The Geography of You and Me (19 page)

When the bell above the door cut through the low hum of the computers and the whistle of the cappuccino maker, he looked up a bit reluctantly.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her. It was that he’d known even when he’d first gotten her e-mail a couple of weeks ago—on January 1, as if he were a resolution, a way to start the year off right—that he would feel this way when he saw her.

Standing there in the doorway in a red coat with her hair in two long braids, a light went on inside him, as he’d known it would. She was beautiful, startlingly so, and she stood out brightly against the background of the coffee shop, her smile broadening at the sight of him.

She was the one who’d asked to meet. After weeks of perfunctory voice mails and the occasional text, she’d
e-mailed to say that she’d be in Berkeley for a few days. He assumed she was looking at the school, but it was impossible to know for sure with her. She could have just as easily been meeting friends or attending a protest or consulting a psychic. And even if she
were
here for him, it could have just as easily been to break up with him as propose to him. With Paisley, you just never really knew.

When she was near enough to the table, Owen half-stood, still unsure how to greet her. If there was an etiquette for seeing your not-quite-ex-girlfriend after six weeks of not-quite-avoiding-each-other, then he wasn’t sure what it was.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, pulling out the chair across from him and reaching for his cup of coffee without asking. She smelled of cold air and cigarettes and pine trees, and she eyed him over the rim of the cup as she took a long sip.

“You too,” he said, the words a little stiff. “What’re you doing down here?”

“I’ve got a few different things going on,” she said, then shrugged. “And it’s been a while.”

“That’s true,” Owen said, trying to think of what might come after that, but she saved him by scraping back her chair and getting to her feet.

“Need another?” she asked, waving at the chalkboard menu.

He shook his head. “I’m okay.”

From across the crowded shop, he watched her laughing at
something the guy behind the counter was saying, and he waited to feel a twitch of annoyance, but there was nothing, only a weariness that made him feel sleepy, in spite of all the caffeine.

He flicked his eyes back over the window, where the sun was nearly gone, the light cold and gray.

He wondered what time it was in Edinburgh.

When Paisley returned, she set down her mug and smiled at him, but rather than pick up speed, his heart seemed to slow down. And he knew then, for sure, that what he’d chalked up to distance was actually something deeper. Because even this—being so close to her—was no longer the same. That light he’d felt when he first saw her—he understood now that it was only a lightbulb. It was quick and easy, full of electricity, but there was something artificial about it.

What he wanted was fire: heat and spark and flame.

Across the table, Paisley was saying something about the trip down, but when Owen met her eyes, something in his expression made the words fall away. Her mouth formed an
O
—the start of a question—but before she could voice it, he leaned forward.

“Paisley,” he said quietly, and a look of surprise passed over her face.

Outside, it was just getting dark.

In Prague, Lucy walked.

This was her first trip to continental Europe. It was her first time at the opera and her first glimpse of the Charles Bridge. It was her first visit to the biggest castle in the world and her first parentally sanctioned taste of beer, served in a mug so big she had to hold it with two hands. It was her first proper puppet show, the dangling legs of the marionette dancing wildly as a street performer with kind eyes and wrinkled hands commanded it, and it was her first introduction to Kafka. They hadn’t even made it out of the airport when she asked Dad for enough korunas to buy an English-language copy of
The Metamorphosis
.

She was under no great illusion about why her parents had brought her along, for the first time ever, on one of their trips. Just over a week ago, they’d broken the news to her that they’d be moving again. This time, to London.

“That job,” Dad had said, examining his tie. “The one
from before? The other guy didn’t work out, so it’s opened up again.…”

“And they offered it to you,” Lucy said flatly.

“And they offered it to me.”

“And you want to take it.”

He coughed. “I’ve already taken it, actually.”

She knew they expected her to be furious. Here they were, pulling her from a school only five months after they’d dropped her into it, yanking her away again less than half a year after they’d separated her from her home.

But Lucy simply couldn’t muster the expected anger. Her heart was still too heavy for arguments or fireworks; instead, she just sat there feeling resigned—thinking of Liam, who hadn’t been able to look at her since she’d broken up with him; of Arthur’s Seat, with its views of the city; and the town house with the red door, which sat on a street shaped like a croissant—and listening as her parents strung out a long chain of promises.

“We’ve found a mews house in Notting Hill,” Dad was saying. “Very nice little place.”

“And there’s a lovely school nearby,” Mom told her.

“And we’ll wait until spring break,” said Dad, “so it won’t be as disruptive.”

“And to make it up to you, we were thinking maybe a little holiday was in order,” Mom had said, her smile too bright. “What do you think about Prague?”

So the weekend was a three-day apology tour. But even so, this did nothing to squash Lucy’s enthusiasm for the
great buzzing city with its sweeping plazas and oddly shaped buildings and swaying groups of drunken tourists.

As it turned out, Prague in February meant a low gray sky and fits of stinging rain, but Lucy didn’t mind that, either. All weekend, the three of them dashed from one museum or gallery to another, moving through squares filled with people and umbrellas. Her whole life, she’d been surrounded by this kind of art; she’d grown up within miles of not just the Met, but also the Guggenheim and the Whitney, the MoMA and the Frick. But they’d never gone together. Not once. Her parents’ lives had always seemed to run parallel to their children’s. They weren’t so much a constellation, the five of them, as a series of scattered stars. There had always been something far-flung about their family, even when they were all in the same place.

Yet here they were now, meandering through the National Gallery in Prague together, spread out along a marble corridor until one of them called for the others, and they all three huddled together before a framed canvas, murmuring their thoughts.

“What did you think?” Mom asked Lucy afterward, moving over to share her umbrella as they stepped outside into the silvery rain.

“I loved it,” she said, and then the words tumbled out before she had a chance to weigh them: “We should have done that more back home.”

“You used to go to the Met all the time,” Mom said, glancing over at her.

The rain beat on the umbrella, and Lucy spoke over the noise of it. “I meant together.”

Mom paused, just briefly, but enough to fall behind. When Lucy turned back, she could see the rain making maroon polka dots across the shoulders of her red coat. After a moment, she shook her head, as if clearing water from her ear, then stepped forward to duck underneath the umbrella again. Up ahead, Dad was already pushing through the crowd, his black coat disappearing.

“There are plenty of museums in London, too,” Mom said, looping an arm around Lucy’s waist, and then together, they hurried to catch up, the rain falling in sheets all around them.

In Portland, Owen dreamed.

The rain was loud against the thin roof of the motel, and he woke with a start, the memory of his mother still with him. He felt around for the alarm clock, spinning it so that the red numbers shone in his direction. It was 5:43
AM
, and the light that leaked in around the brownish curtains was pale and new.

In the next bed, his father was still sleeping, his breathing soft. Owen propped himself up on his elbows, still rattled by the dream, where his mother had been pinning plastic stars to the roof of the red Honda, which flew off one by one as they drove away from her, scattering in the wind.

Now he swung his legs off the bed and rubbed his eyes. On the floor beside him, Bartleby rustled in his shoebox. Owen stood, slipped on a pair of sneakers, and grabbed a sweatshirt, then opened the door to the hallway, pressing it closed behind him with a quiet click. At the end of a
hall lined with dozens of identical doors, there was a small terrace, which was littered with cigarette butts. Owen stepped outside and sat down on the edge of it, so that his head was shielded from the rain even as the toes of his sneakers quickly soaked through. He didn’t mind; the cool air felt nice, and the rain smelled like morning.

The terrace looked out over a huddled collection of blue trash cans, which were arranged haphazardly along the perimeter of the parking lot. But beyond that, over the tops of the trees, he could see the mountains. As the sky paled all around them, their outlines grew sharper, like a photo coming into focus. Owen leaned forward to pick at a loose thread on one of his shoes, letting out a sigh he’d been holding for what felt like days.

They hadn’t been here for very long. This time, they hadn’t rented an apartment. They hadn’t looked for schools, either. They knew the drill now. You didn’t arrive at a place and get attached. You didn’t give yourself time to picture a life there, to see a future. You didn’t develop routines. You didn’t get to know anyone too well.

You didn’t come to a full stop.

In the end, San Francisco had lasted a couple of weeks less than Tahoe. Just after New Year’s, Dad had found a temp job at an office supply company in Oakland, where he mostly transferred calls and input numbers into endless spreadsheets. But when that ended a month later, there was nothing else, and before long, it was time to move on again. So they were en route to rainy Seattle, where Dad
had a tenuous lead on an actual building job. But they’d decided to spend three days in Portland on the way, just in case something turned up there. Because the thought of making it all the way up to Seattle only to have the job fall through was almost too much to bear.

Dad had insisted they wait for Owen’s spring break. That way, they’d have a whole week to figure things out without him missing too much school. Owen didn’t have the heart to tell him that every district had a different week off, which meant the dates might not line up as well for the next school wherever they landed. But it didn’t matter, anyway. They both knew he would graduate easily enough. That wasn’t the point. It was more an issue of finding an actual graduation to attend.

“I don’t care about that,” Owen said. “The whole cap and gown thing, the diploma. It’s not like it means anything.”

“It’s symbolic,” Dad insisted. “It’s a moment.”

What he didn’t say, but what they both knew, was that his mother would have loved it: the cap and gown, the walk across the stage, the rolled baton of a diploma, all of it. Owen knew she would have been in the first row. She would have been clapping the loudest.

And he had no interest in attending a ceremony that didn’t include her.

That much, he knew. The rest was a bit harder to figure out right now. How could he know what the next year might hold when he didn’t even know about the next
week? At some point, they’d find a town, and in that town, they’d find a place to live, and near that place, they’d find a school. There would be one more round of making new friends that wouldn’t last, and going to classes where he already knew the answers, and it would all end with a graduation ceremony that he had no interest in attending.

But after that? It was hard to tell. Weeks from now, he’d have six answers to the six questions he’d sent out into the world in the form of college applications. An e-mail would arrive with a link to discover the news, and at the same time, six different envelopes would start to arrive at the house in Pennsylvania, which still sat snow-covered and empty, the For Sale sign in the front yard probably beginning to rust. One of their neighbors had been forwarding the mail whenever they landed somewhere long enough to receive it, and hopefully by then, they’d have an address that was a bit more permanent. But at the moment, Owen wasn’t so sure it mattered, anyway. His future wouldn’t be determined by the click of a mouse or whether the envelopes that arrived were fat or thin. It would depend on when his father got a job, and where they finally settled down; it would be decided not by things like class size and dorm rooms and cafeteria food, but by how many days passed without his dad pulling the last cigarette from the box, measured by the moment when he could listen to a particular song on the radio without his eyes going misty and his fingers going tight on the wheel.

Next year, Owen might be in Portland or Seattle, San
Francisco or San Diego. He might be with his dad in some broken-down apartment or still on the road or in a college classroom somewhere. Right here in this parking lot, the rain coming down in sheets all around him, it was impossible to know for sure.

What he did know was this: Tomorrow, they would get back into the red Honda. They’d take turns choosing a radio station and stop for burgers when they got hungry, leaving the greasy bags strewn across the floor, though they both knew it would have driven her nuts; they reveled in her invisible annoyance, as if it were a sign that she was still with them. They’d arrive in Seattle in need of a shower and some sleep, and then they’d start the same weary search for jobs and schools and houses, all the various pieces that somehow added up to a life.

But for now, Owen left the rain-soaked mountains and the cold pavement behind, moving back through the silent hallway to their room. As he tiptoed past his sleeping father—the thatch of light hair the only thing visible beneath a pile of covers—he wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. He wasn’t thinking about college acceptance letters or graduation or even Seattle. For once, as he kicked off his soggy sneakers and pulled the rough sheets back over him, he was just relieved to be here and now, in this bleak, colorless motel room, with only his dad and his turtle for company, a strange and slow-moving trio, a passing version of home.