You Are Here (25 page)

Peter ran his hands along the steering wheel as they crossed the state line into North Carolina. It was clear to him what his next move would have to be. He’d tried his hardest to make this work, had flattered himself into thinking that his role on this trip might be bigger than just the driver, the navigator, the polite chauffeur. If he was being honest with himself, he’d wanted to be something more. He’d wanted to be her sidekick, her partner, her friend.

And if he was being
really
honest with himself, he’d wanted even more than that.

He’d certainly tried. He’d spoken up. He’d put in his two cents and said his piece. And though he was sorry for a lot of things on this trip, trying to kiss Emma was not one of them. For once in his life, he’d failed at something. But at least he’d done it by trying, rather than standing off to the side like a coward.

Even so, he realized—several days too late—that he probably should have never answered her call in the first place, should have done this trip his own way, zigzagging from battlefield to battlefield, following the lines of history and the paths of ghosts less close to home.

And he knew now what he needed to do.

“Are we close?” Emma asked from the backseat, startling Peter, who hadn’t realized she was awake. Her voice sounded very small; it was the first time either of them had spoken in hours.

“Yeah,” he said. “Almost there.”

“Can we go straight to the cemetery?”

Peter nodded, flicking his eyes to the left and changing lanes, heading toward the cemetery that Emma had chosen earlier in the trip, waving her finger in a little circle like a pendulum above the map. He turned in that direction now, getting off the highway onto a two-lane road that wound its way between sloping, tree-covered hills, past farmhouses and cottages and fields occupied by slow-moving horses.

The dog was awake now in the backseat, his eyes still glassy from the anesthesia, his bandaged foot tucked gingerly beneath him. Emma scratched his ears and leaned in to him, looking nervous as they got closer. At a bend in the road they came upon a small church with a raised steeple, a weather vane at the very top. Peter slowed the car, and Emma sat up to look.

It was nearly perfectly square, made of white clapboard, with a few modest stained-glass windows cut into the sides. There was a circular drive and a few overgrown bushes, and beyond that a small cemetery. Somehow, without really knowing at all, Peter was sure they’d found the right place.

The little parking lot was empty, and so Peter pulled into one of the spaces just beside the church and turned off the ignition. The dog swiveled his head in the direction of the door, as if contemplating jumping up and out, but then rolled over again with a little grunt. Emma, however, didn’t move. She just sat there, her eyes as glazed as the dog’s, blinking out the window. Peter couldn’t tell whether he should say something or not, so he sat very still and looked out at the rows of headstones, their inscriptions worn by years of wind and rain, their edges smoothed over time.

Finally, Emma moved a hand to the door, then stayed like that, caught between moments, waiting—though for what he couldn’t be sure.

“I’m sorry,” she said eventually, still not looking at him. “About last night.”

She didn’t wait for a response, only turned the handle and stepped out of the car, and Peter watched her walk purposefully across the lawn, weaving through the headstones as if she’d always known the way. She paused before an old crab apple tree, and inside the car Peter sighed.

“Me too,” he said.

chapter twenty-three

Of all the things Emma had been expecting to feel when she finally arrived at her dead brother’s grave, this—this sudden urge to laugh—certainly hadn’t been one of them.

After spending so many days first brooding, then stewing, she’d walked up here as if playing a part, solemn and reverent and grief-stricken, her back straight and her head held high as she crisscrossed between the scattered headstones. She’d spent days thinking about her brother, imagining what she would say when she arrived here, contemplating this recent addition to her life, who had been subtracted before she could ever come to count on him.

But now that she was here, standing before a headstone marked with a name so similar to hers—thomas quinn healy, born july 11, died july 13—she found she had nothing to say to him. Most unexpectedly, all those things she
did
have to say, the ones she’d kept quiet about and the ones she didn’t have the words for yet, all these things and more now seemed to belong instead to Peter Finnegan.

And for some reason this seemed wildly comical, like some sort of joke the world had played on her, the kind of fated, cosmic comeuppance her father might write about in one of his poems.

But when the humor of it all began to fade, Emma was left staring down at the moss-covered stone, feeling very small beneath the cottony sky. The air smelled of rain, cool and sweet, and she closed her hands one finger at a time, knuckle by knuckle, until they were tight little balls at her sides. Though she had plenty of practice at being wrong, she’d never quite become accustomed to all that came along with it, the prickle of guilt that worked its way through her like a foul-tasting medicine.

But she knew now she’d been wrong about Peter.

It was okay to find his obsession with maps a little odd, and it was fine to think he was weird because he preferred a good documentary about the Civil War to a night out at the movies. But it had been more than that. Emma felt suddenly wide awake, here among the rotting crab apples and the twisting grass. She could see now, for the first time, why she’d been so awful to him. It was one thing to count on someone who was dead and gone, to rely on an idea or a memory, a person with no real influence over her life outside of her imagination. But it was another thing entirely to have someone actually want to
be there
for you, unfailingly and unquestioningly, someone who listened carefully and told you the truth and waited patiently until you were ready to be there for them, too.

And something about that scared her.

So what she unexpectedly found herself thinking about now—as the blossoms from the trees twirled down all around her, as the wind picked up and the birds hung suspended in the sky like misshapen kites—was Peter’s mother.

Because how many hours had she spent with him in uncomplicated silence, ignoring or humoring him, thinking herself generous for enduring his company? And not once had she asked about his mom. Not once had she even thought about it.

Emma had known about her brother for less than a week, and Peter had been so quick to rush to her side when she needed him. In so many ways his loss was far greater than hers, a lifelong absence. He’d been carrying the weight of it the whole time she’d known him, and somehow Emma was only just now realizing how selfish she’d been.

She’d asked so much of him, and he’d been generous even when he didn’t have to be, even when she didn’t deserve it. He’d forced her to slow down and taught her to think before opening her mouth. He’d seen her impatience for uncertainty, all her bluster for lack of balance, and he’d helped her right herself again. He’d stolen a car and driven all this way; he’d pointed them in the right direction, true and unwavering as a compass, and now here they were.

All her life Emma had felt somehow incomplete, like a piece of her was missing. But standing here at the resting place of her brother—her twin, her missing piece—all she wanted to do was walk back over to the car and see Peter. Because a piece of him was missing too, and she understood now that this was why they were meant to fit. It was that simple, like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle clicking into place, the satisfying snap of it, the long-awaited focus.

It wasn’t her brother that she’d needed to make herself whole again; it was Peter. And now that she knew, now that she finally realized it—in the same manner she came to realize most things: gradually, stubbornly, and then all at once—it was like she’d always known it, like there was never any other way it could have been.

The dog was barking from inside the car, and there was an urgency to it that made Emma feel suddenly anxious, like she’d waited too long for something that was now in danger of slipping away completely. Flustered, she knelt down beside the grave and ran her fingers along the rough stone, tracing the curved letters of her brother’s name.

“Look,” she said. “This isn’t really a proper hello. Or good-bye. Or whatever it was supposed to be. I had a lot of things planned, and a lot I wanted to talk to you about. Our family, for one. And our birthday. And everything else. Seventeen years worth of stuff, actually.”

She glanced over at the car, where Peter was leaning against the hood, his arms folded and his head cocked to take in the great map of the sky overhead, the uneven terrain of clouds and the oceans of blue in between. She turned back to the grave.

“So I guess I should be thanking you,” she continued, feeling somewhat ridiculous talking to a stone. “For getting me to drive down here. It helped somehow. I think I figured out some of the stuff that needed figuring. And so I guess I just wanted to …” She paused, trying to figure out how to phrase this. “I guess I just wanted to meet you.”

Emma sat back and blinked at the grave. The damp grass was cool against her bare knees, and she raked her hands through the dirt, wishing she’d remembered to stop and buy flowers. There was so much she’d intended to do, so much she’d planned to say; a week’s worth of driving to consider it, a lifetime’s worth of loneliness to prepare her.

But none of that seemed to matter anymore. She’d done what she’d come here to do. She’d said hello and good-bye; she’d met him and then let him go. And maybe it wouldn’t change anything with her family, and maybe it wouldn’t even change her. But Emma felt different all the same: lighter somehow, less alone. And the cause of that—Peter or her brother or her family, the many miles between here and home—didn’t seem as important as the feeling itself.

She stretched to pick a dandelion, then laid it beside the stone. It wasn’t a bouquet of daisies or freshly picked tulips or anything close to perfect; it was all she could do right now, but it seemed somehow appropriate all the same.

“Nice to meet you, Tommy,” she said.

As she walked back toward the car, she couldn’t help the corners of her mouth from turning up into a smile. There was suddenly so much she wanted to say to Peter, so many unexpected possibilities. She knew, as she hurried across the grass with a widening grin, that he’d think she was crazy; how could he not? The way she’d been bouncing from mood to mood, wanting to strangle him one minute and needing him there the next. But how could he have possibly understood her when she hadn’t even understood herself? Now, suddenly, she knew what she wanted: She wanted to talk, really talk; she wanted to listen, and she wanted to change. She wanted to keep driving. She didn’t ever want to stop.

But when she reached the car, bypassing her side and looping around to where Peter now sat, making notches on the worn leather steering wheel with the edge of the key, he looked up at her with an expression so grimly set and determined that she forced her mouth back into a straight line. When she opened the door, the dog lifted his head, then dropped his chin again.

Emma stared at Peter, who seemed to be summoning the courage to say something, his fingers working the key in circles, refusing to meet her eye. It occurred to her that now was her chance, that if there were things that needed to be said, then this was the moment, because the way Peter was looking at her—the vague outline of an apology forming in his eyes—made her stomach twist with the possibility that she was too late.

“Peter,” she began, but he shook his head.

“Wait,” he said, his green eyes focused on some point beyond the windshield, his foot tapping a nervous beat against the dusty floor mats. “Me first.”

“I just —”

“Emma, please,” he said, and the way he was looking at her, it was like the moment itself—so bright with expectation only seconds before—was now spiraling away, taken up by the wind like a stray leaf.

“The thing is,” he began, the words coming out in a rush, “there are some battlefields around here I’d really like to see.”

She knew she should cut in before he could say anything too final, before he could do anything they’d come to regret. Tell him she wasn’t ready for him to go yet, let him know she was sorry, explain that she could change, that she
had
changed. But she also knew that to say those things would be to seem as bullheaded and stubborn and hasty as the person who was driving him off in the first place, and because she was determined to seem different—to
be
different—she closed her hands into little fists at her side and bit the side of her lip and waited for him to go on.