The Geography of You and Me

For a moment, he allowed himself to think of her. It had been five weeks since her last e-mail. It hadn’t been a good-bye, exactly—nothing as dramatic as that. There was no signing off, no grand farewell, no bitter questions about why he’d stopped writing. One day there was an e-mail from her, completely and utterly normal, and then, just like that, they stopped, their correspondence ending the same way this whole thing had started: all at once.

But it wasn’t her fault. One day, not long after he’d mailed his second postcard from Tahoe, she’d sent him an e-mail about how much she was loving Edinburgh, how she’d visited the castle and seen the city from the top of a mountain called Arthur’s Seat. After reading it, he walked down to one of the many gift shops in town and flipped through the various postcard options. He’d already sent her two: the first, a photo of the lake at sunset with news that they would be staying here; the second, the same lake in shades of green and blue, with a joke about the Loch Ness Monster. But now, as he looked through the rest, he realized they were all the same: the lake under a pink sky, under an orange sky, under a sky so clear that the water was like glass. After a while, the repetition of the display started to hurt his eyes as he flipped through the many options, and he realized there was nothing new here to show Lucy, and that maybe the sending of postcards had come to an end.

But back at the apartment, he couldn’t bring himself to respond to her e-mail. A rhythm had been established where a postcard from him sparked an e-mail from her and vice versa. His were always lighthearted notes from the places they’d visited, scrawled in the limited space on the back of the cards, whereas hers tended to be longer and slightly rambling, unrestricted by the confines of paper. But sitting there with the cursor blinking at him, he wasn’t sure what to say. There was something too immediate about an e-mail, the idea that she might get it in mere moments, that just one click of the mouse would make it appear on her screen in an instant, like magic. He realized how much he preferred the safety of a letter, the physicality of it, the distance it had to cross on its way from here to there, which felt honest and somehow more real.

That week, he sat down at his computer every single morning, fully intending to e-mail her. But the days passed without him producing so much as a draft. He kept half-expecting her to write again, something new that might inspire a response from him, but nothing ever came, and he started to worry that maybe she’d moved on. After all, here in Tahoe, he had a new school and a new life, and he knew that five thousand miles away, she must be busy with her own version of these things, too.

Then, a week after her last e-mail, he met Paisley.

She sat beside him now, rubbing her mittened hands together. The moon hovered low over the lake, and when Owen blew out, his breath hung in the air.

“So he’s still talking about moving on then?” she asked, and he nodded, feeling guilty, though he knew she was used to this: Tahoe was a revolving door of a town, and for someone like Paisley, who had lived here forever, this was simply a way of life: the coming and the going, the hellos and good-byes. Still, he knew it couldn’t be easy for her.

“Unless he miraculously gets a job in the next couple weeks,” he said. “Or unless the house sells.”

“Any bites?” she asked hopefully, but he shook his head. This was the worst part of it, knowing that the house—their house—was just sitting out there, completely empty, the answer to all their problems, if only someone would buy it. But it wasn’t just about the money. To the Buckleys, it was so much more than just a house; it was a dream home, a monument, a shrine. And they couldn’t understand why nobody else could see that, too. It was hard not to take it personally.

“We just decided to go down to San Francisco for the weekend, actually,” he told Paisley. “To see if we like it.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And if you do?”

“I think,” he said with a little shrug, “there’s a decent chance we’ll be down there for good pretty soon. Probably by Christmas, so I can pick up at a new school right after the break.”

She nodded, her expression hard to read. “You’ve never been before, right?”

Owen shook his head.

“You know my dad lives around there,” she said. “So I usually go down in the summers. A few random weekends, too. It’s one of my favorite places in the world.” She fixed her pale eyes on his, studying him for a moment. “I bet you’ll love it, too.”

She sounded so resigned that Owen put a mittened hand over hers. “It’s not for sure,” he said, but she only shrugged.

“You’ll love it,” she repeated, blinking away the thick flakes of snow. “Everyone leaves their heart in San Francisco.”

Owen was fairly certain that he and his dad had both left their hearts back in Pennsylvania, but he didn’t say this. He and Paisley had spent long stretches of time discussing things like oil spills and wars in the Middle East, but he always found himself stumbling over all those things that were closer to home: My mother is dead, my father is sad, I once met this girl…