The Geography of You and Me (16 page)

And so she didn’t tell them about Liam, she supposed, out of a weird, misplaced loyalty for Owen. Or maybe it was guilt. It was hard to tell.

When she reached over to flick on the light switch, she noticed the small pile of mail at her feet, which had been tipped through the slot. She stooped to pick it up, shuffling through the catalogs and bills on her way to the kitchen, and when she tossed the whole mess of paper down on the wooden table, a postcard slipped out of the pile.

Lucy froze, staring at the corner, where a sliver of sky
was peeking out. She knew it couldn’t be from Owen—it had been a couple of months since she’d heard from him—but still, her heart was pounding like crazy. She nudged at the envelope on top of it, revealing a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, and she felt whatever had been bubbling up inside of her suddenly deflate.

Of course
, she thought. It was about the wedding. Her cousin Caitie was getting married in San Francisco the weekend before Christmas, and she and her parents were flying out to meet her brothers there in just a couple of weeks. Lucy had been looking forward to it. Not the wedding itself as much as being back in America. She’d fallen in love with Scotland in a way she hadn’t expected, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t excited to return to the familiar: peanut butter and pretzels, cinnamon gum and root beer. Faucets that combined hot and cold water, accents that she didn’t have to strain to understand, and good—or even just decent—Mexican food. They would be returning to Edinburgh just before New Year’s, and she already knew that when the time came, she’d be anxious to come back, but still, she was looking forward to the trip, and to seeing her brothers especially.

She flipped the postcard over, expecting to find some sort of information about the rehearsal dinner or the bridal luncheon, but instead, she was astonished to find Owen’s tiny handwriting, a few cramped words printed across the middle of the white square. She brought it closer to her face, her eyes wide and unblinking as she read.

I couldn’t arrive in a new city without dropping you a line. It looks like we’ll be moving here for good once the semester is over. Hopefully this one will stick, but we’ll see how it goes.…

Hope you and Nessie are well.

P.S. We picked up a stray turtle on the way down here. I named him Bartleby. (There are a great many things he prefers not to do.)

The next morning, Lucy was waiting near the window in the front hallway when a black cab pulled up, and she watched impatiently as her parents stepped out. They’d barely made it up the steps when she opened the door, still in her pajamas.

“Hi,” Mom said, clearly surprised by the greeting. The natural follow-up to this would be something like
Did you miss us?
, but they’d long ago stopped asking that, and Lucy had stopped expecting it.

“How was your trip?” she asked as they walked into the front entryway. Dad set down his bags and gave her a funny look.

“What happened?” he asked, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose with a weary expression. “You’re reminding me way too much of your brothers right now. Did you have a party? Did something get broken?”

“No, it’s not that,” Lucy said, though she knew he wasn’t serious. “I was just wondering about San Francisco.”

“It’s a large city in California,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.

“No, I mean… we’ll have some free time when we’re there, right?”

They were heading toward the kitchen, and Lucy trailed after them.

“The wedding’s up in Napa, actually,” Mom said. “At a vineyard.”

“Napa: a wine region north of San Francisco,” Dad chimed in unhelpfully.

“We’re only in the city for a night to get over our jet lag,” Mom continued, setting her purse down on the counter. “Then we head up to Napa and meet up with your brothers for the wedding and Christmas.” She turned around. “Why do you ask?”

But Lucy was already gone.

One night
, she was thinking, as she flew up the stairs.
One night.

After three months of living above
a Mexican restaurant, Owen would have been happy to never see another bowl of salsa again. But here he was now, waiting for Lucy with a basket of chips in front of him and the sounds of a mariachi band drifting from the bar area, while his leg bobbed nervously beneath the table.

He’d been relieved to find that their new apartment sat above a knitting store, which meant it was mercifully free of smells of any kind, except for the faint earthy scent of Bartleby, the little box turtle they’d found in a parking lot outside Sacramento. After nearly running him over, they’d fixed him up with a shoebox full of fruit and vegetables for the rest of the drive—“the luxury suite,” Dad had called it—but now he roamed free around the apartment, occasionally getting wedged beneath the ratty couch that had come with the place. The landlord didn’t seem to mind this exception to the No Pets rule, nor did he care that Owen and his father couldn’t sign a long-term lease.

“Week to week is fine,” he’d assured them when they called in response to an online ad. “It was my mother’s place. I’m just trying to collect some rent off it until I’m ready to sell.”

This suited them just fine, since they weren’t sure how long they might be staying. Dad swore they’d be here at least through the spring semester, so that Owen could finish high school in one place.

“I’m sure I’ll find something soon,” he kept promising. “I’m not worried.”

Owen knew this wasn’t true, but he didn’t mind. He was just relieved to hear the determination in his father’s voice.

The new apartment was near the marina, and from their window, they could hear the sounds of the boats bumping against the docks and the seagulls calling out to each other. Owen wondered what his friends from home would think if they could see his life now, which was so unrecognizable from what it had been in Pennsylvania. Their e-mails had mostly stopped—he knew they must have given up on him by now—but he could still picture their days as clearly as if he were there, too: the exact location of their lockers in the senior hallway, their exact lunch table in the cafeteria, their exact seats in the back row of every classroom. It was strange and a little unsettling to think how easily Owen could have been there, too, and he tried to hold on to this whenever he worried too much about their current situation. Because in spite of everything that had happened
since his mother died, all the bad luck and the good, he was still happy to have seen the things they’d seen.

The last few mornings, while Dad sat at the computer, his eyes bleary as he scanned the newest job postings, Owen took off, exploring the city by foot. It was so unlike New York, all cramped together on a thin spit of island, everything crowded close like an overgrown garden. San Francisco, on the other hand, was sprawling and disjointed and colorful. It had only been a few days, but already he was falling in love with this place, just like he’d fallen for Tahoe, and so many of the other towns they’d seen along the way. And now, as he sat there waiting for Lucy, it struck him that the only one he hadn’t loved—the only city that he had, in fact, been determined not to like—was New York, the place where they’d met.

He wondered if that meant something. He supposed that magic could be found anywhere, but wasn’t it more likely in a Parisian café than a slum in Mumbai? He’d met Paisley on a starry night in the mountains. But with Lucy, they’d met in the stuffy elevator of an even stuffier building in the stuffiest city in the world. And yet…

He knew he shouldn’t be thinking this way. He picked up his fork and twirled it absently between his fingers. But when the waitress appeared at his side, he lost his grip, and it fell to the floor with a clatter.

“Can I get you some more chips while you wait?” she asked, stooping to pick it up.

“Sorry,” Owen said, flustered. He glanced at the basket in front of him, which was down to a few crumbs. He hadn’t even realized he’d been eating them. “I’m okay for now.”

As soon as she left, he straightened in his chair, craning his neck to look past the cactus decorations up front, wondering where she could be. In her last e-mail, she’d suggested a Mexican restaurant, since apparently there wasn’t much in the way of good tacos in Edinburgh, and he’d given her directions to this place, which was just around the corner from his new apartment. He had no idea where she was staying or what time she was supposed to get in. She didn’t even have a U.S. phone number anymore, so there was no way to call to see if her flight had been delayed. He sat back in his chair again and drank his whole glass of water in one gulp, then wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans.

Ever since getting her e-mail a couple of weeks ago, he’d been trying to figure out what to tell her about Paisley. The problem was, he wasn’t entirely sure where they stood himself. In the days leading up to Owen’s departure, they’d danced around the subject of the future; instead, she’d given him restaurant recommendations in San Francisco, and he’d asked her about her plans for Christmas. They’d talked about things like ski conditions and the new item on the menu at the diner. He just assumed they’d figure out the rest of it at some unspecified point later on.

But when he’d stopped by the diner on the way out of
town to say good-bye, Paisley had looked at him expectantly, as if the problems of time and distance could be solved right there, in the middle of the lunch shift, the air smelling of onions and the order for table eight growing cold on the counter.

“Well,” she said eventually, seeming somehow disappointed in him. “I’ll be down to visit my dad soon. And in the meantime, I guess we’ll talk.”

“Sure,” Owen said quickly. “We’ll talk.”

And he’d meant it then. Standing there, with her pale eyes focused on him, he was already thinking about calling her when they arrived. Or maybe even sooner. He’d ring her from the road. He’d text her when he got to the car. He’d be thinking about her even as he walked out the door of the diner.

But what he hadn’t known then was that everything about Paisley was immediate. When you were with her, it was like being in a spotlight. It was almost blinding, that sort of brightness, and it was exactly what he’d needed all these months.

But even as they drove away, it was already beginning to fade.

In the days since he’d arrived in San Francisco, they’d mostly spoken through voice mail. It wasn’t that he was avoiding her calls exactly, but he wasn’t going out of his way to pick them up, either, and he suspected she was doing the same. In her absence, the urgency of what he’d felt for her, the pull of it, had simply evaporated, and each
time her name appeared on his phone, he felt nothing but a vague reluctance at the thought of catching up.

If he were still in Tahoe, he knew things would probably be different, and if he thought too hard about it, he felt a sharp stab at the memory of those starry nights out by the lake and the afternoons when they drank mugs of cocoa behind the steamy windows of the diner. But their relationship had existed wholly in the moment. And he was starting to realize that moment had passed. This, it seemed, was just what happened when you left someone. They disappeared behind you like the wake of a boat.

But sitting here at this Mexican restaurant with his elbows resting on the sticky tablecloth, he was keenly aware that this had never quite happened with Lucy.

And he decided right then that there was no reason to tell her about Paisley. It wasn’t like he owed her an explanation, anyway. They were only friends, he reminded himself, if they were even that.

He was still sitting there with his head bent, lost in thought, when she finally arrived. In all the noise, the relentless music and chatter, he didn’t notice until she was standing right in front of him, and when he looked up through the blurry, chaotic lights of the restaurant, for a brief second he wasn’t sure if it was even her. Her hair was longer than last time, and she was paler, too, the freckles on her nose more pronounced. She was watching him with a gaze a mile deep, her muddy eyes sizing him up, and
neither of them said anything for what felt like a very long time.

Finally, the band stopped playing, the last note ringing out with a rattle, and she smiled at him, the moment tipping from one mood to another, from one song to the next. He scraped back his chair, standing up in a hurry, and he was already hugging her, his hands resting on her thin shoulder blades, when he realized they’d never really done this before, and without quite meaning to, he stepped back, moving away from her as if he’d been shocked. She blinked at him a few times, then offered another smile.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, pulling out her chair, and once she was seated, he took his as well. “Sorry I’m late.”

His eyes were still caught on hers, and he opened his mouth, then closed it again. “It’s okay,” he said after a beat. “I just got here.”

She glanced at the empty basket of chips but said nothing.

“So did you…” he began, then stopped to clear his throat. He reached for his water glass but realized it was empty. “Did you get here okay?”

“Yeah, the flight wasn’t bad actually,” she said, then paused and shook her head. “Wait, sorry, did you mean the restaurant?”

“Yeah. No. I mean… either one.”

“Uh, yeah, it was fine,” Lucy said, looking around. After
a moment, she seemed to remember that her jacket was still on, and she slipped it off her shoulders and onto the back of her chair. She was wearing a black cardigan over a purple shirt, and Owen thought of the white sundress from the elevator that day, remembered following it up the darkened hallway like some sort of apparition.

“Well,” she said, smiling gamely, and he felt the full weight of it now: this stiffness between them where before there’d been such ease. Any excitement over seeing her again had deflated, sharply and suddenly, and what was left was the worst kind of awkwardness. His mind worked frantically, turning over his scrambled thoughts, searching for something to say, but there was nothing but the empty space between them.