The Geography of You and Me (25 page)

June 7 was graduation day.

It took him a long time to meet his father’s gaze. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Really. But I can’t.…”

Dad tilted his head to one side, clearly confused. The conversation had started with Owen needing money, and now here he was refusing it. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not graduating.” Owen shook his head.
“I mean—I am, technically. But I’m not going to the ceremony.”

“Why not?” he asked. “It’s such a big deal.”

“Not to me,” Owen told him. “Not anymore.”

Dad’s eyes went soft behind his glasses as he finally understood. “Ah,” he said, blinking a few times. Outside, the sun emerged from behind the clouds, filling the room with an orangey light, and they sat there as the pancakes went cold on their plates and the clock on the wall—the one from their kitchen back home—marched ahead.

Eventually, Dad shrugged. “Well, who cares about a stupid cap and gown, anyway?”

“Thanks,” Owen said gratefully.

“Besides, she would have hated it,” he said. “All that pomp and ceremony.”

“Circumstance. Pomp and circumstance.”

“Whatever,” he said. “It’s the pomp that’s the real problem.”

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.”

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 close 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.

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.