“There,” she said. “Now it’s official.”
“See? No need for Paris.”
“Not for tonight, anyway,” she said, handing back the stone. “But I’d still like to go.”
“How come they never took you along?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it’s hard to travel with three kids. My brothers are awesome, but they’re twins, and when we were little, they were complete nightmares. The first time we went to London, I remember them running up and down the aisles of the plane, locking themselves in the bathroom.” There was a hint of a smile on her face, but then she shook her head. “That’s not really it, though. The thing is, I think my parents just really like traveling alone together.”
“Alone together,” Owen said. “Oxymoron.”
“You’re an oxymoron,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But really, it’s always been their thing, traveling together. It’s partly his job, but they also just really love it. Some people shop. Some people fish. My parents travel.”
“What does he do?”
“He works for this British bank. They met in London, but he’s had jobs in all these other places, too, Sydney and Cape Town and Rio. When my brothers were born, he took a job in the New York office, since he’s from here, and I think the plan was to settle down, but that part never really took. Instead, they were always just jetting off and leaving us with the nanny.”
“Sounds glamorous.”
“For them,” she said. “But I would have loved to go, too. I still would.” She swept a hand through the air, scattering a few mosquitoes. “Sometimes I think they liked their lives a whole lot better before they had kids.”
Owen thought of his own parents, putting down roots the moment they found out they were pregnant. “It’s probably not that it was better,” he said. “Just different. My parents did the same thing, settling down when I came along, and they were happy.” He paused, blinking fast. “We were all happy.”
Lucy was sitting with her arms resting on her knees, and when she turned to look at him, her leg bumped against his. Right then, he had a sudden urge to inch closer to her, to close the space between them, and the force of it surprised him; it felt like a very long time since he’d wanted anything at all.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching over to put a hand over his. “About your mom.”
The warmth of her palm cracked at something inside him, that hard shell of hurt that had formed over his heart like a coat of ice. She was watching him intently, her eyes seeking his, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. Because the numbness was the only thing keeping him going, the only thing preventing him from falling to pieces in front of his dad, who was falling to pieces enough for both of them.
He turned his eyes back to the sky. “They look almost fake,” he said. “Don’t they?”
Lucy followed his gaze. “The stars?” she asked, but he didn’t answer. He was thinking of the ones on the ceiling of his bedroom back home, little pieces of plastic that glowed green in the dark. His mother had put them up when he was little, when Owen first became obsessed with the sky, spending summer nights on his back in the front yard, staring up at the scattering of lights until his eyes burned. They bought him a telescope, and they bought him binoculars; they even bought him a globe that showed all the constellations. But, in the end, the only way to convince him to go to bed were those glowing plastic stars, which his mother tacked up on the ceiling herself.
“They’re not in the right places,” Owen had said that first night, his eyes pinned above him as he climbed into bed.
“Sure they are,” she told him. “It’s just that these are very rare constellations.”
He frowned up at them. “What are they called?”
“Well,” she’d said, scooting in next to him and pointing at the ceiling. “That’s Owen Major.”
He let his head fall to the side, so that it was resting on her shoulder, and in the dark, his voice was hushed. “Is there an Owen Minor?”
“Sure,” she said. “Right over there. And that’s Buckley’s Belt.”
“Like Orion’s Belt?”
“Even better,” she said. “Because you can always see it. Every single night.”
Now, beside him on the roof, he could feel Lucy smiling. “They don’t look fake at all,” she said. “They look real. Really real. They might be the realest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Owen smiled, too, letting his eyes fall shut, but he could still see them, glowing bright against the backs of his eyelids. For the first time in weeks, he felt all lit up inside, even on this darkest of nights.
5
When she woke, everything was blurry. As soon as she opened her eyes, Lucy brought an arm up over her face to block out the blazing sunlight. But several seconds passed before she remembered where she was—high up on the roof beneath a whitewashed sky—and several more went by before she realized she was alone.
She rubbed her eyes, then propped herself up on her elbows, staring at the blanket beside her, where just last night Owen had fallen asleep, and which was now only an Owen-shaped indent, like a plaid flannel snow angel.
They hadn’t planned to sleep up here, but as the night had deepened and their voices had grown softer, slowed by the heat and the weight of the past hours, they found themselves lying side by side, their eyes fixed on the stars as they talked.
Owen had fallen asleep first, his head tipping to one side so that his hair fell over his eyes, and he looked peaceful in a way he hadn’t when he was awake. His hair smelled faintly of lemons from the cleaning solution on the floor of their kitchen, and Lucy listened to him breathe, watching the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
Being there like that, so close to him, she had to remind herself that this wasn’t real. It wasn’t a date but an accident. It wasn’t romantic, only practical. They were just two people trying to make it through the night, and it didn’t mean anything beyond that.
After all, hours didn’t necessarily add up in that way. Time didn’t automatically amount to anything. There was only so much you could ask from a single night.
Still, Lucy hadn’t expected him to disappear completely. It was true that they’d made no plans for the morning, no promises for the next day. They’d shared nothing more than a blanket and some food and a little bit of light. But somehow, it had seemed like more than that—at least to her. And now, as she glanced around the roof—empty except for a few pigeons milling about on the far side—she couldn’t help feeling wounded by his absence.
She rose to her feet, still squinting from the brightness of the morning, and shuffled over to the ledge. In the daylight, the city looked entirely different. The sky to the east was splashed with orange, and below it, Central Park was stretched out, a vast and manicured swath of wilderness interrupted only by the occasional pond, like dabs of blue-gray paint on a palette. Lucy stood with the breeze on her face, wondering whether the city had power again. It was impossible to tell from this high up.
Downstairs, when she pushed open the door to her apartment, the answer quickly became clear. She held her breath against the wall of heat that greeted her—so dense it almost felt like something she could touch—and moved down the sweltering hallway and into the kitchen, where she stood staring at the place they’d been lying just last night, their heads close so that their bodies formed a kind of steeple.
On one of the gray tiles, something thin and white stood out even in the dim lighting, and when she stooped to pick it up, Lucy was surprised to find a cigarette. She wrinkled her nose as she examined it, trying to square this new fact—that Owen was a smoker—with her memory of the night before. Once again, she felt jolted by the realization that she didn’t actually know him at all, and that those long hours together seemed to have lost something in the light of day.
She was about to toss the cigarette into the trash when something made her stop. It was all that was left of this night. So instead, she grabbed her wallet from the kitchen counter, u
nzipping the little pocket that held all the coins, and slipped it inside.
On the refrigerator, there was a small piece of paper with the number of her parents’ hotel in Paris. By now, Lucy guessed they must have heard what had happened. She lifted the portable phone from its cradle on the wall, ready to dial the long string of numbers, but there was only silence on the line—no power meant no charge, which meant no dial tone—and so she hung up again with a sigh.
The water wasn’t working, either. When she twisted the faucet, there was only a slow dribble that quickly petered out altogether. Without electricity, there was no way to pump the water up to the twenty-fourth floor. So she wiped at her forehead with the back of her arm and stood with a hand on either side of the sink, trying to figure out what to do next.
There was a stillness to the apartment that she usually enjoyed when everyone was gone. But now, without even the hum of the appliances, the huge vaulted rooms felt strangely foreign, like it was someone else’s home entirely.
Lucy had never minded being alone. She was plenty used to it, with parents that traveled so much and brothers that weren’t usually around. Unlike Lucy, who participated in absolutely no school-related activities, they had played basketball and lacrosse and were involved in student government; they led clubs and volunteered on weekends and had even joined a band last year, though it was a largely earsplitting affair that fell more into the category of noise than music.
Lucy, on the other hand, had always drifted along unseen at her school; she had a knack for making herself invisible that had always felt like a kind of superpower, something that belonged only to her. Being on her own had never been a burden. Instead of weighing her down, it buoyed her up; when she was alone, she was lighter. When she was by herself, she felt untethered and free.
But this morning, she was left with an uneasy feeling as she paced the empty apartment. A few years ago, on their first weekend without any supervision whatsoever, her brothers had turned to each other with matching grins the moment the door fell shut behind their parents.
“What should we do first?” Charlie had asked, and Ben pretended to think about this, tapping his finger against his chin.
“Well, we should probably eat a sensible breakfast.”
“Definitely,” Charlie agreed, laughing as he grabbed a frozen pizza from the freezer, and after that, it had become a tradition. Pizza for breakfast. Just because they could.
Now Lucy stood in front of the freezer, the last of the cool air leaking out, and ran a hand over the damp and wilting box of the frozen pizza she’d bought in preparation for her first time entirely on her own. After a moment, she closed it again with a sigh, frowning at the calendar on the door. It was the first day of school, but the city was still stuck, dark and gridlocked, and she was certain it would be postponed. This knowledge was neither welcome nor disappointing; it only meant that the countdown to the end of her junior year—to the end of high school, really—would begin tomorrow instead of today.
Lucy had always enjoyed her classes and endured her classmates, and these two things canceled each other out, resulting in a generally neutral attitude toward the whole endeavor. She’d been at the St. Andrews School since kindergarten, and it was always exactly the same: the same girls and the same uniforms. The same dramas and fights and scandals. The same catty conversations and ruthless jostling and mystifying objectives. Every year was like a rerun of the same boring show, everyone else moving fast all around her, a blur of people and plans and conversations, while Lucy remained alone in the middle of it all, standing absolutely still.
She wandered into her bedroom and stood in front of the open closet, where her plaid skirt and white blouse hung, pressed and ready to wear. But instead, with some amount of relief, she grabbed a pair of red shorts and a T-shirt, suddenly in desperate need of a walk.
The now familiar temperature of the stairwell stung her eyes, and she wound her way down the steps again, passing neighbors too tired and sweaty to do more than raise a hand in greeting. They all wore the heat like a kind of weight, and Lucy, too, couldn’t help feeling like something inside her was wilting.
With each flight, the red numbers flashed by on the gray doors, but it wasn’t until somewhere around the sixteenth floor that she realized she was no longer sure of her destination. Her intention had been to spend the rest of the morning wandering the neighborhood, but by the time she passed the tenth floor, she understood she wasn’t headed outside after all, and she was all the way down to the eighth floor before realizing she was actually on her way to the basement.
She was going to see Owen.
But when she stepped out into the lobby—which needed to be crossed to reach the door in the mailroom that led downstairs—she was greeted by Darrell, one of the newer doormen, who was sitting at the front desk, drenched in sweat.
“I feel like it’s only fair to warn you,” he said, mopping his forehead with a paper towel, “that it’s hotter than hell out there.”
Lucy paused halfway between the elevator and the front desk. “Can’t be worse than my apartment,” she said, stealing a glance at the mailroom.
“I don’t know,” Darrell was saying. “I walked in from the Bronx, and—”
Lucy turned back to him with wide eyes. “You did?”
“Well, halfway,” he admitted. “The subway’s still down, and the buses were all packed, but I hitched a ride on the back of a fruit truck for part of it.”
“So everything’s still a mess then,” she said, and something about the tone in her voice made Darrell’s expression soften.
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said with an encouraging smile. “I heard they got power back upstate, and Boston, too.”
Through the mailroom, she could see the far door swing open, and she caught her breath, surprised by the sudden quickness of her heart. But it was only the handyman from last night, who waved as he turned the corner.
Lucy sighed. “Hopefully we’re next,” she said, and Darrell nodded.
“Where’re you off to now?”
“Nowhere,” she said, a bit too quickly, and he laughed.
“Sounds nice,” he told her. “Be sure to send me a postcard.”
Once again, something seized inside her chest, and she hesitated a moment, looking from the lobby doors back to the mailroom, hoping that Owen might come loping out. It would be so much better to run into him here. She was terrified of knocking on his door only to find that he didn’t want to see her. Even now, she could imagine the painful awkwardness of such an exchange, his face going red as he made some sort of excuse because he was too polite to tell her as much.
After all, he was the one who’d left this morning.
Lucy was normally a firm believer that things worked out for the best, and she usually had no problem being optimistic, but now she felt her legs go weak as she stood weighing her next move, her cheeks pink at the thought of showing up unannounced. Something about Owen had thrown her off, twisting her into uncertain knots, and so before she could do anything she might regret, she headed for the revolving doors that led to the street.
Outside, it was clear that last night’s celebration had officially ended, and all that was left was the hangover. The streets, which had seemed like one big party just hours before, were now full of sweaty and miserable-looking people, everyone fanning themselves with day-old newspapers.
As she walked, Lucy saw a few kids chasing each other along the sidewalk, but otherwise, everyone seemed listless and beaten down by the weather. There were policemen stationed at the major intersections to direct traffic, but it was a haphazard affair, slow and grinding. All the energy seemed to have been sapped right out of the city.
She pressed her way up the street, heading in no particular direction, as she had a thousand times before. The ice-cream shop from last night was now closed, along with most of the other stores, which were all shuttered and silent. A few blocks farther uptown, she passed by her school, an imposing stone bui
lding, where a handwritten sign on the door announced that classes would begin tomorrow as long as the power was back, though there was no way to know if the note had been written yesterday or today.
Finally, having covered most of the neighborhood, and with nowhere else to go, she made her way back home again. As she climbed the stairs, she considered heading back up to the roof, in case Owen was there, and the thought propelled her up the next six flights before she reconsidered it for the same reason she’d walked away earlier.
She’d lived in this city her whole life, had gotten lost countless times at night, survived two muggings, and once broken her arm while climbing the rocks in Central Park. But it was finally Owen—who wasn’t scary in the least; who had, in fact, been nothing but nice to her—who had somehow managed to turn her into a coward.
Back in the apartment, she closed all the blinds and tried to nap on the couch, but the heat was oppressive and stifling. Wide-awake and miserable, she paged through her well-worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye—the ultimate guide to losing yourself in New York City—but the words swam in front of her, blurry as everything else from the heat. Finally, she gave up and returned to the kitchen floor, which was only marginally cooler. As the afternoon sank deeper into darkness, the kitchen grew dimmer and she pressed her bare arms and legs on the tiles and tried not to think about the fact that this was where they’d been lying just last night.
She wondered if there was a word for loneliness that wasn’t quite so general. Because that wasn’t it, exactly; it wasn’t that she was feeling lonesome or empty or forlorn. It was more particular than that, like the blanket on the roof this morning: Here in the kitchen, there was an Owen-shaped indent.
She drifted to sleep there, her cheek pressed against the tiles, and when she woke, it was once again to a blur of light. Only this time, it was coming from the bulb in the ceiling fixture, which was blaring down on her, harsh and unnatural and much too bright.
She sat up so fast she felt dizzy, spinning around to see that it was back now, all of it, the blinking green lights on the microwave clock, the red numbers on the answering machine, the churning of the overhead fan, and beyond the doorway, the lamps that had flickered on across of the rest of the apartment.
The Geography of You and Me Page 5