The Geography of You and Me

“That job,” Dad had said, examining his tie. “The one from before? The other guy didn’t work out, so it’s opened up again.…”

“And they offered it to you,” Lucy said flatly.

“And they offered it to me.”

“And you want to take it.”

He coughed. “I’ve already taken it, actually.”

She knew they expected her to be furious. Here they were, pulling her from a school only five months after they’d dropped her into it, yanking her away again less than half a year after they’d separated her from her home.

But Lucy simply couldn’t muster the expected anger. Her heart was still too heavy for arguments or fireworks; instead, she just sat there feeling resigned—thinking of Liam, who hadn’t been able to look at her since she’d broken up with him; of Arthur’s Seat, with its views of the city; and the town house with the red door, which sat on a street shaped like a croissant—and listening as her parents strung out a long chain of promises.

“We’ve found a mews house in Notting Hill,” Dad was saying. “Very nice little place.”

“And there’s a lovely school nearby,” Mom told her.

“And we’ll wait until spring break,” said Dad, “so it won’t be as disruptive.”

“And to make it up to you, we were thinking maybe a little holiday was in order,” Mom had said, her smile too bright. “What do you think about Prague?”

So the weekend was a three-day apology tour. But even so, this did nothing to squash Lucy’s enthusiasm for the great buzzing city with its sweeping plazas and oddly shaped buildings and swaying groups of drunken tourists.

As it turned out, Prague in February meant a low gray sky and fits of stinging rain, but Lucy didn’t mind that, either. All weekend, the three of them dashed from one museum or gallery to another, moving through squares filled with people and umbrellas. Her whole life, she’d been surrounded by this kind of art; she’d grown up within miles of not just the Met, but also the Guggenheim and the Whitney, the MoMA and the Frick. But they’d never gone together. Not once. Her parents’ lives had always seemed to run parallel to their children’s. They weren’t so much a constellation, the five of them, as a series of scattered stars. There had always been something far-flung about their family, even when they were all in the same place.

Yet here they were now, meandering through the National Gallery in Prague together, spread out along a marble corridor until one of them called for the others, and they all three huddled together before a framed canvas, murmuring their thoughts.

“What did you think?” Mom asked Lucy afterward, moving over to share her umbrella as they stepped outside into the silvery rain.

“I loved it,” she said, and then the words tumbled out before she had a chance to weigh them: “We should have done that more back home.”

“You used to go to the Met all the time,” Mom said, glancing over at her.

The rain beat on the umbrella, and Lucy spoke over the noise of it. “I meant together.”

Mom paused, just briefly, but enough to fall behind. When Lucy turned back, she could see the rain making maroon polka dots across the shoulders of her red coat. After a moment, she shook her head, as if clearing water from her ear, then stepped forward to duck underneath the umbrella again. Up ahead, Dad was already pushing through the crowd, his black coat disappearing.

“There are plenty of museums in London, too,” Mom said, looping an arm around Lucy’s waist, and then together, they hurried to catch up, the rain falling in sheets all around them.

20

In Portland, Owen dreamed.

The rain was loud against the thin roof of the motel, and he woke with a start, the memory of his mother still with him. He felt around for the alarm clock, spi

In the next bed, his father was still sleeping, his breathing soft. Owen propped himself up on his elbows, still rattled by the dream, where his mother had been pi

Now he swung his legs off the bed and rubbed his eyes. On the floor beside him, Bartleby rustled in his shoebox. Owen stood, slipped on a pair of sneakers, and grabbed a sweatshirt, then opened the door to the hallway, pressing it closed behind him with a quiet click. At the end of a hall lined with dozens of identical doors, there was a small terrace, which was littered with cigarette butts. Owen stepped outside and sat down on the edge of it, so that his head was shielded from the rain even as the toes of his sneakers quickly soaked through. He didn’t mind; the cool air felt nice, and the rain smelled like morning.

The terrace looked out over a huddled collection of blue trash cans, which were arranged haphazardly along the perimeter of the parking lot. But beyond that, over the tops of the trees, he could see the mountains. As the sky paled all around them, their outlines grew sharper, like a photo coming into focus. Owen leaned forward to pick at a loose thread on one of his shoes, letting out a sigh he’d been holding for what felt like days.

They hadn’t been here for very long. This time, they hadn’t rented an apartment. They hadn’t looked for schools, either. They knew the drill now. You didn’t arrive at a place and get attached. You didn’t give yourself time to picture a life there, to see a future. You didn’t develop routines. You didn’t get to know anyone too well.

You didn’t come to a full stop.

In the end, San Francisco had lasted a couple of weeks less than Tahoe. Just after New Year’s, Dad had found a temp job at an office supply company in Oakland, where he mostly transferred calls and input numbers into endless spreadsheets. But when that ended a month later, there was nothing else, and before long, it was time to move on again. So they were en route to rainy Seattle, where Dad had a tenuous lead on an actual building job. But they’d decided to spend three days in Portland on the way, just in case something turned up there. Because the thought of making it all the way up to Seattle only to have the job fall through was almost too much to bear.

Dad had insisted they wait for Owen’s spring break. That way, they’d have a whole week to figure things out without him missing too much school. Owen didn’t have the heart to tell him that every district had a different week off, which meant the dates might not line up as well for the next school wherever they landed. But it didn’t matter, anyway. They both knew he would graduate easily enough. That wasn’t the point. It was more an issue of finding an actual graduation to attend.

“I don’t care about that,” Owen said. “The whole cap and gown thing, the diploma. It’s not like it means anything.”

“It’s symbolic,” Dad insisted. “It’s a moment.”

What he didn’t say, but what they both knew, was that his mother would have loved it: the cap and gown, the walk across the stage, the rolled baton of a diploma, all of it. Owen knew she would have been in the first row. She would have been clapping the loudest.

And he had no interest in attending a ceremony that didn’t include her.

That much, he knew. The rest was a bit harder to figure out right now. How could he know what the next year might hold when he didn’t even know about the next week? At some point, they’d find a town, and in that town, they’d find a place to live, and near that place, they’d find a school. There would be one more round of making new friends that wouldn’t last, and going to classes where he already knew the answers, and it would all end with a graduation ceremony that he had no interest in attending.