You Are Here (8 page)

When her cell phone began to ring—dancing along the planks of the rest stop picnic table—Emma looked up in surprise. A few feet away the dog was lying on the grass, looking hopeful about the appearance of more fries, and he pricked his ears forward and eyed the phone. Emma could see on the screen that it was her parents calling, and she suspected that Patrick had now spoken to them. He was probably furious with her, and though she knew she should pick up, she couldn’t bring herself to do it, instead watching the phone until it fell silent again.

They’d be nearly frantic by now, she was sure, but she had no intention of turning back, so what good would it do anyway? It would only be a few more hours until she reached DC, and she could call them when she got to Annie’s. By then she’d be nearly halfway to North Carolina, too far for them to object to her continuing on.

She stood to toss her garbage in one of the bins, giving the dog one more pat as she headed back over to the little blue car, which was now sandwiched between two campers in the parking lot. As she squeezed by the one wallpapered with Texas-themed bumper stickers, she was surprised to find the dog at her side. He sat back and thumped his tail against the pavement, his bad leg tucked up close to him, his head cocked first to one side, then the other.

“You trying to hitch a ride?” she asked, stepping around him. He sat there and watched as she closed the door, then jammed the keys into the ignition, turning them once, twice, and then again. But the engine refused to catch, and she sat in the quiet car and leaned her head back on the seat, telling herself not to panic. After a moment she tried again, and a thin trail of smoke rose from the seams of the hood. Emma stared at it, and then beyond, to where the dog was still watching her, his mouth hanging open in a great doggy smile, looking like he was very much amused by her current predicament.

“It’s not funny,” she said as she strode past him and back toward the building. He trotted after her, a white shadow beneath the high ball of the sun.

In her pocket the phone began to ring again, and Emma was about to hit ignore when she changed her mind. She waited until it had stopped—until her parents gave up for at least another few minutes—then scrolled down until she found a different number.

If she were to call Patrick, he would only yell at her about the car and demand that she turn back. Her parents would want to come pick her up, and Annie would wonder why she thought it was okay to show up unannounced in the first place. If she were to call a tow truck, they would only charge her far too much and then put her back out onto the road, where the car would probably break down again in another fifty miles or so.

But Emma was on her way, and she knew for sure that she couldn’t stop now. And so she sat down at a picnic table and called the only person she could think to call.

Peter picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s Emma.”

“Hey,” he said, unable to hide his surprise. “How’s the trip?”

“Okay so far,” she said, and beside her the dog tilted his head as if to make the obvious point that the trip was not, in fact, okay so far.

“Good,” he said. “Are you still in the city?”

“Not exactly.”

“Where are you then?”

“In Jersey,” she said, biting her lip. “Not far from Philly. You wouldn’t still want to come along, would you?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and Emma could almost hear Peter’s mind at work. He had a way about him that might seem a bit odd to other people, but she’d grown used to it over the years. They’d known each other since her family first moved here when she was eight. Like her, Peter didn’t have many friends at school. He seemed mostly to prefer his own company, though he’d always been different around Emma. She didn’t think this could be called a friendship exactly, but she didn’t necessarily mind having him around either. He spent nearly as much time at her house as she did, and it didn’t escape her notice that, in many ways, he fit into her family far better. He knew everything there was to know about the Civil War, and had a tendency of bringing any subject around to it in the same way the rest of her family couldn’t help letting their own specialties creep into everyday conversation. But he could also remain quiet for impressively long periods of time without feeling the need to say anything, and this suited Emma just fine.

“My car sort of died,” she admitted. “But I’m not quite ready to turn back yet.”

“Well, where are you planning on going?”

“North Carolina.”

Emma held her breath as she waited for Peter to ask all the logical questions—
why?
and
where exactly?
and
for how long?
—but was surprised when he asked her something entirely different.

“Could we make a detour?”

“Where to?”

“Gettysburg.”

“The
battlefield
?” She lifted her eyes to the sky, wondering if she’d made a mistake in calling Peter after all.
Gettysburg?
“That’s got to be at least a few hours out of the way.”

“I could always go on my own, then pick you up afterward,” he suggested, and Emma looked around at the trucks rumbling in off the highway, the men with tall hats and heavy boots, the families eating French fries by the handful.

“No,” she said a bit too quickly. She was already in enough trouble as it was, she thought. Might as well see some sights along the way. “Gettysburg sounds great.”

Once they’d made the arrangements—an exchange of directions and landmarks and information—Emma left the dog behind and wandered back inside. It would be hours before Peter made it down here, and so she set about passing the time, losing a few quarters at the arcade, observing the flood of people from a bench beside a gumball machine, and leafing through magazines at the gift shop. There were rows upon rows of New Jersey souvenirs, glass thimbles with the state flag and spoons stamped with the official flower. There were coins and mugs and snow globes with the boardwalk underneath, the sand whirling beneath the glass like a snowstorm.

Emma ran a finger across a dusty pack of cards—each with a picture of one of the state’s many so-called attractions—and wondered at the kind of people who collected these things. It was at moments like this one that she was grateful her family was so different. They might not watch stupid movies or care about who won the Super Bowl. They might not be able to get through dinner without bringing up a long-dead poet or famous mathematician, but they also didn’t collect pens from different states. What they collected was far more important than that: words and stories, causes and facts. And it occurred now to Emma that perhaps her role in all this was to catch what they didn’t, to find and preserve and hold on to the memories that had slipped from their grasp.

Before heading back outside, Emma stopped in the bathroom and stuffed her pockets with paper towels, then grabbed an empty soda cup and filled it with water. Out on the patio the dog was sprawled beneath the table she’d been sitting at earlier, and he scrambled out from under the bench to join her. He shied away at first when she tried to clean him up, gently untangling the burrs from his coat and dabbing at the dried mud, but soon enough he rested his head on her knee and let her continue. She picked the twigs from his fur, massaged the dirt from the pads of his paws, cleaned a small cut on his snout. Around them the parking lot continued to rearrange itself, the cars coming and going without pause, and the sun slipped lower in the sky, the shadows lengthening across the pavement. The dog let out a weary sigh, and Emma did too.

A few feet away a rectangular billboard advertised area events and attractions from behind a thick pane of yellowing plastic. The notices formed a border around a large map of Northern New Jersey, its colors muted by weather and time. Emma’s eyes kept returning to the center of it, where a red circle with a tiny arrow jutting down like a spike of lightning announced you are here, and she couldn’t help wishing it were always so easy to locate herself.

chapter eight

What Peter hadn’t told Emma was that he was already on the road—shooting south toward Gettysburg as if he’d been summoned to battle there himself—and this alone should have struck him as a warning sign. If she knew that he’d already gone through the trouble of stealing a car and sneaking away from his dad, and not for her sake, not for any grand reason, but simply out of frustration at the latest in a long string of frustrations, then it wouldn’t seem like such a very big deal that he was now on his way to rescue her.

And much to his surprise Peter found himself hoping that Emma would think it was just that. A very big deal.

He checked his phone one more time—just to be entirely, completely, utterly certain that the call had actually taken place—and felt a strange sense of excitement that made his stomach wobble and his hands flutter on the steering wheel. A smarter person would have told her that he couldn’t come, would have stopped himself from getting off at the next exit, making a slight change in direction and heading east toward New Jersey. But although Peter was smart about a rather impressive range of things, dealing with girls was simply not one of them.

Up until Emma called, he’d been driving on sheer worry, propelled by a nervous fear of what Dad might do when he got off work later this evening to discover that both his son and the car were gone. Peter tried to distract himself by thinking of all the places he might now visit, the national parks and historical monuments he’d always wanted to see. But what if they weren’t what he imagined? What if the battlefields were overrun by tourists? What if the Smoky Mountains weren’t that much better than the hills of upstate New York? What if the World’s Largest Ball of Twine didn’t turn out to be very big at all?

Peter had never been much of a rule breaker or a boundary crosser, had rarely attempted to stick a toe over any sort of line, and he could blame Dad all he wanted for this. But a small part of him also knew that the reason he’d never ventured anywhere was because of the worry that the reality of the world wouldn’t match up to his dreams.

Still, their argument yesterday had triggered something inside of him, and Peter had spent much of the night staring at the lacework of shadows across his ceiling, wakeful and restless. The keys to the blue convertible were tucked away in the toe of one of his sneakers, and he got up twice during the night to fish them out, turning over the cool metal in his hands, running a finger along the rabbit’s foot as if testing his luck.

The thing was, he and Dad didn’t usually fight. They snapped at each other from time to time—they cast dirty looks and sighed with heavy, pointed sighs—but mostly they just kept their distance. So when Peter had padded down the stairs this morning, already stiff and awkward at the idea of their inevitable interaction, he wasn’t surprised that Dad didn’t even look up from the paper.

“Morning,” he greeted him, and he saw Dad’s left eye twitch, just slightly, though his gaze never wavered from the sports section. This was their usual way of dealing with things—to ignore them, to pretend they’d never happened, to forget about them and hope they might go away—and normally that was just fine with Peter. But as he poured himself a bowl of cereal, he realized for the first time how much the silence bothered him.

Last night hadn’t been an argument over picking up his dirty socks or forgetting about what was in the oven so that the whole house smelled like a campfire. It hadn’t even been about where he wanted to go to school next year. It had been much deeper than that. They’d talked about his mother—the rarest topic of all in a house where most topics went untouched—and the very mention of her should have warranted something more than this evasive shuffling of newspapers and clinking of cereal bowls.

And so Peter fixed a falsely bright smile on his face as he sat down. “Anything going on in the world?”

“The Mets lost to the Cubs,” Dad grunted, not bothering to look up from the paper. This, of course, was a deliberate jab at Peter, a reminder of Dad’s disappointment that his only son found sports to be pointless and boring (running in circles around some bases? tossing a ball into a hoop? grown men tackling each other on a muddy field?).

Normally, these attempts at conversation flickered out with the first sports reference of the morning, but today Peter beamed at Dad across the table. “Hope they can pull it together this season.”