You Are Here (12 page)

“I’m sure they had their reasons,” he said eventually.

“Well, I want to know what they were,” she said. “I mean, maybe something really bad happened. Maybe there was an accident or something, or someone wasn’t watching him carefully enough, and—”

“Emma,” Peter said, cutting her off, a look on his face that fell halfway between sympathy and impatience. “This isn’t a movie. Bad things just happen sometimes.”

She was struck by the sound of his voice, so full of reproach. After a moment he turned to start walking again, his head bowed and his arms held stiffly at his sides.

“That’s it?” she called after him. “
That’s
your answer? Bad things just happen sometimes?” She shook her head, then pushed past him, plunging farther down the path on her own. “That’s not good enough. At least not for me.”

She could hear his footsteps on the dry ground, the snap of twigs as he followed her. She wasn’t sure whether he had an answer for that, whether he’d planned to respond, because before either could say anything more, they broke through the band of trees and stumbled out into a clearing. Emma stared at the sight before her, rings of gravestones like crop formations rising from the wine-colored shadows. There were rows upon rows of unmarked headstones fanning out in half-moon shapes, tiling the manicured lawn.

“What
is
this?” she whispered, following Peter between the lines of pale stones, which spiraled outward like veins across the bruised and broken land. The whole ghostly formation centered around a looming monument, the white marble bright in the dark, and it was here that Peter paused. After a moment Emma realized that he was speaking, his voice low and his head bent, murmuring almost unconsciously.

She moved closer, standing just beside him, so that their shoulders were nearly touching as they tilted their heads to look up at the monument.

“Peter?” she asked, but he didn’t look at her.

“Lincoln’s address,” he said, without any trace of embarrassment. “This is about where he made it.”

Emma nodded, falling quiet again to let him continue, listening as he chanted the words as if in prayer. And when he finished, she closed her eyes.

“‘The world will little note,’” she said softly. “I like that line.”

Peter nodded. “‘The world will little note,’” he repeated, “‘nor long remember what we say here.’”

“They thought it would be just a footnote,” she said, thinking how they couldn’t have possibly known, those soldiers buried beneath this very ground. They couldn’t have realized that this speech, this battle, this particular moment would live on so powerfully. It had refused to stay a footnote. It had refused to be forgotten.

Peter swept an arm across the cemetery. “Some people say it’s haunted.”

“You believe in that sort of thing?”

“Not really,” he said with a little shrug. He seemed about to say something more, then changed his mind, turning to start the walk back. But Emma stood where she was, suddenly reminded of another cemetery—the ending point to this trip—and of her brother, who had been buried there after only two short days in the world. Emma rubbed her hands together, suddenly cold. She closed her eyes, and it was almost as if he were there beside her, not a ghost or a memory, but just a feeling of great comfort, like she suddenly had at her side the one person in the world who would ever understand her.

She smiled, letting her eyelids flutter open again, but when she turned to look, it was not her brother—neither real nor imagined—but Peter who was standing just inches away from her, lost in thought and smiling, too.

chapter twelve

When he pulled into the parking lot of the diner, Peter turned off the engine and reached for the door handle without looking at Emma, since he already felt certain he could guess the look on her face. There was a blinking neon sign that read sid’s diner in orange letters and below that declared that what appeared to be the hollowed-out shell of an old barn was the scrumptious civil war sensation.

It didn’t look like much of a sensation from the outside, where only one other car was parked in the gravel lot, a faded blue pickup truck with a rusted shovel in the back. But Peter could see inside the windows to where the walls were plastered with old wartime flags and posters and a few old muskets hung above the counter. It was like the worst of all theme restaurants. Like Medieval Times, he thought, only without the jousting. And probably not quite as cool, if such things could ever really be considered cool in the first place.

But Emma—who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the walk back from the cemetery—didn’t seem to mind. They left the dog to poke at the garbage bins outside and then walked in to find themselves set adrift somewhere between 1860 and 1960, the room alternating between actual antiques from the Civil War and outdated furniture from when the diner must have first opened. There were only two other customers, a pair of men hunched low over their steaming mugs of coffee as they scraped the crusted dirt from their boots onto the metal legs of the stools.

Peter and Emma slid into an orange vinyl booth and sat examining the menu and the ketchup bottle and the dirty silverware, making fans and tubes and tiny squares out of their napkins rather than speaking to each other. Peter’s eyes roamed the walls, the framed declarations and tattered flags, the Union caps and Confederate slogans, and he thought of explaining their significance to Emma, but he wasn’t sure this was the best way to break the silence.

Once they’d ordered from a bored-looking waitress—Custer’s Custard Pie for Peter and Abolitionist Apple Strudel for Emma—they resumed their own separate investigations of the cutlery, playing with forks and spoons, inspecting the edges of the table and the tears in the seat where the yellow stuffing bloomed. Peter could very nearly feel it, the way the space had suddenly expanded between them. He didn’t have much practice with this kind of thing, but the trip ahead—four more states and five hundred more miles—was beginning to seem far longer than it had at first.

“So,” Emma said finally, more like a sigh than a word. It was the first time either of them had spoken since they’d ordered, and they both seemed slightly unhinged by the sound of it.

“So,” Peter said back. He was aware this was perhaps not the world’s most brilliant response, but he wasn’t sure exactly what the moment called for; it wasn’t like Emma to look this way, weary and overwhelmed and just a little bit sad, sitting in the orange light of the diner in front of her half-eaten plate of dessert.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and serious. “Do you think this was a mistake?”

“The apple strudel?”

“No,” she said, but he was pleased to see a hint of a smile. “The trip.”

He shook his head.

“You’re not ready to turn back then?”

“Not unless you are.”

“Okay, then,” she said with a nod, though she still looked a bit uncertain, and Peter could understand why: After all, they had nowhere to sleep tonight and were no doubt in a world of trouble with their parents. They were somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, and in many ways it had all stopped seeming like a game.

It had all started in the cemetery, of course, when she’d turned to him as if expecting someone else, her eyes widening just slightly, her face going abruptly pale. Gettysburg was supposedly one of the most haunted places in the world, with frequent sightings of ghosts in the trees, cameras inexplicably jamming when people tried to take photographs, glimpses of women in white and all manner of wandering spirits. But Peter knew that not all ghosts wore white sheets and roamed through cemeteries; there were other ways of being surprised by the past, and he suspected Emma had been thinking about the brother she’d never had the chance to know, and this was something he could understand too.

But she wasn’t the only one who was unsettled by the evening. Peter also found himself troubled by the thought of the dead brother they were chasing down the coast, though he knew his reasons were somewhat more selfish.

All these years he’d taken such pride in his acceptance by the Healys, who seemed to find him endlessly interesting, engaging in a way his own father never recognized. But now he was wondering whether there’d been more to it than that. He couldn’t help thinking that maybe he reminded them of the son they’d never had the chance to know, that maybe that was the only reason they ever asked him over, or set an extra place for him at the dinner table. And this gave him a funny feeling, a wobbling in his stomach, like a joke that had gone over his head.

He glanced up at Emma, who was still intent on her food, and he thought of her family, of the way Mr. Healy collected certain books for when he knew Peter was coming over, and how Mrs. Healy always made him a mug of hot chocolate to sip while they discussed the famine ships or the Boer War or the Indian removal. He thought of the way he felt so at home there, the way he seemed to belong, as welcome as if he’d been a part of the family himself.

And it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, he’d been using them for the exact same reason they’d been using him.

When they finished eating and filed back outside, they were pleased to find that the dog was still there to greet them, apparently having nowhere better to go either. He wiggled from head to toe when Emma spilled the contents of a napkin—half her apple strudel and the crust of Peter’s pie—onto the ground for him. The air was thick with fireflies making lazy circles, dipping in and out of the pools of light from the diner, which transformed them from floating lights back into winged, black insects.

Emma hoisted herself up onto the trunk with an expectant look in his direction, but Peter had noticed a phone booth just outside the diner and was already walking back over. It took him a few tries to jimmy open the door, which was rusted along the top, and the inside smelled like a litter box. Aware that Emma was watching from just outside, he dug in his pocket for a few coins and then dialed his number at home.

He let the phone ring twice, his heart skipping around, but before his dad could pick up, Peter slammed the receiver into its cradle and walked back outside.

Emma raised her eyebrows at him, but he only shrugged.

“So what now?” she asked, letting her legs dangle against the bumper of the car. Maybe it was the darkness, or the heaviness of the food in their stomachs, or the chill that had crept into the air without them noticing. But the trip now had a fragile feel to it, gone from sunglasses and milk shakes and the wind on their faces to this: the two of them staring at each other in the back lot of an old diner, unsure of their next move and uneasy about all the ones that had come before this.

“Are you gonna want to see more of this stuff in the morning?” Emma asked, and Peter tightened his jaw, trying to ignore the tiniest bubble of irritation that had risen up in his throat. Just an hour ago she’d been interested and engaged, asking questions about the history of the place, genuinely fascinated by his knowledge of it. But now she’d once again grown tired of it all, and Peter was mad at himself more than anything for feeling wrong-footed and surprised, when he should have known better by now.

He wondered if there was a rule that you had to love
all
of someone, or whether you could pick out only the best parts, like piling your plate full of desserts at a buffet table and leaving the vegetables to go cold in their little metal bins.

He frowned at her. “This
stuff
?”

“Gettysburg,” Emma said, waving a hand in the general direction from which they’d come. “Have you seen enough, or are we doing round two in the morning?”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing the reenactments tomorrow,” he said. “But we wouldn’t have to stay long.”

“What should we do about tonight, then?” she asked, sliding down off the trunk. The dog was rolling in the grass at the edge of the parking lot, and as they stood there, the bell on the door of the diner rang out, and the two men emerged. They passed by the blue convertible with a nod, then drove off in the pickup truck, the tires spraying gravel at their feet. A moment later the waitress followed, locking up the door without acknowledging them and then taking off down the shadowy road on foot.

Peter and Emma exchanged a look.

“We could stay here,” he said.

“In the car?”

He shrugged. “Got any better ideas?”