The Geography of You and Me

Now Owen sat listening as the wash cycle ended and the machine beeped, the sound carrying upstairs. Out the window, a car slid past, and a few birds called back and forth, but otherwise there was nothing: just Owen, alone in his room, staring at his computer screen and trying to figure out what he’d been thinking.

There was no logical explanation for the e-mail he’d just sent, and he was suddenly remembering why, until now, he’d always stuck to postcards. With those, there was still time to change your mind: just after putting the pen down, or on the way to the mailbox, or at any point in between. But there was nothing to be done about the e-mail. With one click, it had gone flying across the miles, straight to Lucy’s computer, and there was no getting it back.

He closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead as the rain started up outside. It always seemed to be half raining here, something between a mist and drizzle, so that it felt like the sky was spitting at you. Owen watched for a few minutes, his thoughts wiped clean by the weather, then he stood up, grabbed his rain jacket, and headed outside.

At the corner, he caught a bus, watching the rain make patterns on the windows, and when he stepped off again downtown about twenty minutes later, the sun was trying its best to emerge, trimming the clouds in gold.

The fish market was crowded, as it had been that first weekend when he’d come here with his dad, the two of them standing at the edge as they took it all in: the slap of fish on paper, the people shouting their orders, the guy playing harmonica off to one side. There were fish flying through the air as vendors in stained aprons tossed them as casually as you would a baseball, and the smell of it made his eyes burn, but Owen had loved it right away, just as he’d loved this city from the moment they’d arrived. It wasn’t exactly home—not yet—but when they flew in last night, he’d looked out the window of the plane at the orange lights of the city, bounded by water and mountains, and he’d felt something deep within him settle.

For the first time in all their travels, he thought he could see a future here.

He’d told his friends that just a few days ago, over an enormous pizza, and they’d asked him about the ferries and the fish market and the university, and when he was done, they told him about their plans for next year, skipping like a record over the other things, the holes in his life that had caused holes in their friendship, before they stopped talking altogether and simply played video games until it got too late and they parted with promises to stay in touch better.

“It’s all you,” Josh teased him. “You’re the weak link here.”

“It’s my phone,” Owen had said with a grin. “It’s completely worthless. I’ll have to send you a postcard instead.”

They both laughed; they couldn’t have possibly known he was serious.

Now he left the chaos of the market behind, heading toward the water, and as he walked, he thought back to what Lucy had said about New York, how the only way to truly know the place was to see it from the ground up. When the gray waters of Puget Sound came into sight, dotted with ferries, he found himself thinking about the marina in San Francisco and the path along the Hudson River in New York, and how in all of these very different places, this was something that rarely changed: the same blue-gray water, the same rise and fall of the waves, the same smells of salt and fish.

He wondered if the harbor in Edinburgh was the same, too.

He hoped it was.

The rain picked up again, and Owen pulled at his hood.

He needed to figure out what to do about the e-mail.

The problem, of course, wasn’t so much what he’d written; it was what he was going to do about her response.

He didn’t regret what he’d said. After finding her postcard from Paris, he’d carried it with him all week, tucked in his back pocket like a good-luck charm, something to buoy him whenever he felt he was sinking under the weight of the task at hand: the dismantling of all of their memories. And by the time he’d gotten back to Seattle last night, he’d written and rewritten the e-mail in his mind enough times to know it by heart.

He apologized for what happened in San Francisco and explained that he’d ended things with Paisley and admitted that he thought of Lucy all the time even though they hadn’t been in touch.

I miss you, he’d written at the end. And I wish you were here, too.

That was when he should have hit Send.

But for some reason, he found himself writing one last line: By the way, I’m not sure if you’re still planning to be in New York for the summer, but I’ll actually be there the first week of June, so let me know and maybe we could meet up.…

And that, right there, was the problem.

Because not only did Owen have no plans whatsoever to be in New York City the first week of June, he also had no money and no way of getting there.

And no idea what he’d do if—against all odds—she actually wanted to see him.