“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…
He lifted his shoulders. “We’ll see what happens.”
“I guess it would probably be easier for your dad to find a job in a city,” she said, and he could almost feel her floundering under the weight of the conversation. They didn’t ever really do this sort of thing, he and Paisley. They went skiing and snowshoeing; they snuck into movies and drank frozen cans of beer behind the diner; they hiked the trails and went fishing on the Truckee River, and at night they borrowed people’s piers to laugh and joke and talk about issues that didn’t matter to either one of them in any sort of immediate way.
Being with her always made him feel light as air, which was exactly what he’d needed these past weeks. But this—this was heavy.
“It feels like you only just got here,” she continued, her gaze fixed on the lake. “There’s still so much we haven’t done.” She paused for a second, but when she turned back to him, he was relieved to see the hint of a smile. “I mean, look at all those piers out there. We’ve probably only checked off, like, three percent of them. Which means there are still thousands waiting for us to leave our mark.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “What’s that?”
She hopped to her feet, stepping carefully away, then gestured with a little flourish at the heart-shaped patch of wood where she’d been sitting.
“Way more incriminating than fingerprints,” she said, and he couldn’t help laughing. When he stood up to join her, she doubled over in a fit of giggles at the narrow outline he’d left on the dock, and he circled his arms around her waist and pretended to throw her into the icy lake until they both lost their balance, skidding into a graceless, sprawling heap. Only after their laughter had finally subsided did he lean forward, touching his cold nose to hers, and kiss her.
“There’s a lot I’ll miss about this place,” he said later, as he helped her up, “if we end up going.”
“The lake?” she asked, brushing the snow off her jacket.
He shook his head. “You.”
Together, they left the water behind, walking back toward town on stiff legs and frozen feet. The snow had mostly stopped, but the path back up to the road was covered in at least a foot of powder, and they clasped their mittened hands together as they stumbled through it.
“So what should we see this weekend?” he asked. “Alcatraz? Pier Thirty-Nine?”
She rolled her eyes, as he’d known she would. “You can’t just go to all the tourist traps. There’s this great vintage place in the Haight.…”
When they reached the diner, Owen leaned in to kiss her again. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, but she pulled away with a dizzying smile.
“Can we please stop celebrating a day where we slaughter innocent turkeys?”
“If it makes you feel any better, my dad and I had a chicken instead.”
She shook her head. “Still awful.”
“Still delicious,” Owen said, kissing her for real this time.
When they broke apart, she turned and headed up to the back door of the diner. “Have a good trip,” she called out, her voice trailing behind her, and Owen waved, though she couldn’t see him. “But not too good…”
“I’ll bring you back an Alcatraz snow globe.”
“Very funny,” she said, just before the door slammed shut behind her.
As he walked home, the snow crunching beneath his boots, Owen tried to imagine San Francisco. But the only thing he knew, the only thing he managed to call to mind, was the Golden Gate Bridge, the familiar red arches surrounded by fog. It was hard to know where the image came from, but even now, in the darkness of the mountains—the air so cold it stung his face, the snow so white it practically glowed—that was all he could see: the great red bridge against a square patch of bluish sky.
It wasn’t until he was home in bed, halfway to sleep, that he realized why he couldn’t see anything beyond the edges.
He was imagining a postcard.
12
December was already six days old, and this was the first time that Lucy had seen it in daylight. Every morning she rode the bus in the dark, the sun rising around half past eight, when she was already inside the brick school building, and then setting again around three thirty, just as she burst out the doors and into the early dusk.
But today was Saturday, and though the light only broke through the clouds in thin patches, and though she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt underneath her coat, compared to the past few weeks, it still felt a bit like being at the beach, and she closed her eyes and tipped her head back to soak it in.
When the crowd around her began to cheer, her eyes flickered open again, and she squinted at the figures on the pitch, trying to make sense of it all. A girl from school named Imogen, who had an uncle that lived in Chicago, kept leaning over to explain the rules of rugby by way of football terminology: a try was like a touchdown, a fly-half was like a quarterback, a ruck was like a tackle. Lucy didn’t have the heart to explain to her that she didn’t know much about football, either.
The boys on the pitch were all wearing shorts, though it was the middle of winter, and their legs were pink blurs as they sprinted up and down the field, pausing to kick the ball at mystifying moments, hoisting each other in the air to try to catch a wild throw, forming knot-like scrums that were all kicking and shoving and never seemed to accomplish anything. The girls from school—friends of hers, she supposed, if you were using the term fairly broadly—sat on either side of her, their eyes darting back and forth, riveted by the game and apparently immune to the cold. Lucy did her best to keep her eyes pinned to Liam, but she kept losing him amid all the other boys in striped jerseys.
When the game ended, he came jogging over, and Lucy could feel the girls around her practically vibrating with the excitement of it all. He was a year older than them, a sixth year, and the rumor was that he had a good shot of making the Scotland Under-18 rugby squad, which was a training ground for the national team. When Lucy had asked him about this early on, he’d only shrugged.
“Sounds like a long shot to me,” he said, but she could see the way he glowed, and she knew it must be true.
Now she walked over to the edge of the pitch to meet him. His cheeks were ruddy and he was covered in mud, from his knees to his shirt to his face, which was positively freckled with it. He jokingly held out his arms for a bear hug, and Lucy laughed and ducked away.
“It’s hard to tell from your shirt that you guys won,” she said.
“Those other lads came off a lot worse,” he said, jabbing a finger over his shoulder. “So what did you think?”
“It’s kind of confusing,” she said. “And pretty rough.”
“That’s why the Americans leave it to us,” he said, thumping his chest with a grin. Around them, the bleachers were emptying, and players from both teams were headin
g back toward the clubhouse. Liam looked over his shoulder. “I’m gonna go change out of my kit. Wait for me?”
Lucy nodded, watching him jog off to catch up with his teammates, all of them tackling each other sideways and kicking at the mud. She sat down on the grass and opened her new book—Trainspotting, because it seemed about time she traded in Holden Caulfield for something a bit more Scottish—and read until Liam returned, smelling like soap, with a gym bag slung over his shoulder. The rest of the crowd was long gone, and the sky was deepening, already purple at the edges.
“How do you get used to this?” she asked him, as he slung an arm around her shoulders. She shivered. “It’s so gloomy.”
“We Scots thrive on a little gloom,” he said. “But really, you should see it in the summer. The sun comes up at like half-four and doesn’t set again till nearly midnight. It’s brilliant, the summers here. You’ll see.”
When they reached the road that bordered the rugby pitch, they waited at the bus stop, standing close together. Even after an intense match, Liam still had a restless energy to him, and Lucy watched now as he paced around on the grass.
Every once in a while, in moments like this, she found herself startled by the very fact of him. It was all so unlikely: those rugby shirts and that accent, the easy confidence and the heart-stopping smile. Sometimes, she thought she could detect a similar sense of surprise in him, too: when she declined an invitation to a party, or when she was so caught up in a book that it took her ages to notice him standing right in front of her. They were just so different, and she kept wondering if he’d realize this was a mistake at some point; if, once she stopped being the novelty, the random American, he would recognize who she really was—a nerdy bookworm, a happy loner—and move on.
But somehow, it worked. If not for their differences, they probably wouldn’t have noticed each other in the first place. That there were only more differences waiting beneath the surface made it all the more interesting.
“This is taking forever,” Lucy said, peering down the darkened road for the bus.
Liam shrugged. “Will we have a wee wander instead?”
She pursed her lips, but this gave way to a smile, which finally turned into a helpless laugh. “A wee wander?”
He pretended to look injured. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“A wee wander,” she repeated, still laughing.
“Not a fan of wandering?”
“It just so happens I’m a huge fan of wandering,” she said. “Let’s do it. This bus is the worst.”
“You’re not in Manhattan anymore,” he reminded her, as they set off up the street. “No yellow cabs around.”
“Trust me, I know.”
They could have cut straight down toward the newer part of the city, avoiding the enormous hill in the center, but instead, Liam led her past Holyrood and up toward the Royal Mile, where little shops and pubs lined the cobblestone streets on the way to the castle. They stopped for fish and chips, sitting behind steamy windows where they could look out and watch the tourists pass, and when they were finished, they wound their way down toward the West End, where Lucy lived.
As they turned onto her street, where the town houses curved around a small patch of green grass, Liam cleared his throat.
“Don’t suppose your parents are out…”
Lucy quickly shook her head.
“Ah,” he said with a smile, coming to a stop a few feet shy of her red front door. “Then I guess I’ll have to leave you here.”
He reached out and placed a broad hand on her back, pulling her closer, and even as he leaned down to kiss her, all she could think was What’s wrong with me?
Maybe it was possible that you could take someone out of their life and drop them in the middle of another place entirely and they could seem like someone completely different. But even if that were the case, she thought, it wasn’t really that they had changed—it was just the backdrop, the circumstances, the cast of characters. Just because you painted a house didn’t mean the furniture inside was any different. It had to be the same with people. Deep down, at the very core, they’d still be the same no matter where they were, wouldn’t they?
Standing there, kissing Liam in the light of a street lamp, she was beginning to believe this was true.
When they parted, finally, with a few more kisses and several promises to ring each other tomorrow, Lucy slipped inside the town house and leaned back against the door, letting out a long sigh. The house was dark, as she’d known it would be. Her parents were still in London and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.
All day, she’d wondered what to do with this: the promise of an empty house. She’d spent the day watching Liam on the rugby pitch, holding his hand as they crossed through the streets of Edinburgh, joking with him over a greasy basket of chips, and then kissing him on the corner, and still—still—she hadn’t been able to bring herself to invite him in.
What’s wrong with me? she thought again.
He was perfect. And she was an idiot.
Her parents hadn’t even thought to warn her against having people over, because for all they knew, she spent her afternoons here the same way she had in New York: walking around aimlessly, poking through bookshops, discovering new places, finding a good spot to read. She hadn’t mentioned Liam to them, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. For the past six weeks, she’d been half-waiting for it to all fall apart, because surely two people so different couldn’t last for very long. But if she was being really honest, that was only part of it. The other reason was more complicated than that.
She’d never mentioned Owen to them, either, but somehow he was there all the same, in the air, in the house, in the raised eyebrows each time the mail arrived without a postcard. They hadn’t known about him, exactly, but they’d worked it out for themselves, watching those notes arrive one by one, and now that they’d stopped, she sensed a certain sympathy in their eyes.
And so she didn’t tell them about Liam, she supposed, out of a weird, misplaced loyalty for Owen. Or maybe it was guilt. It was hard to tell.
When she reached over to flick on the light switch, she noticed the small pile of mail at her feet, which had been tipped through the slot. She stooped to pick it up, shuffling through the catalogs and bills on her way to the kitchen, and when she tossed the whole mess of paper down on the wooden table, a postcard slipped out of the pile.
Lucy froze, staring at the corner, where a sliver of sky was peeking out. She knew it couldn’t be from Owen—it had been a couple of months since she’d heard from him—but still, her heart was pounding like crazy. She nudged at the envelope on top of it, revealing a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, and she felt whatever had been bubbling up inside of her suddenly deflate.
Of course, she thought. It was about the wedding. Her cousin Caitie was getting married in San Francisco the weekend before Christmas, and she and her parents were flying out to meet her brothers there in just a couple of weeks. Lucy had been looking forward to it. Not the wedding itself as much as being back in America. She’d fallen in love with Scotland in a way she hadn’t expected, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t excited to return to the familiar: peanut butter and pretzels, cinnamon gum and root beer. Faucets that combined hot and cold water, accents that she didn’t have to strain to understand, and good—or even just decent—Mexican food. They would be returning to Edinburgh just before New Year’s, and she already knew that when the time came, she’d be anxious to come back, but still, she was looking forward to the trip, and to seeing her brothers especially.
She flipped the postcard over, expecting to find some sort of information about the rehearsal dinner or the bridal luncheon, but instead, she was astonished to find Owen’s tiny handwriting, a few cramped words printed across the middle of the white square. She brought it closer to her face, her eyes wide and unblinking as she read.
I couldn’t arrive in a new city without dropping you a line. It looks like we’ll be moving here for good
once the semester is over. Hopefully this one will stick, but we’ll see how it goes.…
Hope you and Nessie are well.
P.S. We picked up a stray turtle on the way down here. I named him Bartleby. (There are a great many things he prefers not to do.)
The next morning, Lucy was waiting near the window in the front hallway when a black cab pulled up, and she watched impatiently as her parents stepped out. They’d barely made it up the steps when she opened the door, still in her pajamas.
“Hi,” Mom said, clearly surprised by the greeting. The natural follow-up to this would be something like Did you miss us?, but they’d long ago stopped asking that, and Lucy had stopped expecting it.
“How was your trip?” she asked as they walked into the front entryway. Dad set down his bags and gave her a funny look.
“What happened?” he asked, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose with a weary expression. “You’re reminding me way too much of your brothers right now. Did you have a party? Did something get broken?”
“No, it’s not that,” Lucy said, though she knew he wasn’t serious. “I was just wondering about San Francisco.”
“It’s a large city in California,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.
“No, I mean… we’ll have some free time when we’re there, right?”
They were heading toward the kitchen, and Lucy trailed after them.
“The wedding’s up in Napa, actually,” Mom said. “At a vineyard.”
“Napa: a wine region north of San Francisco,” Dad chimed in unhelpfully.
“We’re only in the city for a night to get over our jet lag,” Mom continued, setting her purse down on the counter. “Then we head up to Napa and meet up with your brothers for the wedding and Christmas.” She turned around. “Why do you ask?”
But Lucy was already gone.
One night, she was thinking, as she flew up the stairs. One night.