You Are Here (11 page)

Emma leaned forward to turn on the radio, then fiddled with the dial, landing on each station for a minute or so before flipping through to the next one. When she caught Peter looking at her with raised eyebrows, she shrugged and switched it off again.

“Maybe we should play a car game or something,” she suggested.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The license plate game?”

“What’s that?”

“You try to spot as many license plates from as many different states as you can,” she explained. “You’d probably love it. It’s very ‘fun with geography.’”

“Sounds slow.”

“So is geography.”

He made a face at her. “What else you got?”

“The animal game?”

“Let me guess,” he said. “See how many animals you can spot?”

Emma grinned. “Sheep are worth two points each.”

“Thank God we’re not in Ireland,” he said. “Where do you come up with these anyway?”

“They’re pretty standard road trip games,” she said.

“What happened, you were too busy with the atlas as a kid to have any fun in the car?”

“Sitting in the backseat of a police car like a criminal isn’t exactly fun.”

Emma laughed. “You could build up a lot of street cred that way.”

“Yeah, I looked like a regular thug with my bowl haircut and glasses.”

“Who would’ve thought you’d turn into an
actual
criminal all these years later?”

He knew she was joking, but Peter felt suddenly nervous anyway, adjusting his hands on the wheel and glancing up at the rearview mirror as if he were expecting someone to be tailing them.

Emma looked down at her lap. “My birthday’s next week, you know,” she said, and Peter glanced over at her, trying to compose his face in a way that might suggest that this was news to him, although he knew—had always known—just exactly when her birthday was, despite the fact that his was only a few days later and she unfailingly missed it every year.

“I wanted it to be different this year.”

“Different from what?”

She shrugged. “My family’s not great with birthdays.”

Peter thought of
his
past birthdays, the well-intentioned gifts his dad always gave him—baseball cards or action figures or a skateboard—which were always so perfectly and completely wrong, and no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, the day always left them both with a sour taste in their mouths.

“My family’s just …,” Emma was saying, her face small and pale against the rest of the world as it scrolled past. “They just never manage to get things quite right, I guess.”

“Most don’t,” Peter said shortly.

“Yeah, but my family’s different.”

He set his mouth in a thin line. “Most are.”

They rode in silence for a few miles, easing off onto quieter roads, the car moving purposefully through the deepening dark. The barest sliver of a bone-white moon had already appeared low in the pale sky, and a fog hung at knee level in the fields. As they reached the top of a sloping hill, they could see the lights of the town of Gettysburg glowing white in the pocket of a valley. Emma leaned forward and blinked out at the town, but Peter was more interested in the shadowy areas that bordered it, the wheat fields and orchards and pastures that had once been the stage for so many important battles.

“So, I guess that’s sort of the reason for the trip.”

“Your birthday?” Peter asked, but even as he did, and even as she looked away, he suspected there were many reasons—not just a restlessness that he, too, could understand, but also a search for something bigger, something that maybe not even Emma yet understood—and for now, the rest didn’t need to be put into words.

chapter eleven

The moment they stepped out of the car, the dog began turning in small, pitiful circles, flattening his ears and pausing every now and then to cast a doleful glance in their direction. Peter didn’t seem to notice; he stood with his back to the car, the keys in one hand as he stared out over the ink-black patchwork of fields. But when the dog let out a low whine, Emma thought that maybe she understood: There was something about this place, an eerie stillness, an almost tangible feeling that something irreversible had been stitched across the land, and it made her shiver too.

“Ready?” Peter asked, turning to her with a faint smile, and Emma nodded, not entirely sure what she was agreeing to. There was nobody else around. All the tourists had returned to their hotels. The employees who spent their days going through the motions of those blood-soaked skirmishes had long since hung up their uniforms and retreated to the bars in town, and the local kids had surrendered their playground to the muffled hour just before dusk.

But Peter was already half trotting down a steep hill and toward the fields that broke off from the road, and even the dog—who’d been hanging back uncertainly—now went streaking out ahead of him with that uneven three-legged gait of his, a white blur in the darkness.

“You can’t see much,” Emma ventured, her voice made thin by the wind. She skidded down the damp grass in her flip-flops, narrowly avoiding a rabbit hole. “Sure you wouldn’t rather just come back in the morning?”

Peter was waiting at the bottom of the hill. “We can do that, too.”

“Super,” Emma managed. From what she could make out, they were standing in a valley bordered by shadowy ridges that looked like great sleeping monsters in the dark. For a moment she was calmed by the thought that this could be anywhere—any old meadow in any old town, the kind of place where dogs run in circles and kids fly kites and flowers grow each spring—but then a face seemed to materialize out of the fog, a metal statue of a soldier gazing impassively over the site of his own death, his horse frozen beneath him, his gun forever at the ready.

“Are you sure we should be here?” Emma asked, and when her words were met with only a heavy silence, she turned to see that Peter had paused before the statue. His head was bent over the plaque, and it struck her as somehow impolite to bother him now, like interrupting someone at a funeral, so solemn was the look on his face, reverent and humbled at once. The dog had circled back and now sat rigidly at her side, his mismatched eyes darting between the pale stone monuments and the rows of cannons that formed an uneven line across the field.

Emma watched Peter’s back, the rise and fall of his shoulders, wondering and worrying, trying to guess how much of these desolate grounds he’d want to see tonight, how far into the past he’d be tempted to wander. There were other things too: She wondered where they would sleep later on, and how far it was to Washington. She wondered if her parents were still calling the phone she’d left in the car, whether Patrick would ever speak to her again, what they would do with the dog when they got to Annie’s. All these worries seemed to expand in the darkness, until Emma felt nearly short of breath, and she tried not to fidget as she waited for Peter to finish whatever it was he was doing.

After a moment he turned around, his face pale in the dark. “Isn’t it …,” he began, then trailed off, apparently unable to find the right word. Emma could think of several that might fit the bill—“creepy,” “depressing,” “morbid”—but she didn’t say any of them.

“This part’s called East Cemetery Hill,” he said quietly, waving his hand in a circle. “And over there was Culp’s Hill, where the Union formed their fish-hook line.”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “Fish hook?”

“It was named for the shape of their defense,” he told her, then whistled for the dog as they began walking again. Through the trees she could see splintered headlights as they neared the road and whatever lay beyond, and their feet made loud crunching noises in the dirt. Peter held a tree branch for her as she ducked beneath it, her foot getting snagged on a twisted root. There was a wooden fence strung out along the length of the two-lane road, and Emma squinted to make out a run-down farmhouse and a few crooked trees on the other side of it.

“Lincoln made his address just up there,” Peter said, already looking awestruck as they waited for a truck to lumber past, then jogged across together. “It’s one of the most famous speeches—”

Emma snorted, and Peter glanced back at her, his eyebrows raised.

“Give me a little credit,” she said indignantly. “I might not know a lot, but I
do
know about the Gettysburg Address.”

He grinned. “Okay, then.”

As they walked deeper into the woods, he told her about battle formations and casualties, unexpected victories and retreats; he brought the whole messy past lurching into the present with newfound significance. And much to her surprise Emma found herself listening as he spoke, as he took a field like any other and turned it into a story, tracing for her a history that had happened on the very spot they were standing.

“So why do you care so much about this stuff?” she asked, the question settling heavily between them. It was clear she’d interrupted Peter in some sort of reverie; he shook his head as if remembering himself and his whereabouts, then turned to her and blinked. Emma cleared her throat. “I guess it just seems sort of random,” she said. “I mean, why the Civil War?”

“It’s not really about the war,” he said softly. They were at the edge of another field now. The moon had slipped behind a bank of clouds, and though he was standing just feet away from her, it was hard to make out his face. “It’s not even about any of the issues really, slavery or the Union or any of the other stuff that kept it going for so long.”

“So what, then?”

He shrugged. “It’s about seeing something get put back together again, I guess. Especially after coming so close to falling apart. I mean, if a whole country can bounce back from something like that, then it sort of seems like anything’s possible.”

Emma breathed in, tilting her head back to look up at the sky, where the stars were punching holes in the endless darkness. Beside her the dog turned circles in the grass, and the wind died so suddenly it was as if the world had stopped breathing.

“Peter,” she said quietly, so quietly it took a moment for him to face her, with an expectant look that nearly made her change her mind. But his words were still rattling through her head, and the night had grown still, and she could almost feel the secret she’d been carrying struggling to work its way out of her. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

He grinned at her. “You’re secretly a Civil War enthusiast?”

“No,” she said. “I once had a twin brother.”

His face changed, slipping just slightly, but his eyes remained steady on hers. “Once?”

“I found a birth certificate in our attic,” she said. “Just last week. But there was a death certificate, too. From a couple days later.”

Peter lowered his chin, and Emma watched him carefully, trying to make out what he was thinking. His brow was furrowed, and he was staring at the ground so intensely that he might have been calculating the number of blades of grass in the field.

It struck her then, as it had so many times before, that his way of seeing the world must make life fairly difficult. When he looked at a house, it was like he could only ever see a network of pipes and beams, as if the rest of it—all the little details that made it what it was, the furniture and family photos, the chipping paint and sagging ceiling—were hardly there at all. It was like he saw deeper into things than most people, an explorer winding his way into the tiniest corners of a cave, while Emma, on the other hand, seemed to always see her way
around
things, skirting the edges of whatever lay in front of her, the interesting and the extraordinary as much as the mundane and the dull.

She’d always had a worrying ability to see right past everything.

“I’m really sorry,” Peter said finally, his jaw set as he turned away, keeping to the dirt path that wound toward a distant grove of trees. Emma hurried to catch up to him.

“That’s it?”

“What else is there?”

She frowned. “You could at least say it like you mean it.”

“I do mean it,” he said without pausing. “It’s a terrible thing.”

“Well, aren’t you curious about why they never told me?” she asked, stopping abruptly in the middle of the path. It took him a moment to notice she’d fallen behind, and when he did, he spun around with his eyebrows raised high above the rim of his glasses. They remained there like that for a few beats too long, squared off and uncertain, each nearly lost to the darkness.