You Are Here (26 page)

“You don’t need me tagging along anymore,” Peter was saying, looking as if he was still trying to convince himself of this fact. “You’ve got a lot of things going on with your family, and I don’t want to intrude. And I figure that as long as my dad’s gonna kill me anyway, I might as well see a few more things along the way. Especially since I’ll probably never be allowed out of my room again.”

He looked up at her as if all this was inevitable, as if he’d always known this would happen here in this shaded cemetery in western North Carolina, with the wind rearranging the grass and the trees a symphony of rasps and groans. His hair was blown sideways off his forehead, and his eyes were quiet, the bright intelligence replaced by something deeper, something sadder, maybe.

“Are you—?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”

She attempted a small smile, but she couldn’t help feeling that she was falling back inside herself, despite her best efforts to stay afloat. She knew he had every right to do this, that in his position she wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing. She’d offered him so little, and even now, as she walked around to the other side of the car and slipped inside, she still couldn’t bring herself to say the one thing that might fix all this, at once an apology and a wish:
Stay
.

“And hey,” he said, “I could come back and pick you up afterward, unless your family …”

“I found my way down here,” Emma said shortly. “I’m sure I can figure out a way back home.”

“Okay, then,” Peter said, gripping the wheel.

Emma nodded. “Okay.”

He turned the key in the ignition and said it again: “Okay.”

As they left, the tires bounced over the unripened crab apples that littered the drive, and the stained-glass windows of the church threw tinted colors on the hood of the car. Emma leaned an elbow on the side and told herself it was for the best, that her reasons for coming down here had had nothing to do with Peter in the first place, and that once he was gone—doing whatever it was he wanted to do, touring empty fields across the South, searching for reminders of something long since erased—she’d finally be able to focus on what was important again.

It was a short drive to Nate’s house, just a few miles farther down a narrow road that cut through the kind of hills that in another season would be perfect for sledding. There were farms with hay stacked like building blocks, battered mailboxes and white fences, bird feeders and bluish grass. Emma hadn’t been for a visit in years, and she’d nearly forgotten the humble charm of the little house, set near a muddy lake with a sinking dock and an overturned rowboat that looked as if it hadn’t seen the water in years.

Peter turned the key and the car went silent, and Emma pressed her nose up against the window to look out at the place they’d carried her home after she was born, the place where her brother had died and her family had begun the slow process of unraveling. The horizon was crowded by the smoke-colored mountains, and from a distance the trees looked like feathers coating some giant, hunchbacked bird, the wind tipping them this way and that like needles on a scale.

The whole world smelled of pine and mulch, and they sat looking out at the house together, neither of them quite sure what to say. Emma tried not to feel so deflated, but this was what she’d come all the way down here for, and it now seemed silly and pointless. What had she hoped to do in dredging up the past? What good could that possibly have done? A part of her simply wasn’t ready for the trip to be over, but another part of her knew it was more than that. She wasn’t yet ready for Peter to leave.

“Well,” she said.

“Well.”

Peter helped gather her things from the trunk, and when they finished, she slung her backpack over her shoulder. “What about the dog?”

They both stared at the mound of white fur sprawled out across the backseat.

“I hadn’t even thought of that,” Peter said, rubbing at his jaw. “You should probably get to take him. I mean, you found him. And after all you did this morning …”

Emma shook her head. “You take him.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying, or how I’m getting home,” she said. “You two can keep each other company.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We can figure the rest when we get home, but I think he’s gotten pretty fond of that car.”

Peter thumped a fist against the hood and smiled ruefully. “Me too.”

“And me,” Emma said softly, and then they both stood there like that, working up to some kind of good-bye.

“So, good luck,” Peter said eventually, shoving his hands in his pockets and backing up until he ran into the car with a jolt. His cheeks reddened, and he gave a little shrug. “Let me know how things turned out when you’re back home, okay?”

Emma couldn’t bring herself to answer. A small and somewhat ridiculous part of her wished that he might try to kiss her again, because this time would be different. But a second chance seemed too much to hope for now, and so she managed a small nod before turning to hurry up the stone path, where she stood before the front door for a moment, trying to collect herself. Behind her she could hear the familiar rattle of the engine as Peter revved up the car, and then the bleating sound of the tires as it disappeared up the drive.

She kept her back to the street until the noise had given way to a sort of pulsing silence, until Peter was gone, and she was alone, and there was nothing more to be done except kick herself for always choosing the wrong times to be silent and the wrong times to make a fuss, for always managing to get it all so perfectly wrong.

chapter twenty-four

Though it would continue to happen often over the years, the first time Peter set off to follow Emma without an invitation was in fifth grade. Up to that point he’d spent most afternoons on his own, conducting elaborate battles across his bedroom floor, shifting a shoelace back and forth across the carpet to mark the progress of one side or the other.

But one day after school he noticed Emma heading off toward the college where her parents taught, the lofty grouping of stone buildings that had for some time been the object of intense interest for him. Hoping she might be on her way to see her parents at their offices—places he imagined as grand libraries with antique globes and row upon row of dusty, important-looking tomes—he followed, feeling quite proud of himself as he trailed along carefully behind her.

Emma wove purposefully through the throngs of college students, who all looked on with amusement at the ten-year-old girl with scabby knees and tangled hair who swung her arms with such determination. He was surprised when she walked right past the English building, then Anthropology, and then on toward the dorms, eventually going past the president’s house and beyond, where the path opened up to a long field that was shaped like a comma and overgrown with weeds.

Peter hung back as she started out across it, and when he thought she was a safe distance ahead, he kicked his way through the high grass, his shoelaces undone, his backpack heavy with books, his glasses slipping down his nose. He rarely ventured up to the college, which had its own campus security force and didn’t often require his dad’s services. To Peter it seemed almost like a monument, untouchable and sacred and very far away from his own sagging house down the street.

At the edge of the field a wall of trees rose from the untidy lawn, and Emma disappeared into their midst, pulling back branches and picking her away along a leaf-covered path. She paused at one point, and Peter froze and held his breath, sure he’d been caught. But after a moment she kept moving, and he couldn’t help following, pulled along behind her as if by some magnetic force. When she finally reached a small clearing, Peter was still a good ten yards back, but he could hear Emma—her back turned toward him—sing out, “We’re here.”

He stepped forward, blushing.

“Sorry,” he muttered as he joined her. “I wasn’t …”

“Yeah, you were,” she said, frowning at him. “You were following me.”

Not having anything to say to this, Peter poked at the leaves with the scuffed toe of his sneaker, examining his too-short corduroys. Emma sat down beneath a tree and unpacked a thermos and an apple from her backpack.

“I only have enough for me,” she said unapologetically. “I didn’t know I’d be having company.”

“That’s okay,” Peter said, sitting down cross-legged a few feet away.

The crows were circling overhead, their calls harsh and distant-sounding in the empty sky. He watched her bite into the apple, thinking how she—like him—didn’t seem to have any friends at school, but though he couldn’t have explained why, he knew the situation was different somehow.

“What do you do up here, anyway?”

She shrugged.

“Do you come up here every day?”

She shrugged again, and Peter stood up to circle the faded gravestones, which were covered in sap and bird droppings and stained with juice from the berries growing thickly in the surrounding bushes. There were a few dried flower petals beside one of them, but most looked largely abandoned.

“Who are these people?” he asked, stooping to read the names. “Did you know any of them?”

She shook her head.

“Then why do you come up here?”

“It’s quiet,” she said simply. Peter glanced over at her, thinking that her house must be fairly quiet too. He knew her older brothers and sister had all moved away, and her parents spent most of their time up at the college, or at least in their home offices, writing poems and researching speeches and lectures. He wondered what could possibly be quieter than a house that ran itself like a library, thinking of his own home, his dad half asleep on the couch with only the sound of the beer settling in its can, the soft swish as he scratched at one socked foot with the other.

“I like it here,” he said, tripping along from tombstone to tombstone, studying each with interest. He could feel Emma’s eyes on him with an intensity that he was unaccustomed to, and he felt a sudden tightness in his throat, like he might cough or cry without warning, like something that had been caught there for ages might now decide to come tumbling out.

He was standing before the grave of a woman who’d died in 1924 at the age of thirty, the same age his mom had been when she’d died giving birth to him, and because it was autumn and the leaves were falling all around them, because the world was a blur of red and brown and orange, because he had no one to talk to—had
never
had anyone to talk to—and because Emma was here and his dad wasn’t (was never
really
there, even when he was), because of all this Peter turned to tell Emma about his mother, about the hole that had been torn in the map of his life, like a town he’d never had the chance to visit, like all the towns in the world he’d never seen and maybe never would.

But when he looked over, Emma had her head tipped back against the tree, and was humming as she watched the clouds move through the branches. Peter realized then how alone they each were. It was just that now they were alone together.

As he drove away from Nate’s house, Peter gave the steering wheel a good solid pound with his fist. When the car jerked to the left with an enthusiastic little surge, he twisted to apologize to the dog, who opened one eye and yawned.

Peter couldn’t believe he’d driven all this way only to end up alone again.

It was hard to believe that after all these days with Emma he hadn’t picked up even a shred of her self-confidence, her reckless spontaneity and unchecked impulsiveness. He was still just as awkward and hesitant and hopeless as he’d always been, and the more he tried to overcome it, the worse it seemed to get. Just now he’d stood outside the car, and he’d waved good-bye, and he’d watched her march up to the door on her own. And then he’d driven away like a coward.

Now he considered heading south, but he’d come too far in that direction with Emma to continue on without her. East was the ocean, and Peter could already imagine a more forlorn version of himself gazing out at the open sea, angrily tossing rocks, tracing pathetic little hearts into the sand. It would all be very melodramatic, and so he thought it best to head west instead, a nod to the time-honored tradition of starting over.

There were several battlefields in the eastern part of Tennessee, strewn across the crooked edge of the state like minefields in its history. For the most part these were not like ones in the North. These were different types of memorials entirely, many of them home to crushing defeats and demoralizing losses by the South, and it seemed somehow fitting that Peter had come all the way down here to witness this.