You Are Here (18 page)

“Look at
that
,” she’d say, pointing to what turned out to be a post office with the kind of awe usually reserved for monuments and other such wonders.

Peter didn’t mind. He found the whole thing fairly silly—that Emma would drive all these miles to Annie’s only to squander the opportunity to ask about her twin brother—but he was also secretly pleased at the way Emma was acting toward him, with a closeness that felt like a prize he’d somehow managed to win. He didn’t care if it was only a reaction to Annie; he was perfectly happy to widen his eyes and ooh and aah over the rather ordinary post office building.

It wasn’t long before he spotted another pay phone, a slanted structure near the river, and Annie and Emma waited patiently while he once again dialed and then hung up, but there was a strange comfort in the numbers, and words had never come easily to him anyway.

“You have a cell phone,” Emma pointed out when he walked back outside, thrusting a finger at his pocket.

“I know.”

“So why do you keep using pay phones?”

“Because then he won’t know it’s me.”

“Well, isn’t that the point of calling?” she asked. “For him to know it’s you?”

Peter shrugged. “It’s nice to have the option to hang up.”

The sun rose higher over the white city, and the three of them ambled through its maze of monuments and parks. Nobody talked much, and Peter was grateful for this. It seemed a place too important for chitchat, and he was nearly overwhelmed by it all, the buildings he’d so often seen in pictures suddenly blown up into three dimensions, towering gateways to government and democracy. They peered up at the tall spike of the Washington Monument, stared at the sun-drenched buildings on Capitol Hill, poked their heads through a fence to gaze past the landscaped lawn stretching up to the White House.

At the Lincoln Memorial, Peter stood breathlessly and ran through the words to the Gettysburg Address again—this time only in his head—and it was as if Lincoln himself had blessed the trip, like the tall man in the big stone chair was smiling down on all of them. And as they walked away from the columned building, Peter felt happy and dizzy and lightheaded all at once, closing his eyes and imagining his own map of the city, tracing a thin line across it in his mind, marking their route as others might record the day in a journal or a photo album.

They ate lunch at an outdoor café in Georgetown, squinting at each other across a table that reflected the sun like a spotlight. Once their food arrived, Peter attempted to make small talk—something he was not in the least bit adept at—but Emma still didn’t seem to be making much of an effort, and the silence had become even more noticeable since they sat down.

“So,” he said around a mouthful of turkey sandwich, looking from one to the other. “You guys lived here for a while when you were younger?”

Neither made any sort of move to answer, and Peter swallowed his food, thinking that he now understood why people found his own silences so frustrating.

“We moved up from North Carolina when I was a baby,” Emma said finally. “Just me and Patrick and my parents, though.”

“It was just after I left for college,” Annie explained. “So I was already up in Boston then.”

“Where?”

“Harvard.”

Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter lowered his sandwich and looked at Annie with interest. “What was it like?”

“Peter’s hoping to go there for a degree in Civil Warology.”

“That’s not a thing,” he pointed out. “It would be a degree in History.”

“I know,” she said with a sigh. “It was a
joke
.”

“It’s a great school,” Annie told him, ignoring her sister. “But there are lots of other great ones out there too.”

“He could get in,” Emma said, picking the onions off her burger, and Peter sat up a bit straighter in his seat. “He’s almost worse than you guys.”

Annie shot her a look. “What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“You’re smart,” she said. “Guess.”

“What’s it like there?” Peter asked, and Annie shrugged.

“It’s really not all that different from the campus at home, other than being in a city.”

“It
must
be,” Peter said, though even as he did, he was picturing the little college on the hill, the way the afternoon shadows fell across the buildings as he passed by on the way home from school. He thought of the lake with the swans and the oak-lined paths and the sturdy little chapel that sat above it all.

And he thought of his house just down the street.

“It’s not really about the campus anyway,” Annie was saying now. “Wherever you go will be great, but it’s more just because of what you’re doing there. The place is beside the point.”

“The place is never beside the point,” Peter said matter-of-factly, and Annie shrugged and excused herself to go to the bathroom.

“What’s up with you?” Emma asked once she’d gone.

“My dad wants me to stay home for school.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Really? That’s kind of sweet.”

“
Sweet
?”

“Yeah, maybe he wants to keep an eye on you.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“He’s a cop, Peter. He’s probably just looking out for you.”

“Yeah, because I’m so much trouble,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t think so.”

“Then why do you think?” Emma asked. “Because of money?”

Peter lifted his shoulders. “Maybe. I’m sure that’s part of it, at least.”

“But?”

“But it’s not fair,” he said, aware of the bitterness in his voice. “I mean, he’s practically ignored me my whole life, and when he does get around to paying attention, he always ends up acting like some asshole cop. And then all of a sudden he decides I should stick around?”

“Maybe he’s finally changing.”

“No,” Peter said, shaking his head. “He never changes.”

“Well, then maybe he’s
always
wanted you there. Maybe he’s just never been able to say it,” Emma said gently. “The thing about parents is that you always just assume they’re supposed to be good at their jobs, because they’re parents. But they’re usually not. So this might be the only way he knows how to tell you.”

Peter frowned. “Tell me what?”

“That he wants you to stay. That he’d miss you otherwise.”

“But the whole point of going to college is that it’s your one chance to escape where you’re from. You get to start over.”

“Oh,
that’s
the point of college,” Emma teased. “Good to know, since I thought you’d had your nose in a book all these years for fun.”

“Well, it
was
for fun, actually,” he said with a smile. “But you know what I mean. You’re always trying to escape too.”

“Yeah, but you’re just talking about geography,” she said. “And that’s not always everything.”

Later, as they walked back to the apartment, Peter noticed that Annie had picked a different route. He tried not to let this bother him, but as they headed deeper into an unfamiliar neighborhood and farther from her street, it was all he could do not to ask what was going on; it seemed impolite to question her sense of direction when she’d lived here for over ten years. So instead he studied the spidery cracks in the sidewalk, distracting himself by formulating a new map in his head.

It didn’t surprise him that Emma hadn’t noticed; she was too busy pretending to ignore Annie. And so when they came to a stop before a narrow house with chipped yellow paint and a faded blue door, Emma very nearly bumped into her sister.

“What’s this?” she asked, frowning up at the building, which seemed to slump to one side. Through one of the downstairs windows they could see the huddled form of a sleeping cat, and the wind chimes hanging from the front porch tinkled in the breeze.

“It’s where you lived when you were little,” Annie said with a small smile. “It used to be white with blue shutters, and there wasn’t a porch, but …”

Emma’s face changed, her eyes widening, her mouth turning up at the corners, and she began to pace back and forth along the sidewalk, her head tipped back to take it all in. “Oh,
yeah
,” she said, pointing at the driveway, the lacework of cracks in the asphalt. “This must be where I tripped when I was still learning to walk.” She raked back the hair from the left side of her face to display a tiny scar that Peter had never noticed. “Three stitches. And we used to take our Christmas photo in front of that tree.” She jogged over to the front corner of the house, where the cement showed beneath the wood paneling. “And that must be where Patrick crashed the car.”

Peter looked on as she pinballed around the yard, and he couldn’t help himself from smiling whenever she did, as if it were something contagious. It was like watching someone reclaim their past, or better yet discover it for the first time. Seeing her this way made him think, unexpectedly, of the pay phone by the river, and all the other pay phones along the way, silent and empty monuments to some great failure, whether his or his father’s Peter couldn’t tell.

But he wished now he’d had the courage not to hang up. All this time he’d been grateful that his dad hadn’t called, but he suddenly wished just the opposite: that rather than teaching him a lesson by letting him go, letting the quiet between them stretch the length of the country, his dad would ask him to come home.

He also knew that the braver thing to do would be to stop waiting, to quit wondering, to go searching and seeking and asking. The braver thing to do was exactly what Emma was doing now. It was being determined to discover the past. It was not letting anything get in your way.

Unfortunately, Peter wasn’t anything like Emma.

He watched her now, pacing the front yard as Annie pointed at the second floor of the house, which seemed to strain forward, leaning toward the telephone wires where a few birds were huddled together.

“Remember how you and Mom used to make signs welcoming me home from school?” Annie asked. “You’d hang them in the windows at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You used to be so excited to see me.”

The smile slipped from Emma’s face. “And you used to be so excited to come home.”

Annie blinked a few times, as if unsure how to respond. “I still am,” she said eventually, but something had shifted, and they stood looking at each other without knowing what to say. A bank of clouds passed overhead, pulling a shadow across the house and the little party standing outside of it, and so one by one they turned to leave, making their way back up the street single file, Annie followed by Emma followed by Peter.

“You should go easy on her,” Peter whispered, feeling both brave and hypocritical at once, waiting for Emma to either snap at him or ignore him. But to his surprise she slowed down and nodded.

“It’s just that she was always so close, just a city or two away, and she hardly ever visited,” she said, her eyes trained on Annie’s back as she led them all home. “I mean, no wonder we have nothing in common. I never got a chance to know her.”

“You’re family,” Peter said simply.

“Maybe so, but I don’t get her.”

“Maybe she doesn’t get you, either.”

“That’s the point,” Emma sighed. “Nobody understands anyone else in my family, and nobody even tries. Least of all with me.”

“It’s not just
your
family, you know,” Peter pointed out, and then stopped himself. He wanted to say more, to tell her how he suspected everyone felt a little bit alone, that maybe it was impossible to ever be fully understood, and that she wasn’t the only one in the world who felt that way. But he was afraid of breaking the newfound complicity between them.

“Maybe not,” Emma said. “But it sometimes feels that way.”

It wasn’t long before they came across a small city park where a four-man band was playing on the pavilion. Emma made them stop to listen, and as they watched, Peter could tell that the trumpet player—clearly the worst of the quartet—was struggling to keep up with the rest of them. Every so often a stray note would make itself heard amid the other instruments, and the poor man would heave a desperate breath into his horn as he limped through the song.

Peter glanced over at Emma and Annie, both looking on with a similar expression of mildest interest, their heads tilted the exact same way. Nobody else seemed to notice the lagging trumpeter as the trombonist entered the song at high volume and the saxophone kicked up at the chorus.

That was the thing about playing with a band, Peter thought. There was always someone else to rescue you when it seemed certain you might fall behind. Only the solo acts left themselves open to those kinds of disasters.

chapter seventeen