The Geography of You and Me(17)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

Then, on the third day, George appeared at the door to help carry her suitcase downstairs and hail her a cab to the airport.

Just before midnight on the day the lights came back, her parents had finally gotten through to her. Lucy had been asleep already, and when she reached for her phone and saw a jumble of numbers too long to be local, she picked it up.

It was morning in Paris, and her parents were on two separate extensions, wide-awake and talking over each other.

“Lucy,” her dad kept saying. “Luce, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said groggily, sitting up in bed. “Just sleepy.”

“We’ve been trying and trying,” Mom said, her usually clipped accent softened by worry. “You gave us such a fright.”

“I couldn’t get through,” Lucy explained, fully awake now. “The circuits were all busy. But it’s fine. I’m okay.”

“Listen,” Dad said, his voice brisk and businesslike. “We want to hear all about it. But first, you should know that I called the airline.…”

Lucy waited for them to say they were coming home early, that they’d fought tooth and nail to get a flight back. She’d heard on the news earlier that the airports were all overrun with stranded travelers who had been stuck there since the power went out, living on pretzels and sleeping at the gates, and that it would take days for the schedules to return to normal. But her father must have figured something out, must surely know the type of people who could help, or at least the type of people who knew other people, and Lucy felt a sudden rush of gratitude for her parents, who must have been trying to get home to her this whole time.

“… and I’ve got you on a flight to London on Friday,” Dad was saying, and Lucy’s mouth fell open as she pressed the phone closer to her ear. “I know you’ve got school that day, but how much do they actually cover in the first week anyway, right?”

“London?” she said, her voice cracking.

“Yes, London,” Dad said impatiently, as if this were a ridiculous question. “Your mother and I are going tomorrow, and you’ll meet us there on Friday.”

Lucy was torn between the impulse to simply agree—in case they might change their minds—and the urge to ask a thousand more questions. “Uh, why…?”

“We want to see you, darling,” her mother said. “We want to be sure you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” she said again. “I just—”

“Coming home was out of the question,” Dad said, once again businesslike. “So we’d like you to meet us there.”

Lucy felt like laughing. On the scale of worldwide emergencies, nothing could have given her a truer sense for where the blackout ranked: not urgent enough for her parents to interrupt a trip but just alarming enough for them to buy her a plane ticket.

The details were discussed and the rest of the plans arranged. Lucy would miss two days of school, but she’d be getting a cultural experience, which seemed like justification enough. She thought of her earlier trips over, once when she was five and once when she was eight. The first time had been during Christmas; they’d visited her grandmother in the stately town house where her mother had grown up, and all toured the city together: the ornate parliament buildings and the giant clock that towered over them, Oxford Street with its garlands and wreaths, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Lucy had sung carols, her voice loud and warbling beside her mother’s more melodic one.

They went again three years later, just after her grandmother had passed away, a more somber trip that was spent mostly in the living room of the old town house, nodding politely to black-clad strangers and playing cards on the floor with her brothers.

Still, she had loved it there. It was the thing that—even more than the postcards—had sparked her obsession with travel. When she was little, she’d believed the whole world—or at least all its cities—would look exactly like New York: tall and jagged and imposing. She had no other basis for comparison, and it seemed only logical that a city was a city, just as a farm was a farm, and a mountain was a mountain. But London was completely different from what she’d imagined; it was regal and charming, stately and enchanting, and she’d fallen under its spell from the moment she arrived.

So she was excited to be going back now. It wasn’t Paris and it wasn’t Cape Town. It wasn’t Sydney or Rio. And it wasn’t anywhere new.

But it was definitely Somewhere.

And there was nobody she wanted to tell more than Owen. But she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to knock on the door of the basement apartment. And as often as she’d lingered in the lobby, making small talk with the doormen, she still hadn’t run into him again.

Even now, as she waited on the curb while George tried to flag down a cab, she couldn’t help glancing back toward the lobby one last time, hoping he might appear. But there was no sign of him, and there hadn’t been in three days.

It was almost as if she’d made him up entirely.

At the airport, she sat at the gate and watched out the window as the planes took off, trying to decide whether it was nerves or excitement that was making her stomach churn. This was what she’d wanted, of course, but it wasn’t how she’d pictured it happening: being sent rather than invited, summoned rather than whisked away.

On the plane, she sank low in her seat, looking out the window while the other passengers boarded. Her thoughts drifted to Owen again, the way his eyes had flashed when he spoke about traveling the country, and she was so focused on this, so lost in the memory of him, that when someone sat down heavily beside her and she turned to find that it wasn’t him—that it was, instead, an old Englishman with red cheeks and whiskers in his nose—she was more surprised than it made sense to be.

She slept the whole way across the Atlantic, the night passing as the ocean slipped by beneath the plane, and when she woke, it was to discover that they’d caught up with the morning, the light streaming through the oval windows all up and down the length of the plane. She rubbed her eyes and squinted out at the clouds that tumbled over the city, and the fine mist of rain that clung to the plane as they landed.

There was a car waiting for her just outside the arrivals area, and she sat in the backseat and tried to keep her bleary eyes open as it glided through the rainy London streets. She realized how much she’d forgotten in the last eight years; it was half a lifetime ago that she was here, and only now did she recall the quirky details of the place: the colorful doors and the painted signs on the pubs, the roundabouts and the lampposts, the buildings that stood shoulder to shoulder along the winding streets.