Where It All Goes Down
Coast to Coast
New York, New York
The book opens up in Wendy's hometown of New York, New York—which is the kind of place singers sing about and directors film movies about. It's full of bustling people, cultural events, and busy subways. Wendy is used to this New York and comfortable here… but then 9/11 happens and the whole landscape changes. Suddenly, people are running around frantically and the subways are shut down. And worst of all, the New York skyline doesn't look the same anymore—the building where Wendy's mother worked is completely gone:
Wendy walked another block. From somewhere in a high-up window she could hear the same Madonna song that had been playing everywhere. From someplace else, the national anthem. A siren wailed. She turned another corner.
At first she couldn't understand what the shape was, spiking up into the night sky against the blue glare of the searchlights […] The giant finger was the base of her mother's building. Not the whole of it, but parts of a steel arch, twisted and broken off. Two stories high, maybe more. The only part left you could recognize. Only where the plaza used to be, where just last week Louie had practiced his skipping, there was nothing but a mountain of metal and dust. (3.278-280)
In the space of one morning, the New York Wendy knows and calls home is completely changed—and so is her life. The rubble in the place where the World Trade Center used to be is like the place in Wendy's family that her mother used to occupy: barren and destroyed.
Davis, California
When Wendy's thought about Garrett living in California in the past, she's always thought of him living somewhere woodsy and quaint—a place completely different from her home in New York City. Maybe that's why she wants to visit him so much: She thinks she will feel like she's in a completely foreign land. But the reality doesn't live up to her expectations when she comes to the little town of Davis, where Garrett lives:
When she pictured him in California, she'd imagined a little cabin off in the middle of a field, facing out at the ocean, with a sleeping loft and plants in macrame holders and crystals hanging in the window—like a picture she'd seen of a place where her parents had lived in upstate New York one summer when she was a baby. She imagined artworks all around, and the smell of incense and baking bread. But he lived in a regular house, with neighbors on both sides, and a couple of shrubs in front and a cement walkway leading up to the door. (13.2)
In fact, Davis seems perfectly mundane and suburban. But even so, the change in scenery lets Wendy live out her life without having to explain what happened to her mother all the time. Even though Davis looks like many other places Wendy has been to, it's different because none of the people here know her, so they won't feel sorry for her or talk about how tragic she is behind her back. In the end, it's not what the place looks like that matters; it's how Wendy feels there. And she feels like a whole new person while she's living with Garrett.