The Geography of You and Me (23 page)

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.

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.

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: