You Are Here (9 page)

Dad raised his head to look at him with undisguised suspicion. “What’re you trying to talk about baseball for?”

Peter shrugged. “What else would we talk about?”

“Look, if you’re trying to make some kind of point—”

“I’m not trying to do anything other than talk.”

“I’d think you were all talked out after last night,” Dad said coldly, setting down the newspaper as he collected his plates. He dumped what was left of the mushy cereal into the garbage, then stood washing his dishes at the sink, his back to the table.

Peter cleared his throat, determined. “Last night you said that Mom—”

But Dad whirled around, spraying the room with soapy water. “Don’t you know when to quit?” he said, his voice hard. “Just leave it already.”

Peter took off his glasses, wiping away the flecks of soap with the end of his shirt. He was on the verge of losing his nerve, and wasn’t entirely sure why he was still pressing the issue. He took a deep breath.

“You were saying how much Mom loved this town,” he ventured again, the forced cheeriness now entirely gone from his voice. Because this was the thought that had kept him up last night. He’d known that they’d grown up here, that they’d met in high school and gone to prom together and been married in the chapel on the hill. But he didn’t know any of the particulars, and hearing something other than a fact—that she was born this year and died that one—had reminded him that she must have once taken walks here, picked flowers in the park, and said hello to neighbors on the street. It was a testament to how little he knew about her that it took something as mundane as this to send him vaulting into a past that didn’t belong to him, fueled by curiosity and frustration and a desperate longing to shout when all he’d ever been allowed were a few timid whispers.

But Dad was looking at him now with such abject disbelief that Peter nearly brought a hand to his face to make sure nothing was growing there.

“Of
course
she loved it here,” Dad said, and for a moment Peter thought maybe this was the beginning of something, that they’d sit back down together, lean across the milk-stained tablecloth, and have an actual discussion. But then Dad’s left eye began to twitch again, and he brought a heavy hand down on the back of Peter’s chair and lowered his face. “It was her home.”

“Yeah, but—”

“She was smart,” Dad said mildly, as if this quality weren’t necessarily numbered among the things he missed about her. “Very smart.”

Peter opened his mouth, but Dad scraped back a chair and sat down again across the table, giving him a long look.

“She didn’t feel like she had to go running off to see the world,” he said, bowing his head to examine the tablecloth. He used his fingernail to chip at a crusted piece of ketchup left over from last night’s dinner. “Her life was here. She was happy
here
.”

“It’s not that I’m
un
happy here,” Peter said quietly. “It’s just that there are other things, other places …”

There was a long silence, interrupted only by the dripping of the kitchen sink and the hum of the air-conditioning from the next room. Finally, Dad shook his head, frustrated, and stood up to leave. He tipped the contents of his coffee mug into the sink, tried twisting the faucet off again, then grabbed his sunglasses and hat from the counter. Peter watched all this with a sort of detached fascination, aware that something had shifted between them, an opening of something that perhaps should have been left closed.

Dad had a hand on the back door when he turned around once more. His eyes flicked across the room, taking in the drab green curtains and the faded floor tiles, the fraying tablecloth and his improbable son.

“She wasn’t happy here
in spite
of being smart, you know,” he said. “She was happy here
because
of it. She was smart enough to know a good thing.”

“Then I guess she was smarter than I am,” Peter said, his voice barely audible. The words emerged almost before he could think to stop them, and it was obvious by the way the door slammed that Dad had heard him loud and clear.

Later that morning, when Peter pulled the blue car out to the end of the driveway, his hands were shaking. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing, only that it felt like it was already too late to take it back. And as he drove deeper into the state of New York—moving so quickly along the well-known map routes that it almost felt like falling—his mouth was dry and chalky with the very real fear that at any moment a police car would flip on its lights and peel out after him.

He knew that if it weren’t for Emma, he probably wouldn’t have made it very far. It simply wasn’t in his nature, this tendency toward flight, this ability to break the rules without a second thought. No matter what he told himself, no matter how much he’d like to believe he’d have made it all the way to Gettysburg, in reality, he probably would have only stopped for pizza a few towns over, wandered to the farthest corners of the county, maybe waited until it was dark out before slinking back home to accept his punishment.

But then his phone had begun to ring, and the trip had suddenly changed from something meandering and lonely and spiteful into something more purposeful, an unlikely adventure with Emma, a journey filled with incredible possibilities. It was no longer just an afternoon jaunt. It was an expedition. It was a voyage.

It was unlike anything he’d ever done before.

All afternoon Peter tried not to imagine what Dad’s reaction would be when he found out. After the first fifty miles he stuck a Post-it note over the clock on the dashboard, because all he could think about was the rapidly approaching hour when his father would arrive home from work to discover an empty house and a missing car. And it wasn’t until five o’ clock came and went, and the sky fell a shade darker, and the rest stop grew closer, and the phone in his pocket failed to ring, that Peter was struck with a new worry. That perhaps his dad
had
noticed that he wasn’t there, and just didn’t care enough to do anything about it.

But for the moment, at least, he was on his way, and he distracted himself by thinking about all the landmarks he’d always wanted to visit, not just the battlefields—which stretched up and down the coast like a scar across the land—but all the other things too: the Appalachian Trail and the Washington Monument, the Liberty Bell and the Smithsonian. In Pennsylvania alone there was the Hershey Museum (with its unimaginable amounts of chocolate) and the National Aviary (with its unending varieties of birds) and the town of Punxsutawney (home to the world’s most famous groundhog). In Virginia he’d visit Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown; South Carolina had the world’s largest peach (an astounding one hundred and thirty-five feet tall and seventy-three feet wide), and Georgia had America’s Smallest Church (which held only thirteen people). There was Disney World and Cape Canaveral, the wetlands and the Outer Banks, South of the Border and the Kennedy Space Center, and that was all just the East Coast.

But when he pulled into the rest area, a solitary patch of ugly concrete in northern New Jersey, and saw Emma sitting there—hunched on a picnic table beside a large white dog, her legs pulled up so that her chin rested on her bare knees, somehow managing to look bored and worried and excited all at once—Peter realized that this was even better.

chapter nine

Emma wasn’t exactly sure what she’d been expecting—something more
Peter
, perhaps a minivan or a Volvo, something blocky and safe, a low-slung, sensible car with good mileage. So when the blue convertible came lurching up alongside the curb, she couldn’t help laughing.

It was nearly the same as the other one—the one parked lifelessly across the lot—and Peter looked so comically out of place in it, his usually combed hair ruffled by the wind, his glasses speckled with bits of dirt, his arm slung over the passenger seat in a display of forced casualness.

“Hi,” she said, and he grinned back at her somewhat less certainly, then looked down in surprise when the car gave a little jerk forward.

“Uh, let me just go park,” he said, twisting his mouth in concentration as he fiddled with the gearshift. “I’ll be right back.”

Emma slid off the picnic table, and beside her the dog leaped to his feet too. They eyed each other until Peter reappeared a few moments later, clutching the keys and looking somewhat sheepish.

“I didn’t have much of a selection, and it seemed to run okay …,” he started to explain, throwing a hand in the general direction of the parking lot. The collar of his shirt was twisted and crumpled, and his shorts were too baggy for his skinny legs, and he was shifting from one foot to the other, clearly nervous about her or the car or the situation in general.

Emma attempted a reassuring smile. “It’s perfect,” she told him, because after nearly four hours here she would have been happy if he’d shown up driving a lawn mower. “Did you have any trouble getting it?”

“No,” Peter said a bit too quickly. “None.”

She nodded, and they stood for a moment in an uncomfortable silence, Emma only now really absorbing the idea of it: that she and Peter Finnegan were about to embark on a road trip together. She cleared her throat—to say what, she wasn’t exactly sure—but before she could think of something, the dog limped over and bumped at the back of her leg, causing her knee to buckle. She swung her head around as he backed up a few steps, looking pleased with himself.

“Whose dog?” Peter asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Nobody’s,” she said. “He’s been keeping me company.”

Peter accepted this information the same way he did most everything else, without comment or judgment, only a thoughtful and unreadable nod of his head.

“Can we grab some food before we get going?” he asked, glancing over toward the hulking lodge of a building, and though Emma would have been just as happy to never set foot there again, she nodded and led the way.

“So what are you gonna do about your brother’s car?” he asked, once they’d ordered and carried their trays back outside again. They were joined by the dog, who gazed expectantly at the food, following each fry like a spectator at a tennis match.

Emma took a sip of her milk shake. “Leave it here, I guess.”

“Won’t it get towed?”

“I doubt it,” she said, not really knowing at all. “We shouldn’t be gone much more than a week, and there are so many cars coming in and out of here.”

He licked his fingers one at a time. “So then what happens in a week?”

“We’ll get it repaired,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t know. We’ll figure something out then.”

Peter seemed pleased at the “we,” and Emma realized she was too. It was a strange little crew she’d gathered—her slightly odd next-door neighbor and a three-legged dog—but it felt good to have company all the same.

“I saw your parents yesterday,” Peter said, and Emma lowered her eyes. “It didn’t seem like they realized you’d be gone for so long.”

As if on cue her phone began to ring again, and she jammed her thumb against the off button. “You didn’t say anything, did you?”

He shook his head. “My dad doesn’t exactly know where I am either.”

“Oh,” Emma said, feeling worse instead of better. This only meant they’d have more people worried about them, more parents trying to figure out where they were. Peter’s dad was a police officer—the town sheriff, of all things—and she wondered what kind of trouble two almost-seventeen-year-olds could get into for this kind of thing.

But Peter was now beaming at her from across the table, his eyes large against his freckled face—looking as desperate for approval as the dog at their feet—and so she smiled back at him with more confidence than she felt.

When he finished his burger, he balled up the wrapper to toss into the nearby garbage can. But his throw went wide, glancing off the side of the bin, and the dog pounced on it, bobbing his head up and down and looking confused when it didn’t easily clear his throat. Before she had a chance to think better of it, Emma sprang up and wrestled him into a headlock. Ignoring Peter’s protests, she pried open the dog’s mouth and thrust a hand in, emerging triumphantly with the slobbery wrapper. The dog coughed a few times, and Peter stared at her.

“You shouldn’t stick your hand into a strange dog’s mouth,” he said, sounding so much like her father that all Emma could do was nod wearily as she returned to her seat, the dog now pressed against her leg and eyeing her with a look of great devotion.