The Geography of You and Me(4)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

The sound came again, and Owen stood this time, moving over to the door and pressing his ear against it. He knocked back, and they both listened. Even from where she was still sitting numbly in the middle of the floor, Lucy could hear the muffled voices outside, followed by the scrape of something metal. After a moment, she rose to her feet, too, and without a word, without even looking at each other, they stood there like that, shoulder to shoulder, like a couple of astronauts at the end of a long journey, waiting for the doors to open so they could step out into a dazzling new world.

2

The day had started in darkness, too. Owen had woken before the sun was up, just as he had for the last forty-two mornings, jolted out of sleep with the feel of something heavy on his chest, a weight that pressed down on him like a fist. He blinked at the unfamiliar ceiling, the faint cracks that formed a sort of map, and the fly that roved between them, like an X marking some unknowable spot.

In the next room, he could hear the clink of a coffee mug, and he knew his father was awake, too. The last six weeks had turned them into bleary-eyed insomniacs, their days as shapeless as their nights, so that one simply bled into the other. It seemed fitting that they were living underground now; what better place for a couple of ghosts?

His new room was less than half the size of his old one back in their sprawling, sun-drenched house in rural Pennsylvania, where he’d been woken each morning by the sparrows just outside his window. Now he listened to a couple of pigeons squabbling against the narrow panel of glass near the ceiling, where the protective metal bars made what little light there was fall across his bed in slats.

When he emerged into the hallway that separated his room from his father’s and led back to the small kitchen and sitting area, Owen caught a whiff of smoke, and the intensity of it, the vividness of the memory, almost took his knees out from under him. He followed the scent to the living room, where he found his father sitting on the couch, hunched over a mug that was serving as a makeshift ashtray.

“I didn’t think you’d be up,” he said, stabbing out the cigarette with a guilty expression. He ran a hand through his hair, which was just a shade or two darker than Owen’s, then sat back and rubbed his eyes.

“I didn’t really sleep,” Owen admitted, collapsing into the rocking chair across from him. He closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. He couldn’t help himself; they’d been his mother’s cigarettes, and the scent clenched at something inside him. There’d been eight left when she died, the crumpled pack recovered from the accident site and returned to them along with her wallet and keys and a few other odds and ends, and though his father didn’t usually smoke, there were now only two. Owen could chart the bad days in this way, by the tang of smoke in the mornings, the best and worst reminder of her—one of the only ones left.

“You always hated these,” Owen said, picking up the nearly empty box and spinning it in his hands. His father smiled faintly.

“Terrible habit—it drove me crazy,” he agreed, then shook his head. “I always said it would kill her.”

Owen lowered his eyes but couldn’t help picturing the police report, the theory that she’d been distracted while trying to light a cigarette. They’d found the car upside down in a ditch. The box was ten yards away.

“I thought I’d head out to Brooklyn today,” Dad said, a forced casualness to his voice, though Owen knew what that really meant, knew exactly where he was going and why. “You’ll be okay on your own?”

Owen thought about asking whether he might like some company, but he already knew the answer. He’d seen the flowers resting on the kitchen counter last night, still wrapped in cellophane and already wilting. It was their anniversary; the day didn’t belong to Owen. He ran a hand over the pack of cigarettes and nodded.

“We’ll have dinner when I get back,” Dad said, then picked up the ash-filled mug and padded out into the kitchen. “Anything you want.”

“Great,” Owen called, and then before he could think better of it, he slid one of the last two cigarettes from the pack, twirled it once between his fingers, and tucked it into his pocket without quite knowing why.

In the doorway to his bedroom, he paused. They’d been here nearly a month now, but the room was still lined with boxes, most of them half-open, the cardboard flaps spread out like wings. This sort of thing would have driven his mother crazy, and he couldn’t help smiling as he imagined what her reaction would be, a mix of exasperation and bemusement. She’d always kept things so tidy at home, the counters sparkling and the floors dust-free, and Owen was suddenly glad she couldn’t see this place, with its dim lighting and peeling paint, the mold that caked the spaces between bathroom tiles and the dingy appliances in the kitchen.

Whenever Owen used to complain about cleaning his room or having to do the dishes the moment they were finished with dinner, Mom would cuff him playfully on the head. “Our home is a reflection of who we are,” she’d say in a singsong voice.

“Right,” Owen would shoot back. “And I’m a mess.”

“You are not,” she’d say, laughing. “You’re perfect.”

“Perfectly messy,” Dad would say.

She used to make them take off their shoes in the laundry room, only ever smoked on the back porch, and kept the pillows on the couches from getting too squashed. Dad said it had always been this way, from the moment they bought the house, the two of them thrilled to finally own something so permanent after so much time on the road.

They’d spent the previous two years traveling around in a rickety van with all their worldly belongings stashed in the back. They’d crisscrossed the country, camping out under the stars or sleeping curled in the backseat, whittling away their meager savings as they made their way across every state but Hawaii and Alaska. They’d seen Mount Rushmore and Grand Teton, driven up the California coast and gone fishing in the Florida Keys. They’d been to New Orleans and Bar Harbor and Mackinac Island, Charleston and Austin and Napa, traveling until they ran out of land, and money, too. It was only then that they returned to Pennsylvania, where they’d both grown up—and where it was time to grow up for a second time—and settled down for good.

But in spite of all the stories he’d heard of their years on the road, Owen had never been much of anywhere. His parents seemed to have gotten it out of their system by the time he came along, and they were content to be in one place. They had a house with a porch and a yard with an apple tree; there was a swingset around the side and a neighboring field of grazing horses. They had a round kitchen table just big enough for three, a door the perfect size for a wreath at Christmastime, and enough nooks and crannies for long and drawn-out games of hide-and-seek. There was nowhere else they ever wanted to be.