The Geography of You and Me(10)

The man nodded as he packed their items into two plastic bags. “I heard the place on Seventy-Seventh is giving it away for free. It’s all melting anyhow.”

Owen turned to Lucy. “I think I like this city better in the dark.”

Outside, they stood for a moment with the plastic bags hooked around their fingers. The last streaks of pink had been erased from the sky over the Hudson, and an inky black had settled over the street. As they walked uptown to join the line for free ice cream, there was still a feeling of celebration to the evening. The price of beer at the bar next door was plummeting as the kegs grew warmer, and on the other side of Broadway, a restaurant was serving a makeshift dinner by candlelight. A few kids ran past with purple glow sticks, and two mounted policemen steered their wary-eyed horses through the crowds, surveying the scene from above.

As the line inched forward, Lucy glanced over at Owen, who was looking around with a dazed expression.

“You’d think there’d be looting or something,” he said. “In a place like this, you’d think it’d be mayhem. But it’s just a big party.”

“I told you it’s not so bad here,” Lucy said. “Give it a chance.”

“Okay,” he said with a little smile. “As long as you promise every night will be like this.”

“What,” she asked, “dark?”

“That’s the thing,” he said, looking up. “It’s not that dark. Not really.”

She followed his gaze to where the sliver of moon hung above the shadowy outline of the buildings, a thin curve of white against a navy sky that was dotted with stars. In all her years here, Lucy had never seen anything like it: a million points of light, all of them usually drowned out by the brilliant electricity of the city, the billboards and streetlights, the lasers and sirens, the fluorescent lamps and the neon bulbs, and the great white noise of it all, which left no room for anything else to break through.

But tonight, the world had gone quiet. There was nothing but the black canopy of the sky and the wash of stars above, burning so bright that Lucy found she couldn’t look away.

“He was right,” she murmured. “This must be quite a sight from up in space.”

Owen didn’t answer for a moment, and when he finally did, his voice was hushed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s even better from down here.”





4


By the time they made it back up the twenty-four flights of stairs—red-faced and panting and holding their sides—the apartment was like an oven, and there was nothing to do but collapse onto the cool tiles of the kitchen floor. There was no cure for this kind of heat, no fans and no air-conditioning and no breeze from the window, and even the ceramic tiles grew warm beneath them as they lay there in silence, still breathing hard.

Eventually, Owen sat up and reached for one of the water bottles, handing another over to Lucy, who was sprawled out beside the refrigerator, her white dress pooled all around her. She wiped at her forehead with the back of her hand, then propped herself up on her elbows to take a sip.

“That’s it,” she said when she was done.

Owen lay back again. “What is?”

“I’m never going downstairs again.”

“Until the elevator’s fixed…”

“Maybe not even then,” she said. “That elevator and I go way back, but after tonight, I’m not sure I can ever trust it again.”

“Poor old elevator.”

“Poor old me.”

There was a ceiling fan above them, and Owen stared at the outline of the blades through the dark for so long that he could almost imagine it spinning. His whole body was spiky with heat, even his eyelids, which felt heavy and thick. He reached absently for the flashlight on the floor between them, then clicked it on, shining it around the kitchen like a spotlight: circling the sink and zigzagging across the cabinets.

“There’s pretty much nothing in there. My mom doesn’t cook,” Lucy said, following the beam with her gaze. “None of us really do.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “You’ve got a great kitchen.”

“Do you?”

“Have a great kitchen?”

“No,” she said, lying back again so that their heads were inches apart, their bodies fanned out in opposite directions. “Do you cook?”

“Yup,” he said. “And I clean, too. I’m a regular Renaissance man.”

He flicked the light over the dishwasher, then the oven, and finally up to the refrigerator, which was covered with postcards, each one pinned by a brightly colored magnet. He sat up to take a closer look, focusing the light so he could read the names scrawled over them: Florence, Cape Town, Prague, Barcelona, Cannes, Saint Petersburg.

“Wow,” he said. “Have you been to all these places?”

Lucy laughed. “Do you think I’m sending myself postcards?”

“No,” he said, his face burning. “I just figured—”

“They’re from my parents. They go to amazing places, and I get a piece of cardboard,” she explained with a shrug. “They always bring one of my brothers a magnet and the other a snow globe. It’s kind of a tradition. Apparently I asked for a postcard once when I was little, and I guess it sort of stuck.”