The Geography of You and Me

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Owen laughed. “She would have loved it.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “She would have. But she’d have been proud of you either way. Just like I am.”

  To Owen’s surprise, Dad scraped back his chair then and walked over to one of the drawers beneath the toaster. He paused there for a moment, his shoulders rising and falling, before turning around and holding out a pale blue box.

  “Sorry it’s not wrapped,” he said. “I was going to wait till graduation, but now…”

  Owen reached for it, turning it around to where a plastic window showed a jumble of glow-in-the-dark stars. He stared at it, gripping the edges of the box so hard that the edges bent under his fingers.

  “I tried to pry the old ones off the ceiling back home,” Dad said, returning to his seat. “But they were stuck on pretty tight. I guess whoever lives there next is going to fall asleep under them, too.”

  There was a lump in Owen’s throat. “That’s kind of cool.”

  “Anyway, I’m sure no self-respecting astronomy major goes to sleep under fake stars,” Dad said, gesturing at the box, “but you can always put them up here, for whenever you come home.”

  “Thank you,” he said, the words a little wobbly. “I love them.”

  They were both quiet for a moment, lost in their own separate memories, but then Owen remembered where this had all started, and he cleared his throat.

  “Dad?”

  His father looked up. “Yeah?”

  “This is great,” he said, rattling the box. “Really. And I don’t want to sound greedy, but the thing is… I could still use that money. Or at least some of it.”

  “For what?” he asked with a frown, and Owen coughed into his hand.

  “It’s just…”

  “What?”

  He sighed. “There’s this girl.…”

  To his astonishment, Dad began to laugh. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, his shoulders shaking.

  “What?” Owen asked, confused. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’ve just been wondering when you’d get around to telling me about her.”

  He stared at him, unable to hide his surprise. “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew.”

  “I thought you were too busy.…”

  “Being sad?”

  Owen gave him a rueful grin. “Well… yeah.”

  “You know what made me less sad?”

  “What?”

  “Seeing you happy,” he told him. “And for a while there, it seemed like those postcards were the only things that did the trick.”

  Owen wasn’t sure what to say, but before he could find the words, Dad leaned forward in his seat, reaching into his back pocket for his cracked leather wallet, which he tossed onto the table. It landed heavily beside the bottle of syrup and they both stared at it for a moment. Then Dad raised his glass of orange juice in a toast.

  “Happy Graduation,” he said. “Now go get her.”

  42

  Lucy woke in the last hour of the flight, blinking into the gray haze of the quiet airplane. Beside her, the window shade was open a few inches, and she yawned as she looked out at the steep banks of clouds moving past like dreamy mountain ranges. On the screen in front of her, a timer ticked down the minutes until they reached New York. It wouldn’t be long.

  For sixteen years, Lucy had hardly ventured off the island of Manhattan, and now, eight months and five countries later, she was finally returning. She reached for the bag at her feet, pulling out her old copy of The Catcher in the Rye—her security blanket, her teddy bear—but instead of opening it, she just held it in her lap, gripping the edges.

  Soon, she would be seeing the apartment where she grew up, the building she’d lived in her whole life, and the neighborhood she’d known so well, but it didn’t feel the way she thought it would. It didn’t feel like going home.

  A part of her would always love New York, but she’d loved Edinburgh, too, and now London. And if you were to set her down in Paris or Rome or Prague or any of the other places they’d visited, she was certain she’d find a way to fall in love with those, too.

  All these years, she’d imagined her parents were out there in the world trying to take in as much as possible: photos and stories and memories, check marks on a list of countries and pins on a globe. But what she hadn’t understood until now was that they’d left pieces of themselves in all those places, too. They’d made a little home for themselves wherever they went, and now Lucy would do the same.

  But first, there was New York. The little cartoon airplane on the screen inched out across the blue of the map and toward the green, and Lucy ran a finger along the cracked spine of the book in her lap, closing her eyes.

  At first, she’d tried telling her parents that she’d simply changed her mind about going back for the summer.

  “Not for the whole time,” she said one afternoon as they strolled through Kensington Gardens, enjoying the rare sunshine and the even rarer appearance of Dad in daylight hours. “I was just thinking it would actually be kind of nice to visit, you know?”

  Along the edge of the pond, a trio of ducks sat honking at everyone who passed by, and Dad watched them intently, his mouth turned down at the edges.

  “Wish I could go back for a visit,” he said, squinting at the water.

  But Mom only raised her eyebrows. “What kind of visit?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “Maybe just to see some sights… or some friends.”

  At this, Mom stopped short, her hands on her hips. “Some friends?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “In New York?” she asked, then turned to Dad without bothering to wait for an answer. “Are you buying this?”

  He glanced over at her with a blank look. “What?”

  “Mom,” Lucy said with a groan. “It would only be for a few days.”

  “And you’d be there all by yourself?”

  Lucy dropped her gaze. “Yeah,” she said to the gravel path.

  “Nope,” Mom said. “No way.”

  Dad looked from one to the other as if this were some kind of sporting event where he didn’t quite understand the rules. “I think Lucy’s perfectly capable of being there on her own,” he said. “It’s not like she hasn’t done it before.”

  “Yes,” Mom said in a measured tone, “but this time, there’s a boy in the picture.”

  Lucy let out a strangled noise.

  “A boy?” Dad said, as if the concept had never occurred to him. “What boy?”

  “He’s in town that first week of June,” Lucy said, ignoring him as she turned back to Mom. “He thinks I’ll be there already, because I told him that a million years ago, and he wants to meet up.…”

  Mom was watching her with an unreadable expression. “And you really want to see him.”

  Lucy nodded miserably. “And I really want to see him.”

  Dad shook his head. “What boy?”

  There was a long pause while Mom seemed to consider this, and then, finally, her face softened.

  “What boy?” Dad had asked again.

  Now Lucy’s seat shook as Mom leaned over the top of it from the row behind her. “Hi,” she said. “Sleep well?”

  She swiveled to look at her. “Did you?”

  “No,” Mom said, but her eyes were shining. “I’m too excited.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” she said with a grin. “It seems that distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder.”

  “I think that’s absence.”

  Mom shrugged. “Either way.”

  Lucy turned back to the window, where the plane had broken free of the clouds, and the blue-gray ocean swept out beneath them. When she pressed her cheek to the glass, she could see ahead to where it met the land, stopping abruptly at the edge of New York. “Not a whole lot of distance now.”

  “That’s okay,” Mom said, sitting back down, so that she spoke through the space between seats, her voice clos
e to Lucy’s ear. “Someone once told me it’s best to see a city from the ground up.”

  They left the water behind, the scene below becoming a grid of grayish buildings, and made a wide sweeping turn as they moved inland, the plane tipping leisurely to one side so that Lucy could see the rivers that cut through the land like veins.

  As the ground rushed up at them, she remembered her father’s advice about calling the car company as soon as they landed, and she sat forward, reaching for her bag. In her wallet, there was a business card with the number, which her dad had carried around in his own wallet for years. It was fuzzy at the corners and bent across the middle, but he’d handed it to her with pride.

  “This is what we used to get home to you after every trip,” he said. “Now that you’ve become something of a traveler, too, I’m officially passing the baton.” He pulled her into a hug and kissed her on the forehead. “Say hi to New York for me.”

  As she slid the card carefully from the folds of her wallet, she felt the lump at the bottom of the change purse. Over the past months, she’d become so used to the shape of it that she’d nearly forgotten what it was, but now she pulled it out, twisting the cigarette in her fingers. It was a little bit flattened now, crushed by the months spent tucked beneath all those heavy British coins, but it was still mostly intact, and she studied it, remembering how she’d found it the morning after the blackout. She brought it to her nose and inhaled deeply, thinking that it smelled a bit like Owen, and then—before the flight attendant could remind her that there was no smoking on board the plane—she wedged it back inside her wallet, her chest suddenly light.

  Out the window, she could see that they were circling over Brooklyn now, but in the distance, the spiky outline of Manhattan rose up in an arrangement of towering buildings and valleys made out of vast green parks, all of it bordered by two rivers like a pair of cupped hands. As they dropped lower in the sky, she could see the outlines of roads and parking lots and backyards, all of them fanning out around the heart of the city, where people were busy going on with their lives, walking and eating and laughing and working, and somewhere below, in the middle of it all, there was Owen: nothing but a yellow dot from above, waiting just for her.

  43

  There was traffic on the way in from the airport. Owen leaned against the window of the bus as it inched toward the Lincoln Tunnel, watching the long chain of cars spitting clouds of exhaust into the afternoon heat. Above him, beyond the tunnel and across the Hudson River, the city seemed to shimmer. From where he sat behind the smudged glass, it looked almost like a mirage, the kind of place where you could forever draw closer without ever actually reaching it.

  But Owen knew he’d get there eventually. And he had plenty of time. He wasn’t meeting Lucy until noon tomorrow, which meant he had the rest of the day to prepare. His dad had given him enough money for a cheap hotel room, but Owen planned to spend the night up on the roof anyway; if there was ever a place that had felt like home in the city, that was it, and there was nowhere else he’d rather be tonight.

  The plan was simple. When he arrived at Port Authority, he’d take the subway up to Seventy-Second Street and see if the back door to the building was open. Sometimes, if you caught the maintenance guys at the right time, it was easy to slip in that way, and Owen had often gone that route just to avoid the uncomfortable splendor of the lobby. If it happened to be locked, he planned to walk in through the front door, say hello to whichever doorman was on duty, then walk straight over to the elevator like he belonged there, though it was obvious he never had. If anyone asked where he was going, he’d give Lucy’s name, which wasn’t a lie, since he’d be there to see her the next day, and then he’d head straight up to the roof.

  In the morning, he’d go around the corner to the gym that was always offering free trials, and he’d take a shower, change into clean clothes, buy some flowers on the way back, and then wait for her in the lobby.

  His head felt light as he thought about it, and in the cramped space of the bus, his knee jangled against the back of the seat in front of him. He’d been like this ever since Dad dropped him off at the airport this morning, giving him a bear hug and wishing him luck. On the flight, he’d been so rattled that he spilled his orange juice, drenching not only himself but the lady beside him. He still smelled faintly of sour citrus.

  It wasn’t that he was nervous to see Lucy. It was more that he didn’t know what this was to her, and there was something scary in that. Just because he knew what he wanted now didn’t mean that she did, too. And just because he’d made up an excuse to fly all the way across the country didn’t mean that she was equally excited.

  That first time, during the blackout, they’d met as strangers. Then in San Francisco, they’d met as friends, eager to find out whether the strange magnetic pull they felt toward each other was real or an illusion.

  But this time, Owen wasn’t sure what to think.

  When there was nothing but space between you, everything felt like a leap.

  As the bus began to ease into the Lincoln Tunnel, the phrase came to him all at once, pulled from a memory like an echo: It is what it is.

  He smiled as he remembered Lucy’s objection to the words, but he realized now that she was wrong. It was true that things could always change. But it was also true that some things remained as they were, and this was one of them: nine months ago, he’d met a girl in an elevator, and she’d been on his mind ever since.

  All around him, the other passengers were blinking into the deep black of the tunnel, but not Owen. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he could see it just as clearly in the dark.

  44

  They stood in the quiet of the apartment, the last of the day’s light coming through the windows at a slant, and neither spoke. Finally, Lucy dropped her bag, and the sound of it seemed to echo for a long time.

  “It looks the same,” she said, not sure whether she meant that as a good thing or a bad thing. The place had a hushed quality to it, left on its own all this time with only the occasional cleaning lady for company. She kept half-expecting to hear her brothers laughing in the next room, or the sound of her father’s voice as the front door creaked open. “It doesn’t feel the same, though.”

  “It’s just been so long,” her mother said, trailing a hand along the back of the couch as she walked over to the window. “Too long.”

  Lucy glanced at her, where she was silhouetted against the orange sky, the sun burning itself down in the reflections behind her. “It’s been forever,” she said, and Mom looked over her shoulder.

  “Not quite,” she said with a smile. “Maybe just half a forever.”

  Once they’d walked through the apartment from end to end—poking their heads in the bathrooms and laughing at the things they’d left behind, surveying bedrooms and rummaging through the cabinets like tourists in their own home, picking it over for memories and souvenirs, marveling at the sheer oddity of being back after so long—Lucy announced that she was going out.

  “You’re welcome to come…” she said, but she trailed off in a way that made Mom laugh.

  “Go,” she said. “I know you’re just going to wander endlessly, and my feet will only get tired.” She paused, glancing out the window, where the sky had gone from pink to gray. “Just be careful, okay? It’s been a while since we’ve been in the big bad city.”

  Lucy smiled. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Where do you go anyway?” she asked. “When you walk?”

  “Nowhere,” she said with a shrug, then changed her mind. “Everywhere,” she corrected, and they left it at that.

  In the hallway, she punched the button for the elevator, already trying to decide where to go first—Riverside Park or Central Park, uptown or downtown—but when the doors opened with that familiar ding and she stepped inside, she found herself stalled there. Her hand was inches from the button that would take her to the lobby, but instead—without even thinking about it—she sent the car moving up, the
ground lifting beneath her feet, and she raised her chin and watched the dial go from the twenty-fourth floor to the twenty-fifth and on and on until the doors opened onto the little hallway that formed an entrance to the roof.

  She had no idea why she had come. Tomorrow, she would see Owen. In less than twenty-four hours, they would be together. It wasn’t long to wait. But still, when she’d thought of him over the past months, this had been the backdrop, unfamiliar and slightly magical, and now she couldn’t stop herself from wanting to see it again.

  He’d told her once that the door was left open sometimes, and she’d been amazed at this, astonished that she could have lived her whole life in a building and never known such a place existed.

  Now she held her breath as she twisted the metal knob of the door, and when it turned, she used her shoulder to open it the rest of the way, then grabbed a nearby brick to use as a doorstop, propping it open a few inches so it wouldn’t lock behind her.

  When she turned around, she felt her lungs expand, happy for no other reason than to be alone up here beneath a sky like a chalkboard, the night still new and unwritten. The city was spread before her, all twinkling lights and staggering scale, and it occurred to her that until she met Owen, she’d been living her life on a map, when really the world is a globe: three-dimensional and full of possibility.

  With the breeze on her face and the distant fog of noise below, it took her a moment to register the click of the door falling shut somewhere behind her. She spun around, her thoughts wild as her thumping heart—expecting to find herself stranded up here, cursing herself for not wedging the brick better—but then she saw the figure by the door, and all this melted away.

  “You’re early,” he said, but it didn’t feel that way to Lucy.

  To her, it felt like it had been forever.

  45

  It was hard to tell exactly how it had happened or who had moved first, but suddenly there they were: standing only inches apart in the middle of the inky black roof, the air between them electric. Owen opened his mouth to say something, to explain his presence here, to make some sort of a joke, but then he changed his mind, because he was tired of talking, at least for the moment, done passing words between them. All he wanted to do right now was kiss her.