e-mails she’d sent, filled with questions about his new home in Tahoe and updates about their move to Edinburgh. She realized he was probably
busy with a new school and a new house and a new life, but she was surprised by how fiercely she wanted to know about it all, and how difficult it was to wait and wait amid such crashing silence.

Maybe, she told herself, he just wasn’t much of a correspondent. After all, her brothers were in California, too, and though they had a pretty questionable grasp of the time difference—especially Charlie, who’d called more than once in the middle of the night—even they managed to e-mail every couple of days. She supposed it was possible that Owen still didn’t have wireless access, but that seemed like a thin excuse, even to her. Maybe he just wasn’t a big fan of e-mail. It made sense; even his postcards were never very long. Or maybe he was simply a guy who was at his best in person. (That she suspected she was at her best from a distance was something she was trying not to think too hard about.)

While her parents finished their breakfast, Lucy flipped over the long-awaited card, which said simply:

Loch Ness = 745 feet deep

Lake Tahoe = 1,644 feet deep

Your new monster pal would love it here. I bet you would, too.

Before leaving for school, she slipped the note into the pocket of her blazer. When she stepped outside the bright
red door of the town house, she was met by a wind far too cold and damp for any October she knew, and she felt a small shiver go through her. She shoved her hands deep in her pockets and ran her thumb along the rough edges of the postcard, which was somehow reassuring.

It was nearly eight by now, but all along the crescent of stone buildings that neighbored theirs, the street lamps were still on, burning little pockets of light into the morning haze. When they first found out they’d be moving to Edinburgh, this was just one of the many things her parents had seemed to find discouraging.

“I heard there are only five or six hours of daylight in the winter,” Mom said, looking miserable. “They might as well be sending us to Siberia.”