The Geography of You and Me(33)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

She’d never mentioned Owen to them, either, but somehow he was there all the same, in the air, in the house, in the raised eyebrows each time the mail arrived without a postcard. They hadn’t known about him, exactly, but they’d worked it out for themselves, watching those notes arrive one by one, and now that they’d stopped, she sensed a certain sympathy in their eyes.

And so she didn’t tell them about Liam, she supposed, out of a weird, misplaced loyalty for Owen. Or maybe it was guilt. It was hard to tell.

When she reached over to flick on the light switch, she noticed the small pile of mail at her feet, which had been tipped through the slot. She stooped to pick it up, shuffling through the catalogs and bills on her way to the kitchen, and when she tossed the whole mess of paper down on the wooden table, a postcard slipped out of the pile.

Lucy froze, staring at the corner, where a sliver of sky was peeking out. She knew it couldn’t be from Owen—it had been a couple of months since she’d heard from him—but still, her heart was pounding like crazy. She nudged at the envelope on top of it, revealing a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, and she felt whatever had been bubbling up inside of her suddenly deflate.

Of course, she thought. It was about the wedding. Her cousin Caitie was getting married in San Francisco the weekend before Christmas, and she and her parents were flying out to meet her brothers there in just a couple of weeks. Lucy had been looking forward to it. Not the wedding itself as much as being back in America. She’d fallen in love with Scotland in a way she hadn’t expected, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t excited to return to the familiar: peanut butter and pretzels, cinnamon gum and root beer. Faucets that combined hot and cold water, accents that she didn’t have to strain to understand, and good—or even just decent—Mexican food. They would be returning to Edinburgh just before New Year’s, and she already knew that when the time came, she’d be anxious to come back, but still, she was looking forward to the trip, and to seeing her brothers especially.

She flipped the postcard over, expecting to find some sort of information about the rehearsal dinner or the bridal luncheon, but instead, she was astonished to find Owen’s tiny handwriting, a few cramped words printed across the middle of the white square. She brought it closer to her face, her eyes wide and unblinking as she read.

I couldn’t arrive in a new city without dropping you a line. It looks like we’ll be moving here for good once the semester is over. Hopefully this one will stick, but we’ll see how it goes.…

Hope you and Nessie are well.

P.S. We picked up a stray turtle on the way down here. I named him Bartleby. (There are a great many things he prefers not to do.)

The next morning, Lucy was waiting near the window in the front hallway when a black cab pulled up, and she watched impatiently as her parents stepped out. They’d barely made it up the steps when she opened the door, still in her pajamas.

“Hi,” Mom said, clearly surprised by the greeting. The natural follow-up to this would be something like Did you miss us?, but they’d long ago stopped asking that, and Lucy had stopped expecting it.

“How was your trip?” she asked as they walked into the front entryway. Dad set down his bags and gave her a funny look.

“What happened?” he asked, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose with a weary expression. “You’re reminding me way too much of your brothers right now. Did you have a party? Did something get broken?”

“No, it’s not that,” Lucy said, though she knew he wasn’t serious. “I was just wondering about San Francisco.”

“It’s a large city in California,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.

“No, I mean… we’ll have some free time when we’re there, right?”

They were heading toward the kitchen, and Lucy trailed after them.

“The wedding’s up in Napa, actually,” Mom said. “At a vineyard.”

“Napa: a wine region north of San Francisco,” Dad chimed in unhelpfully.

“We’re only in the city for a night to get over our jet lag,” Mom continued, setting her purse down on the counter. “Then we head up to Napa and meet up with your brothers for the wedding and Christmas.” She turned around. “Why do you ask?”

But Lucy was already gone.

One night, she was thinking, as she flew up the stairs. One night.

13

After three months of living above a Mexican restaurant, Owen would have been happy to never see another bowl of salsa again. But here he was now, waiting for Lucy with a basket of chips in front of him and the sounds of a mariachi band drifting from the bar area, while his leg bobbed nervously beneath the table.

He’d been relieved to find that their new apartment sat above a knitting store, which meant it was mercifully free of smells of any kind, except for the faint earthy scent of Bartleby, the little box turtle they’d found in a parking lot outside Sacramento. After nearly running him over, they’d fixed him up with a shoe box full of fruit and vegetables for the rest of the drive—“the luxury suite,” Dad had called it—but now he roamed free around the apartment, occasionally getting wedged beneath the ratty couch that had come with the place. The landlord didn’t seem to mind this exception to the No Pets rule, nor did he care that Owen and his father couldn’t sign a long-term lease.

“Week to week is fine,” he’d assured them when they called in response to an online ad. “It was my mother’s place. I’m just trying to collect some rent off it until I’m ready to sell.”

This suited them just fine, since they weren’t sure how long they might be staying. Dad swore they’d be here at least through the spring semester, so that Owen could finish high school in one place.

“I’m sure I’ll find something soon,” he kept promising. “I’m not worried.”

Owen knew this wasn’t true, but he didn’t mind. He was just relieved to hear the determination in his father’s voice.

The new apartment was near the marina, and from their window, they could hear the sounds of the boats bumping against the docks and the seagulls calling out to each other. Owen wondered what his friends from home would think if they could see his life now, which was so unrecognizable from what it had been in Pennsylvania. Their e-mails had mostly stopped—he knew they must have given up on him by now—but he could still picture their days as clearly as if he were there, too: the exact location of their lockers in the senior hallway, their exact lunch table in the cafeteria, their exact seats in the back row of every classroom. It was strange and a little unsettling to think how easily Owen could have been there, too, and he tried to hold on to this whenever he worried too much about their current situation. Because in spite of everything that had happened since his mother died, all the bad luck and the good, he was still happy to have seen the things they’d seen.