“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, 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.
At the corner, he caught a bus, watching the rain make patterns on the windows, and when he stepped off 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 better touch.
“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.”