The Geography of You and Me (8 page)

When dusk crept in through the window, dipping the room in shades of blue, Owen had decided it was safe to venture outside again for more water, and he circled the neighborhood for what felt like forever before stumbling across a hot dog vendor who was charging ten bucks apiece.

Now he stood across the street from their building, juggling the bottles in his arms and watching the giant clock above a department store, which had just come back to life along with everything else, the slow ticking completely at odds with the urgency he felt as he waited for the signal to cross.

The lobby was still unbearably hot, but there were a few people standing around the front desk, and Owen bent his head and hurried toward the mailroom, hoping to go unnoticed, eager to return to his father. But just before he could disappear through the door, he was pulled up short by the sound of his name.

“Owen Buckley!”

His first thought, strangely, was of Lucy. That something might have happened to her today—that he shouldn’t have left her on the roof, that he should have come back for her, like he’d meant to—and his chest flooded with fear. But when he swiveled to look, he realized it wasn’t that at all, and his shoulders slumped.

Striding toward him was Sam Coleman, his father’s second cousin and the owner of the building, the one who had given him the job here.

The only time Owen had ever seen him was at his mother’s funeral, where after the ceremony, in the midst of all the handshakes and kisses, the hugs and condolences, he’d noticed a man handing his father a business card. Dad had taken it with numb fingers, nodding mechanically, and Owen watched as he slipped it into the pocket of his suit. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that he brought it up.

“I don’t know if you met my cousin Sam at the…” he trailed off, unable to say the word
funeral
. In the days leading up to it and the days that had followed, he’d somehow managed to avoid it altogether, talking around it, the word a black hole that had opened up in the very center of their lives.

Owen shook his head. They were sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched casserole dish between them, one of dozens that were stacked like bricks in the fridge.

“He offered me a job. In New York,” Dad said, raising his eyes from the table, where a column of light from the window spotlighted a thin layer of dust. Already, the house no longer felt like the same one they’d lived in just ten days before.

“New York City?”

Dad nodded. “He owns a few buildings there,” he explained. “He wants me to manage one of them.”

“Why?” Owen asked, and Dad was silent for a moment. The question wasn’t a necessary one. He’d been out of work for almost a year now, a contractor in a town where there was nothing new to be built. He’d picked up work as a handyman here and there, enough to keep them going, but it wasn’t permanent. He’d needed a job long before the accident, and he still needed one now.

“Because,” Dad said quietly. “Because I’m not sure we can stay here.”

It wasn’t the answer Owen had been looking for; it wasn’t even a response to the right question. He didn’t know whether his father meant for financial reasons or emotional ones, whether he’d given this a lot of thought or was just saying it out loud for the first time now, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it yet himself.

But even so, he understood.

“Let’s go out west then,” he said, sitting forward at the
table. “Let’s just get in the car and drive, like you and Mom used to do.”

Dad’s eyes flashed with pain at the memory, and he shook his head. “This isn’t just some lark, O,” he said. “We have to be logical about this. There’s no work for me here. If we sell the house—” He paused, his voice cracking at this, then pushed on. “We’ll have the money for whatever’s next. But who knows how fast that’ll happen, and for now he’s offering us an apartment with the job. And I just can’t…”

“… stay here,” Owen had finished. He breathed out, then raised his eyes to meet his dad’s. “I know,” he said finally. “Me neither.”

It was true. Too much had changed. His mother was gone, and the house didn’t feel like theirs anymore. Even his two best friends were different. At the funeral, Owen had watched the pair of them—who had said all the right things and been nothing but supportive—begin to laugh helplessly when one tripped over nothing at all, his arms windmilling before he managed to right himself again. They were trying their best to hold it together, their laughter threatening to bubble over, and from across the lawn, Owen just stood there—alone and apart, solemn and heartbroken and hopelessly, endlessly, miserably sad—and it was then that he felt the first pinpricks of doubt that things would ever be normal again.

It had always been the three of them: Owen, Casey, and Josh: a steadfast team, a solid unit. They’d grown up playing hide-and-seek and then tag, soccer and then
football; they’d studied together a thousand times and found a thousand ways to avoid studying at all; they’d talked about girls and sports and their futures; they’d teased each other mercilessly and had been there for one another in the most surprising of ways. But in that moment, everything was different. They were over there, and he was over here, the space between them already too big to cross.

And as it turned out, Owen and his dad left town before he even had a chance to try, his best friends becoming just two more items on the list of things they left behind.

Now his knees felt unsteady as he watched Sam approach him from the other side of the lobby. He was short and dark and broad-shouldered, the opposite of Owen and his dad in every way, and he offered a hand when he was close enough, which Owen shook warily.

“Nice to see you again,” he said, though they hadn’t actually met before. “Quite a night, huh?” He didn’t wait for a response. “I’ve been doing the rounds today, checking on all my buildings. Obviously, this thing has caused a lot of hiccups. Any chance your dad’s around?”

Owen opened his mouth, then closed it again, unsure what to say. But it didn’t matter anyway. Sam barreled on without giving him a chance.

“Because I gotta tell you, I’ve got a boatload of problems here, too many for the doormen to be handling on their own.” He reached out and put a beefy hand on Owen’s thin shoulder. “Listen, I know you guys are going through a rough time, but the whole reason to hire a building manager
is so there’s someone to manage the building, you know? And on a day like this, it doesn’t look too good when he’s nowhere to be found.”

“I think maybe he called in—”

“Sick?” Sam said with raised eyebrows. “No.”

Owen shook his head. “Then it was a vacation day.…”

“After only a couple of weeks?” Sam asked, then flashed a smile that came off as more of a leer. “I don’t think so. No way I’d have cleared that even if he’d bothered asking. Which he didn’t.”

“I’m really sorry.…”

Sam waved this away. “Is he back now, or is he still sipping mai tais on the beach?”

Owen glanced over at George, who was now at the front desk and who gave him a helpless shrug.

“He’s back,” he said through gritted teeth. “But he’s not feeling well.”

“Well, give him a message for me, will you?” Sam leaned in a little closer. “Tell him the water’s back but not the pressure. And since he’s already on fairly thin ice,” he said, demonstrating with his thumb and index finger, only the tiniest sliver of space between the two, “he might want to see about fixing it tonight. Okay?”

There was nothing to do but nod. Sam gave him a little pat on the shoulder before turning to walk back over to the desk, and as soon as he did, Owen hurried through the mailroom and down the stairs, biting back his anger at Sam and his frustration at Dad.

It was impossible to know what he’d been thinking, simply taking off for the day without asking after only a few weeks on the job. It was stupid and completely shortsighted.

But when he opened the door to the apartment, his eyes fell on the kitchen counter, where he’d seen the bouquet of flowers just a couple of nights before, and something about the memory made him feel like crying.

He thought about what Sam had said. There was no way his father would have gotten the day off even if he’d asked.

But Owen understood why he had to go.

He went out there for Mom; to stand in the place where they’d first met, the rough wood of the boardwalk beneath their feet and the salty smell of the ocean at their backs. He’d gone to relive that day. And he’d gone to say good-bye.

He’d gone there for her.

And then he’d walked all the way back for
him
.

From down the hall, Owen heard Dad call his name, his voice hoarse. In the bedroom, he was sitting up now, propped against a couple of pillows. When he saw Owen, he reached over and switched on the bedside lamp with a grin.

“Ta-da,” he said. “Electricity.”

For a moment, Owen thought of not telling him about Sam, of letting the night pass without fixing the water pumps. He knew what it would mean—they’d have to leave the building. They’d probably even leave New York.
The two of them could drive out west, find some place better suited for them, a place with more sky and fewer people. Maybe they’d even retrace the route his parents had taken all those years ago. Maybe, in that way, Owen would be able to say good-bye, too.

But standing there in the doorway, he knew he couldn’t do it. He had to give this a chance, if only for his dad. It was what his mom would have wanted. And it was the right thing to do.

Besides, after last night, Owen wasn’t so sure he was ready to leave New York behind anyway. At least not yet.

Instead, they would haul the heavy red toolbox into the utilities room, where Dad would sit on the cool concrete floor with a glass of water and show Owen what to do. Together, they would figure out a way to make it work. They would figure out a way to make
this
work.

Owen crossed the threshold of the room, stepping into the pool of light from the lamp, and handed over one of the water bottles.

“So,” he said, his voice bright. “Now that we’ve got electricity, think you’re up to conjuring some water, too?”

For the next two days
, Lucy got herself out of bed and went to school. She sat through her classes and tolerated her classmates. She looked for Owen each morning and then again each afternoon. And when she didn’t see him, she returned to her apartment, trying not to be disappointed, and ate dinner alone.

Then, on the third day, George appeared at the door to help carry her suitcase downstairs and hail her a cab to the airport.

Just before midnight on the day the lights came back, her parents had finally gotten through to her. Lucy had been asleep already, and when she reached for her phone and saw a jumble of numbers too long to be local, she picked it up.

It was morning in Paris, and her parents were on two separate extensions, wide-awake and talking over each other.

“Lucy,” her dad kept saying. “Luce, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said groggily, sitting up in bed. “Just sleepy.”

“We’ve been trying and trying,” Mom said, her usually clipped accent softened by worry. “You gave us such a fright.”

“I couldn’t get through,” Lucy explained, fully awake now. “The circuits were all busy. But it’s fine. I’m okay.”

“Listen,” Dad said, his voice brisk and businesslike. “We want to hear all about it. But first, you should know that I called the airline.…”

Lucy waited for them to say they were coming home early, that they’d fought tooth and nail to get a flight back. She’d heard on the news earlier that the airports were all overrun with stranded travelers who had been stuck there since the power went out, living on pretzels and sleeping at the gates, and that it would take days for the schedules to return to normal. But her father must have figured something out, must surely know the type of people who could help, or at least the type of people who knew other people, and Lucy felt a sudden rush of gratitude for her parents, who must have been trying to get home to her this whole time.

“… and I’ve got you on a flight to London on Friday,” Dad was saying, and Lucy’s mouth fell open as she pressed the phone closer to her ear. “I know you’ve got school that day, but how much do they actually cover in the first week anyway, right?”

“London?” she said, her voice cracking.

“Yes, London,” Dad said impatiently, as if this were a ridiculous question. “Your mother and I are going tomorrow, and you’ll meet us there on Friday.”

Lucy was torn between the impulse to simply agree—in case they might change their minds—and the urge to ask a thousand more questions. “Uh, why…?”

“We want to see you, darling,” her mother said. “We want to be sure you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” she said again. “I just—”

“Coming home was out of the question,” Dad said, once again businesslike. “So we’d like you to meet us there.”

Lucy felt like laughing. On the scale of worldwide emergencies, nothing could have given her a truer sense for where the blackout ranked: not urgent enough for her parents to interrupt a trip but just alarming enough for them to buy her a plane ticket.

The details were discussed and the rest of the plans arranged. Lucy would miss two days of school, but she’d be getting a cultural experience, which seemed like justification enough. She thought of her earlier trips over, once when she was five and once when she was eight. The first time had been during Christmas; they’d visited her grandmother in the stately town house where her mother had grown up, and all toured the city together: the ornate parliament buildings and the giant clock that towered over them, Oxford Street with its garlands and wreaths, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Lucy had sung carols, her voice loud and warbling beside her mother’s more melodic one.

They went again two years later, just after her grandmother had passed away, a more somber trip that was spent mostly in the living room of the old town house, nodding politely to black-clad strangers and playing cards on the floor with her brothers.

Still, she had loved it there. It was the thing that—even more than the postcards—had sparked her obsession with travel. When she was little, she’d believed the whole world—or at least all its cities—would look exactly like New York, tall and jagged and imposing. She had no other basis for comparison, and it seemed only logical that a city was a city, just as a farm was a farm, and a mountain was a mountain. But London was completely different from what she’d imagined; it was regal and charming, stately and enchanting, and she’d fallen under its spell from the moment she arrived.