The Geography of You and Me(16)

“I feel like it’s only fair to warn you,” he said, mopping his forehead with a paper towel, “that it’s hotter than hell out there.”

Lucy paused halfway between the elevator and the front desk. “Can’t be worse than my apartment,” she said, stealing a glance at the mailroom.

“I don’t know,” Darrell was saying. “I walked in from the Bronx, and—”

Lucy turned back to him with wide eyes. “You did?”

“Well, halfway,” he admitted. “The subway’s still down, and the buses were all packed, but I hitched a ride on the back of a fruit truck for part of it.”

“So everything’s still a mess then,” she said, and something about the tone in her voice made Darrell’s expression soften.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said with an encouraging smile. “I heard they got power back upstate, and Boston, too.”

Through the mailroom, she could see the far door swing open, and she caught her breath, surprised by the sudden quickness of her heart. But it was only the handyman from last night, who waved as he turned the corner.

Lucy sighed. “Hopefully we’re next,” she said, and Darrell nodded.

“Where’re you off to now?”

“Nowhere,” she said, a bit too quickly, and he laughed.

“Sounds nice,” he told her. “Be sure to send me a postcard.”

Once again, something seized inside her chest, and she hesitated a moment, looking from the lobby doors back to the mailroom, hoping that Owen might come loping out. It would be so much better to run into him here. She was terrified of knocking on his door only to find that he didn’t want to see her. Even now, she could imagine the painful awkwardness of such an exchange, his face going red as he made some sort of excuse because he was too polite to tell her as much.

After all, he was the one who’d left this morning.

Lucy was normally a firm believer that things worked out for the best, and she usually had no problem being optimistic, but now she felt her legs go weak as she stood weighing her next move, her cheeks pink at the thought of showing up unannounced. Something about Owen had thrown her off, twisting her into uncertain knots, and so before she could do anything she might regret, she headed for the revolving doors that led to the street.

Outside, it was clear that last night’s celebration had officially ended, and all that was left was the hangover. The streets, which had seemed like one big party just hours before, were now full of sweaty and miserable-looking people, everyone fanning themselves with day-old newspapers.

As she walked, Lucy saw a few kids chasing each other along the sidewalk, but otherwise, everyone seemed listless and beaten down by the weather. There were policemen stationed at the major intersections to direct traffic, but it was a haphazard affair, slow and grinding. All the energy seemed to have been sapped right out of the city.

She pressed her way up the street, heading in no particular direction, as she had a thousand times before. The ice-cream shop from last night was now closed, along with most of the other stores, which were all shuttered and silent. A few blocks farther uptown, she passed by her school, an imposing stone building, where a handwritten sign on the door announced that classes would begin tomorrow as long as the power was back, though there was no way to know if the note had been written yesterday or today.

Finally, having covered most of the neighborhood, and with nowhere else to go, she made her way back home again. As she climbed the stairs, she considered heading back up to the roof, in case Owen was there, and the thought propelled her up the next six flights before she reconsidered it for the same reason she’d walked away earlier.

She’d lived in this city her whole life, had gotten lost countless times at night, survived two muggings, and once broken her arm while climbing the rocks in Central Park. But it was finally Owen—who wasn’t scary in the least; who had, in fact, been nothing but nice to her—who had somehow managed to turn her into a coward.

Back in the apartment, she closed all the blinds and tried to nap on the couch, but the heat was oppressive and stifling. Wide-awake and miserable, she paged through her well-worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye—the ultimate guide to losing yourself in New York City—but the words swam in front of her, blurry as everything else from the heat. Finally, she gave up and returned to the kitchen floor, which was only marginally cooler. As the afternoon sank deeper into darkness, the kitchen grew dimmer and she pressed her bare arms and legs on the tiles and tried not to think about the fact that this was where they’d been lying just last night.

She wondered if there was a word for loneliness that wasn’t quite so general. Because that wasn’t it, exactly; it wasn’t that she was feeling lonesome or empty or forlorn. It was more particular than that, like the blanket on the roof this morning: Here in the kitchen, there was an Owen-shaped indent.

She drifted to sleep there, her cheek pressed against the tiles, and when she woke, it was once again to a blur of light. Only this time, it was coming from the bulb in the ceiling fixture, which was blaring down on her, harsh and unnatural and much too bright.

She sat up so fast she felt dizzy, spinning around to see that it was back now, all of it, the blinking green lights on the microwave clock, the red numbers on the answering machine, the churning of the overhead fan, and beyond the doorway, the lamps that had flickered on across of the rest of the apartment.