The Geography of You and Me(26)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

“It seems your daughter has fallen for a traveling salesman,” she said to Dad, who was too busy with his copy of The Guardian to respond.

“He’s just a friend,” Lucy said a bit too quickly, sliding the postcard toward the edge of the table and then lifting the corner to take a quick peek, like a poker player guarding his cards.

“Well, I think it’s romantic,” Mom said. “Nobody writes each other anymore. It’s all just e-mails and faxes.”

Dad glanced up. “Nobody faxes anymore, either.”

“Another lost art,” Mom said with an exaggerated sigh, and he winked at her.

“I’ll fax you anytime.”

Lucy groaned. “Please stop.”

But it was true. There were never any e-mails from him. No letters, either. It was always, always the postcards—several a week, when he was still on the road, places she could track on a map as he’d moved steadily west—but lately there’d hardly even been any of those. Now that Owen and his father were planning to stay in Lake Tahoe—as he’d written to tell her a couple of weeks ago—Lucy understood that the postcard gimmick had probably run its course. She also realized that any mail from him might be slower in coming now that she was all the way in Scotland, almost five thousand miles from the little lake town that straddled the border between California and Nevada. But she’d hoped they’d at least move the conversation over to e-mail. She never imagined the whole thing might just taper off entirely.

This was the first she’d heard from him in more than a week, in spite of the three e-mails she’d sent, filled with questions about his new home in Tahoe and updates about their move to Edinburgh. She realized he was probably busy with a new school and a new house and a new life, but she was surprised by how fiercely she wanted to know about it all, and how difficult it was to wait and wait amid such crashing silence.

Maybe, she told herself, he just wasn’t much of a correspondent. After all, her brothers were in California, too, and though they had a pretty questionable grasp of the time difference—especially Charlie, who’d called more than once in the middle of the night—even they managed to e-mail every couple of days. She supposed it was possible that Owen still didn’t have wireless access, but that seemed like a thin excuse, even to her. Maybe he just wasn’t a big fan of e-mail. It made sense; even his postcards were never very long. Or maybe he was simply a guy who was at his best in person. (That she suspected she was at her best from a distance was something she was trying not to think too hard about.)

While her parents finished their breakfast, Lucy flipped over the long-awaited card, which read simply:

Loch Ness = 745 feet deep

Lake Tahoe = 1,644 feet deep

Your new monster pal would love it here. I bet you would, too.

Before leaving for school, she slipped the note into the pocket of her blazer. When she stepped outside the bright red door of the town house, she was met by a wind far too cold and damp for any October she knew, and she felt a small shiver go through her. She shoved her hands deep in her pockets and ran her thumb along the rough edges of the postcard, which was somehow reassuring.

It was nearly eight by now, but all along the crescent of stone buildings that neighbored theirs, the street lamps were still on, burning little pockets of light into the morning haze. When they first found out they’d be moving to Edinburgh, this was just one of the many things her parents had seemed to find discouraging.

“I heard there are only five or six hours of daylight in the winter,” Mom said, looking miserable. “They might as well be sending us to Siberia.”

“It won’t be as bad as all that,” Dad had told her, but Lucy could tell from the set of his mouth that he was only trying to make the best of it. She’d overheard them arguing after he lost out on the position in London. As a consolation prize, they’d offered him some big job in the Edinburgh office, and he’d accepted out of an odd sense of duty, as well as the hope that it might soon lead to better things.

“Scotland?” Mom kept repeating as if she couldn’t quite believe it, and Lucy tried hard not to laugh at her accent, which had grown softer after all these years in New York, but which was now suddenly as crisp and precise as if she were speaking to the queen.

“I’ve heard it’s nice,” Dad said weakly, and Mom wrinkled her nose.

“I went once when I was Lucy’s age.”

“And?” he asked, looking hopeful.

“And the whole city smelled like stew.”

“Stew?”

“Stew,” Mom confirmed.

Now that they were here, Lucy could sort of see what she meant. There was definitely something heavy in the air, something vaguely soupy, but she only ever caught a whiff of it from time to time, when the winds shifted and the scent of the North Sea—full of salt and brine—drifted inland. She didn’t mind it, though. And she didn’t mind the darkness, either. Just as sunshine and clear skies suited beach towns, the constant rain and perpetual clouds suited Edinburgh, with its stone buildings and churches, its uneven cobblestone streets and the enormous castle that sat high above it all. There was something utterly romantic about it, as if you’d fallen straight into a fairy tale.

Once she reached Princes Street, Lucy waited for the bus beneath the gaze of the castle, a fortress of stone perched on a cliff above the gardens that separated the old section of the city from the new one. When the bus arrived, she was lucky to find a seat, shouldering in between two women in woolly jackets who proceeded to talk around her in nearly indecipherable accents. On her first day, Lucy had brought along her old copy of The Catcher in the Rye, clinging to that small piece of New York as she rode through the unfamiliar city. But halfway there, she lowered it to watch the buildings whip past the windows, and she hadn’t picked it up since. There was too much to see.

Her school was all the way across town, tucked just behind a huge rounded hill that rose between the city and the sea. The sun had climbed higher now, pushing through the fog so that the world had turned from gray to gold, and when the bus hissed to a stop across the street from the school, Lucy stepped off behind a cluster of younger students, all of them chattering away as they hurried through the gate.

She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d been expecting when she first arrived. She’d been kidding about the kilts and bagpipes in her e-mail to Owen, but there was still a little part of her that half expected to be greeted by a bunch of red-bearded, plaid-wearing, whiskey-swigging classmates. As it turned out, though, Scottish schools weren’t all that different from American ones—at least not in any of the ways that were important. The uniforms were worse—knee-length skirts and boxy blazers—and the accents of her teachers forced her to pay close attention, straining to find something recognizable inside all those rolling r’s and twisted vowels. But the students were pretty much the same. The boys played rugby instead of football, and everyone talked about sneaking their parents’ whiskey instead of their parents’ beer on the weekends, but these were all small things.