The Geography of You and Me

“This is what we used to get home to you after every trip,” he said. “Now that you’ve become something of a traveler, too, I’m officially passing the baton.” He pulled her into a hug and kissed her on the forehead. “Say hi to New York for me.”


As she slid the card carefully from the folds of her wallet, she felt the lump at the bottom of the change purse. Over the past months, she’d become so used to the shape of it that she’d nearly forgotten what it was, but now she pulled it out, twisting the cigarette in her fingers. It was a little bit flattened now, crushed by the months spent tucked beneath all those heavy British coins, but it was still mostly intact, and she studied it, remembering how she’d found it the morning after the blackout. She brought it to her nose and inhaled deeply, thinking that it smelled a bit like Owen, and then—before the flight attendant could remind her that there was no smoking on board the plane—she wedged it back inside her wallet, her chest suddenly light.

Out the window, she could see that they were circling over Brooklyn now, but in the distance, the spiky outline of Manhattan rose up in an arrangement of towering buildings and valleys made out of vast green parks, all of it bordered by two rivers like a pair of cupped hands. As they dropped lower in the sky, she could see the outlines of roads and parking lots and backyards, all of them fanning out around the heart of the city, where people were busy going on with their lives, walking and eating and laughing and working, and somewhere below, in the middle of it all, there was Owen: nothing but a yellow dot from above, waiting just for her.





43


There was traffic on the way in from the airport. Owen leaned against the window of the bus as it inched toward the Lincoln Tunnel, watching the long chain of cars spitting clouds of exhaust into the afternoon heat. Above him, beyond the tunnel and across the Hudson River, the city seemed to shimmer. From where he sat behind the smudged glass, it looked almost like a mirage, the kind of place where you could forever draw closer without ever actually reaching it.

But Owen knew he’d get there eventually. And he had plenty of time. He wasn’t meeting Lucy until noon tomorrow, which meant he had the rest of the day to prepare. His dad had given him enough money for a cheap hotel room, but Owen planned to spend the night up on the roof anyway; if there was ever a place that had felt like home in the city, that was it, and there was nowhere else he’d rather be tonight.

The plan was simple. When he arrived at Port Authority, he’d take the subway up to Seventy-Second Street and see if the back door to the building was open. Sometimes, if you caught the maintenance guys at the right time, it was easy to slip in that way, and Owen had often gone that route just to avoid the uncomfortable splendor of the lobby. If it happened to be locked, he planned to walk in through the front door, say hello to whichever doorman was on duty, then walk straight over to the elevator like he belonged there, though it was obvious he never had. If anyone asked where he was going, he’d give Lucy’s name, which wasn’t a lie, since he’d be there to see her the next day, and then he’d head straight up to the roof.

In the morning, he’d go around the corner to the gym that was always offering free trials, and he’d take a shower, change into clean clothes, buy some flowers on the way back, and then wait for her in the lobby.

His head felt light as he thought about it, and in the cramped space of the bus, his knee jangled against the back of the seat in front of him. He’d been like this ever since Dad dropped him off at the airport this morning, giving him a bear hug and wishing him luck. On the flight, he’d been so rattled that he spilled his orange juice, drenching not only himself but the lady beside him. He still smelled faintly of sour citrus.

It wasn’t that he was nervous to see Lucy. It was more that he didn’t know what this was to her, and there was something scary in that. Just because he knew what he wanted now didn’t mean that she did, too. And just because he’d made up an excuse to fly all the way across the country didn’t mean that she was equally excited.

That first time, during the blackout, they’d met as strangers. Then in San Francisco, they’d met as friends, eager to find out whether the strange magnetic pull they felt toward each other was real or an illusion.

But this time, Owen wasn’t sure what to think.

When there was nothing but space between you, everything felt like a leap.

As the bus began to ease into the Lincoln Tunnel, the phrase came to him all at once, pulled from a memory like an echo: It is what it is.

He smiled as he remembered Lucy’s objection to the words, but he realized now that she was wrong. It was true that things could always change. But it was also true that some things remained as they were, and this was one of them: nine months ago, he’d met a girl in an elevator, and she’d been on his mind ever since.

All around him, the other passengers were blinking into the deep black of the tunnel, but not Owen. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he could see it just as clearly in the dark.





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