Lucy woke in the last hour of the flight, blinking into the gray haze of the quiet airplane. Beside her, the window shade was open a few inches, and she yawned as she looked out at the steep banks of clouds moving past like dreamy mountain ranges. On the screen in front of her, a timer ticked down the minutes until they reached New York. It wouldn’t be long.
For sixteen years, Lucy had hardly ventured off the island of Manhattan, and now, eight months and five countries later, she was finally returning. She reached for the bag at her feet, pulling out her old copy of The Catcher in the Rye—her security blanket, her teddy bear—but instead of opening it, she just held it in her lap, gripping the edges.
Soon, she would be seeing the apartment where she grew up, the building she’d lived in her whole life, and the neighborhood she’d known so well, but it didn’t feel the way she thought it would. It didn’t feel like going home.
A part of her would always love New York, but she’d loved Edinburgh, too, and now London. And if you were to set her down in Paris or Rome or Prague or any of the other places they’d visited, she was certain she’d find a way to fall in love with those, too.
All these years, she’d imagined her parents were out there in the world trying to take in as much as possible: photos and stories and memories, check marks on a list of countries and pins on a globe. But what she hadn’t understood until now was that they’d left pieces of themselves in all those places, too. They’d made a little home for themselves wherever they went, and now Lucy would do the same.
But first, there was New York. The little cartoon airplane on the screen inched out across the blue of the map and toward the green, and Lucy ran a finger along the cracked spine of the book in her lap, closing her eyes.
At first, she’d tried telling her parents that she’d simply changed her mind about going back for the summer.
“Not for the whole time,” she said one afternoon as they strolled through Kensington Gardens, enjoying the rare sunshine and the even rarer appearance of Dad in daylight hours. “I was just thinking it would actually be kind of nice to visit, you know?”
Along the edge of the pond, a trio of ducks sat honking at everyone who passed by, and Dad watched them intently, his mouth turned down at the edges.
“Wish I could go back for a visit,” he said, squinting at the water.
But Mom only raised her eyebrows. “What kind of visit?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “Maybe just to see some sights… or some friends.”
At this, Mom stopped short, her hands on her hips. “Some friends?”
Lucy nodded.
“In New York?” she asked, then turned to Dad without bothering to wait for an answer. “Are you buying this?”
He glanced over at her with a blank look. “What?”
“Mom,” Lucy said with a groan. “It would only be for a few days.”
“And you’d be there all by yourself?”
Lucy dropped her gaze. “Yeah,” she said to the gravel path.
“Nope,” Mom said. “No way.”
Dad looked from one to the other as if this were some kind of sporting event where he didn’t quite understand the rules. “I think Lucy’s perfectly capable of being there on her own,” he said. “It’s not like she hasn’t done it before.”
“Yes,” Mom said in a measured tone, “but this time, there’s a boy in the picture.”
Lucy let out a strangled noise.
“A boy?” Dad said, as if the concept had never occurred to him. “What boy?”
“He’s in town that first week of June,” Lucy said, ignoring him as she turned back to Mom. “He thinks I’ll be there already, because I told him that a million years ago, and he wants to meet up.…”
Mom was watching her with an unreadable expression. “And you really want to see him.”
Lucy nodded miserably. “And I really want to see him.”
Dad shook his head. “What boy?”
There was a long pause while Mom seemed to consider this, and then, finally, her face softened.
“What boy?” Dad had asked again.
Now Lucy’s seat shook as Mom leaned over the top of it from the row behind her. “Hi,” she said. “Sleep well?”
She swiveled to look at her. “Did you?”
“No,” Mom said, but her eyes were shining. “I’m too excited.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said with a grin. “It seems that distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder.”
“I think that’s absence.”
Mom shrugged. “Either way.”
Lucy turned back to the window, where the plane had broken free of the clouds, and the blue-gray ocean swept out beneath them. When she pressed her cheek to the glass, she could see ahead to where it met the land, stopping abruptly at the edge of New York. “Not a whole lot of distance now.”
“That’s okay,” Mom said, sitting back down, so that she spoke through the space between seats, her voice close to Lucy’s ear. “Someone once told me it’s best to see a city from the ground up.”
They left the water behind, the scene below becoming a grid of grayish buildings, and made a wide sweeping turn as they moved inland, the plane tipping leisurely to one side so that Lucy could see the rivers that cut through the land like veins.
As the ground rushed up at them, she remembered her father’s advice about calling the car company as soon as they landed, and she sat forward, reaching for her bag. In her wallet, there was a business card with the number, which her dad had carried around in his own wallet for years. It was fuzzy at the corners and bent across the middle, but he’d handed it to her with pride.
“This is what we used to get home to you after every trip,” he said. “Now that you’ve become something of a traveler, too, I’m officially passing the baton.” He pulled her into a hug and kissed her on the forehead. “Say hi to New York for me.”
As she slid the card carefully from the folds of her wallet, she felt the lump at the bottom of the change purse. Over the past months, she’d become so used to the shape of it that she’d nearly forgotten what it was, but now she pulled it out, twisting the cigarette in her fingers. It was a little bit flattened now, crushed by the months spent tucked beneath all those heavy British coins, but it was still mostly intact, and she studied it, remembering how she’d found it the morning after the blackout. She brought it to her nose and inhaled deeply, thinking that it smelled a bit like Owen, and then—before the flight attendant could remind her that there was no smoking on board the plane—she wedged it back inside her wallet, her chest suddenly light.
Out the window, she could see that they were circling over Brooklyn now, but in the distance, the spiky outline of Manhattan rose up in an arrangement of towering buildings and valleys made out of vast green parks, all of it bordered by two rivers like a pair of cupped hands. As they dropped lower in the sky, she could see the outlines of roads and parking lots and backyards, all of them fanning out around the heart of the city, where people were busy going on with their lives, walking and eating and laughing and working, and somewhere below, in the middle of it all, there was Owen: nothing but a yellow dot from above, waiting just for her.