The Geography of You and Me (22 page)

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.

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.