Solemnly, he slid a finger under the flap of each envelope, and one by one he wrestled the papers out to find the same answer each time: yes, yes, yes. First Berkeley, then UCLA, then Portland and San Diego and Santa Barbara. With each one, he passed the letter over to his father, but it wasn’t until he got to the University of Washington that he realized Dad was crying, his blond head bent over the pile.
Owen paused, stiffening, waiting for him to say it: She should have been here or She would have loved this or She would have been so proud. But instead, Dad looked up with a blurry smile.
“Six for six,” he said, shaking his head. “Where the hell did you come from, anyway?”
Owen grinned, looking around the kitchen. “From right here, actually.”
“Well, as much as I miss this place,” Dad said, “I’m glad we won’t be so far apart next year.” He gestured at the pile. “Same time zone, no matter what.”
There was a hitch in Owen’s chest. “No matter what,” he said.
“And it’ll be nice to head into graduation knowing you’ve got some options.”
Owen lowered his gaze. “Dad.”
“No, I mean it,” he said, leaning forward on the table. “You know how many kids will be standing up there onstage in a total panic? And you’ve got all these choices.” He glanced at the letters and shook his head. “All six. Six.”
“I know,” Owen said. “I’m just not sure.…”
“She would have been so proud,” he said finally, inevitably, standing up and placing a large palm on Owen’s shoulder. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of his head. “And so am I.”
There was nothing for Owen to do but nod. “Thanks.”
As Dad walked out of the kitchen to begin taking stock of the rest of the house, Owen sat and listened to his footsteps on the echoing floorboards. Out the window, a cloud drifted by, snuffing out the sun, and the room went abruptly dim. On the wall, the familiar clock ticked its familiar rhythm, and when Owen took a deep breath, he almost expected the faint scent of cigarette smoke.
But of course, there was nothing.
He reached for the stack of acceptance letters, shuffling them into a neat pile. Then he set them aside and grabbed the rest of the mail. As he sorted through old Christmas and birthday cards, bills and coupons and glossy magazines, he couldn’t help wondering whether his friends—if you could even still call them that—had gotten their letters, too. Both of them lived in this neighborhood, and it was strange to think that at this very moment, they were only blocks away, with no idea that Owen was nearby.
Last year, they’d hardly talked about college, and Owen knew he was the only one with dreams of getting out of Pennsylvania. But even if they ended up staying closer to home, Casey and Josh would still likely be splitting up, too, each going their separate ways, and it struck Owen now as inevitable, this distance between them. It would have happened anyway. He just happened to leave a year early. Even if nothing had changed at all, everything would still be about to; even if he’d stayed, they’d still be getting ready to say good-bye. They’d each go off to college, losing themselves in their new lives, seeing each other only at Thanksgiving or Christmas or during the summer. And then it would all go back to normal the way it always did with lifelong friends. As if no time had passed at all.
The point wasn’t the distance. It was the homecoming.
He turned over a catalog in his hands, staring at the photograph on the front: a mother and father and their young son. The perfect family. When he looked up again, he realized he wasn’t ready to venture any farther into the house just yet. He didn’t want to think about college or graduation, his mother or his father, Seattle or Pennsylvania or anywhere in between.
Instead, he reached for his phone. He would call his friends, and they would go for pizza at their favorite place, and he’d tell them about all of it: New York and Chicago, the endless roads through Iowa and Nebraska, the snow in Lake Tahoe, the diner where he’d worked, the months in San Francisco and their new house in Seattle.
He dialed Casey’s number first, and as the phone began to ring in his hand, he sifted absently through the mail, raking over the pile. He was nearly to the bottom when he spotted it: a postcard of Paris. Without thinking, he snapped the phone shut, hanging up before anyone could answer, and then he sat there staring at it in the fading light of the kitchen: the cathedral at the very center of the city.
Even before he flipped it over to find the note, he was thinking the very same thing: that he wished more than anything that she was here, too. And just like that, his heart—that dead thing inside of him—came to life again.
37
Lucy’s first instinct, when the elevator jolted to a stop, was to laugh.
Even before the floor had quit vibrating beneath their feet, hovering midway between the second and third floors of the Liberty department store, her three fellow travelers—an old man in a sweater vest and a young mother with her son, who couldn’t have been older than three—were giving her strange looks, as if she’d already cracked under the pressure of the situation, just four seconds in.
“The lift is stuck,” the little boy pointed out, tilting his head back to take in the ornate wooden carvings along the ceiling. The lights were still on, and when the woman hit the red button, a crackling voice was quick to come over the speaker.
“Are you in need of assistance?” someone asked in a clipped English accent.
“It’s stuck,” the boy said with more force this time. He accompanied this with a little stamp of his foot.
“We seem to have stopped,” his mother said, her mouth close to the speaker.
“Right,” said the voice. “We’re looking into it. Be back with you straightaway.”
Lucy was still shaking her head, unable to get rid of the smile on her face. The woman gave her a look as if to suggest she wasn’t taking this quite seriously enough, but she was quickly distracted by her son, who had started to cry, great heaving sobs that made his shoulders rise and fall. It built to such a pitch in the small space that the old man actually clapped his hands over his ears.
“Would anyone like a mint?” Lucy asked, digging through her bag, and the man glanced over at her, lowering his hands again.
“You’re prepared,” he said, and she smiled.
“Not my first rodeo,” she told him, still amused by the unlikeliness of the situation. Only a few minutes ago, she’d been trailing her mother through the fourth floor of the airy store, running her fingers absently over the endless bolts of brightly colored fabrics. But she’d soon grown bored, and when she spotted a directory that advertised a haberdashery on the third floor, she decided she had to see it. She knew there would only be hats, and she’d probably be far more interested in the travel accessories and notebooks found farther down, but how often did you get to visit a haberdashery? There were stairs across the store, but the elevator was right there, and she she’d stepped in without thinking about it.
And now here she was—stuck once again.
Only this time, it all seemed sort of funny. The old man was tapping his fingers against the wooden panels, and the woman was fanning herself with her hand, though it wasn’t particularly hot—was, in fact, practically cold compared to the last elevator Lucy had been stuck inside—and the little boy was hiccupping now, fat tears still rolling down his rosy cheeks. It was all just so unlikely, that she should find herself in this situation twice in such a short amount of time, and the only person she wanted to tell—the only person who would really appreciate it—was Owen.
It had been two weeks since she’d sent the postcard, and she hadn’t heard back. Not that she’d expected to; even if he wasn’t still angry after their argument in San Francisco, and even if he wasn’t still with Paisley, it had been sent off to a place he hadn’t lived in nine months. And it struck her now—with a kind of jarring obviousness—that a postcard was just about the stupidest possible form of communication. There were so many things that could go
wrong, so many ways it could have gotten lost, so many opportunities for it to go astray. It was almost as if she hadn’t wanted it to reach him. Suddenly, dropping that postcard in the mail seemed about as useful as throwing a paper airplane out of a window. It was a coward’s move, a way of doing something without really doing much of anything.
Beside her, the old man raised his wiry eyebrows to the ceiling and then thumped a hand to his chest, a hollow sound that seemed to vibrate in the crowded space.
Lucy looked at him with alarm. “Are you okay?”
“Heart problems,” he muttered.
“Maybe you should sit down,” Lucy suggested, trying not to sound panicky, but he shook his head.
“Not mine,” he said. “My wife’s.”
Lucy exchanged a look with the other woman, who only shrugged.
“I snuck off to buy her some perfume,” he explained, his eyes swimming. “She’s downstairs looking at fabrics. She’ll be worried when she can’t find me, and her heart…”
Lucy put a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be fine,” she said, surprised by the emotion in her voice. “I’m sure they’ll have us out soon.”
There was a lump in her throat as she watched him fidget with the buttons on his vest, and it struck her as the truest form of kindness, the most basic sort of love: to be worried about the one who was worrying about you.
Only seven minutes had passed, but they were slow minutes, long and unhurried. She thought of Owen again, and how quickly he’d made the time pass when they’d been stuck. Without him, it felt like something was missing.
She should have been braver. She should have e-mailed him. It wouldn’t have mattered if he didn’t write back; that wasn’t the point. The old man worrying about his wife didn’t know if she was worried about him, too. He wasn’t thinking about himself at all. He was too busy loving her simply because she was out there somewhere.
The little boy banged a fist against the wall, and they all paused to listen for a moment, but there was no response.
“Come on,” Lucy muttered, glaring at the speaker. She shifted from one foot to the other, jangly and on edge, then sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. The minute she stepped out of this elevator, she knew that any sense of urgency would drain away. But right now, in a wood-paneled box with three strangers who were not Owen, she wanted nothing more than to reach him somehow.
The last time, when they’d been in this together, the opening of the doors had felt like the breaking of some spell. But this time, as the elevator cranked to life again, moving downward in a motion that felt sudden after eight long minutes of being suspended, there was only relief. Lucy’s eyes flickered open and she blinked a few times, meeting the gaze of the old man, which was suddenly peaceful: He was on his way home.
She envied him that.
On the ground floor, the doors opened with two short dings, and there was a small knot of people waiting for them: the store manager with his patterned tie, a maintenance man in a khaki shirt, an elderly woman with a halo of white hair, who rushed to embrace the old man, and finally Lucy’s mother, who shook her head from side to side with a slow smile.
“Let’s try not to make this too much of a habit,” she said, slinging an arm over Lucy’s shoulders. “You okay?”
Lucy nodded absently as her mother launched into her side of the saga, how she’d been looking for Lucy when she saw the maintenance man hurry past with the manager, and she’d had an inkling her daughter might be involved. So she’d dropped the fabric she was thinking about buying, then followed them down to the ground floor to wait.
“I think you should seriously consider using the stairs from now on,” she was saying. “You don’t seem to have the best luck in this area.”
Normally, Lucy would have made a joke here. She would have been reveling in the hard-won attention of her mother, so rare before and now—still sort of unbelievably—so normal. She didn’t know if it was her father’s new job or the fact that they were in a new country, or maybe it was just that they all missed her brothers, who were so far away, but whatever the reason, they were suddenly a family again: eating dinners together, traveling on weekends, going to museums, joking and laughing and being there. Maybe they’d only needed a change of scenery. Or maybe they’d needed to leave home in order to find it.
But right now, Lucy was too distracted to enjoy their newfound complicity. She was busy collecting the right words, which were too many to fit on a postcard, and too heavy for such a slim piece of cardboard. She carried them with her as they walked out the wooden doors of the building and through the winding streets of the West End to Oxford Circus, where they caught the Central Line to Notting Hill Gate and emerged from the tube stop beneath a steely London sky, then wove up Portobello Road past buildings painted the color of Easter eggs and stalls selling everything imaginable, all the way to the little brick mews house tucked like a jewel in the center of this city she’d so quickly grown to love.
As she walked upstairs, the words multiplied with each step—there was suddenly so much to say!—and she realized she’d been carrying them with her even longer than that, at least since San Francisco, but maybe even since Edinburgh or New York, and she hurried up the last few steps, ready to set them down, one by one, across a blank screen, to say the honest thing, the truest words she could find: that even though she’d been the one stuck inside that elevator, all she’d been able to think about was him walking around outside of it; that it wasn’t her heart she was worrying about—it was his.
But when she flipped open her computer, she was pulled up short by the sight of his name, and it was her own heart that once again needed rescuing.
38
For a long time after he sent the e-mail, Owen just sat there, trying to decide whether or not to panic.
The house was quiet. It was Saturday, but Dad had been eager to get back to work after their trip. He’d set out this morning with a look of great contentment, clearly thrilled at the prospect of spending a day with a hammer in hand after a week of bubble wrap and cardboard boxes and duct tape.
“There’s very little in this world that can’t be cured by bashing in some nails,” he used to say, and Owen knew he needed that more than ever today, after too much time spent clearing away the last reminders of their previous life.
He’d left earlier than usual after putting in a load of laundry, and now Owen could hear the thumping of the washing machine downstairs, which was an encouraging sign. For months, they’d been living in temporary spaces like a couple of teenagers; there was always toothpaste in the sink and crumbs in the kitchen and a layer of grime over pretty much every appliance. But seeing the old house in Pennsylvania must have jolted something in him. After getting back from the airport last night, Owen had watched his father tear around the house, picking up dirty socks and scrubbing at the grout around the faucets. It wasn’t quite up to Mom’s standards yet, but it was getting closer.
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.
&n
bsp; 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.