The Geography of You and Me

But of course, there was nothing.

He reached for the stack of acceptance letters, shuffling them into a neat pile. Then he set them aside and grabbed the rest of the mail. As he sorted through old Christmas and birthday cards, bills and coupons and glossy magazines, he couldn’t help wondering whether his friends—if you could even still call them that—had gotten their letters, too. Both of them lived in this neighborhood, and it was strange to think that at this very moment, they were only blocks away, with no idea that Owen was nearby.

Last year, they’d hardly talked about college, and Owen knew he was the only one with dreams of getting out of Pennsylvania. But even if they ended up staying closer to home, Casey and Josh would still likely be splitting up, too, each going their separate ways, and it struck Owen now as inevitable, this distance between them. It would have happened anyway. He just happened to leave a year early. Even if nothing had changed at all, everything would still be about to; even if he’d stayed, they’d still be getting ready to say good-bye. They’d each go off to college, losing themselves in their new lives, seeing each other only at Thanksgiving or Christmas or during the summer. And then it would all go back to normal the way it always did with lifelong friends. As if no time had passed at all.

The point wasn’t the distance. It was the homecoming.

He turned over a catalog in his hands, staring at the photograph on the front: a mother and father and their young son. The perfect family. When he looked up again, he realized he wasn’t ready to venture any farther into the house just yet. He didn’t want to think about college or graduation, his mother or his father, Seattle or Pennsylvania or anywhere in between.

Instead, he reached for his phone. He would call his friends, and they would go for pizza at their favorite place, and he’d tell them about all of it: New York and Chicago, the endless roads through Iowa and Nebraska, the snow in Lake Tahoe, the diner where he’d worked, the months in San Francisco and their new house in Seattle.

He dialed Casey’s number first, and as the phone began to ring in his hand, he sifted absently through the mail, raking over the pile. He was nearly to the bottom when he spotted it: a postcard of Paris. Without thinking, he snapped the phone shut, hanging up before anyone could answer, and then he sat there staring at it in the fading light of the kitchen: the cathedral at the very center of the city.

Even before he flipped it over to find the note, he was thinking the very same thing: that he wished more than anything that she was here, too. And just like that, his heart—that dead thing inside of him—came to life again.





37


Lucy’s first instinct, when the elevator jolted to a stop, was to laugh.

Even before the floor had quit vibrating beneath their feet, hovering midway between the second and third floors of the Liberty department store, her three fellow travelers—an old man in a sweater vest and a young mother with her son, who couldn’t have been older than three—were giving her strange looks, as if she’d already cracked under the pressure of the situation, just four seconds in.

“The lift is stuck,” the little boy pointed out, tilting his head back to take in the ornate wooden carvings along the ceiling. The lights were still on, and when the woman hit the red button, a crackling voice was quick to come over the speaker.

“Are you in need of assistance?” someone asked in a clipped English accent.

“It’s stuck,” the boy said with more force this time. He accompanied this with a little stamp of his foot.

“We seem to have stopped,” his mother said, her mouth close to the speaker.

“Right,” said the voice. “We’re looking into it. Be back with you straightaway.”

Lucy was still shaking her head, unable to get rid of the smile on her face. The woman gave her a look as if to suggest she wasn’t taking this quite seriously enough, but she was quickly distracted by her son, who had started to cry, great heaving sobs that made his shoulders rise and fall. It built to such a pitch in the small space that the old man actually clapped his hands over his ears.

“Would anyone like a mint?” Lucy asked, digging through her bag, and the man glanced over at her, lowering his hands again.