You Are Here (6 page)

All her life Emma had dreamed of someday being a vet, even as her science grades continued their steady downward plunge. In fact she’d come so close to failing chemistry this year that her parents had forced her to have weekly tutoring sessions with Patrick, who spent hours rattling off formulas over the phone while Emma stared out her window, only half listening. Her grade had just barely improved—enough for her to pass the class, anyway—and her family was able to go on thinking of their youngest daughter as a scientific dunce.

But she knew there was more to being a vet than just science, even if her family didn’t. Something about her shifted when she was around animals; she had a calming effect on them, a certain affinity that couldn’t be learned from a textbook.

“It’s not enough to think puppies are cute,” Annie had told her. “There’s a lot of science involved. And math.”

“That’s that subject with all the numbers,” Patrick had pointed out, while Mom and Dad looked on with indulgent smiles.

Emma had always known she was different from her siblings, but that was the first time she’d felt it, really
felt
it, something sharp and sudden as a bee sting.

She’d grown used to being the token unexceptional one in a family of uncommon intellect, but sometimes it was an awfully lonely position. And though Emma was used to being on her own—may have even preferred it, in fact—she suspected this was only because it had become a habit, like anything else. It made her different from most kids her age, who clung to friendships like lifeboats, terrified of drifting too far. But Emma knew that if she were to allow someone into her life, then they might just discover what she secretly feared: that perhaps she was just as odd as the rest of her family, only without the brains to back it up.

The way she figured, it was okay for poets to be quirky. Professors are supposed to be absentminded, and geniuses are notorious loners. But Emma wasn’t any of these things, and still she found herself easily distracted, prone to daydreaming and wandering, with a habit of zoning out when anyone attempted to explain things to her. She hated directions and instructions and had little patience for studying. She was almost seventeen and had no real friends. She wasn’t exactly normal, but she wasn’t exactly
abnormal
enough either.

Lately she’d begun to wonder whether her twin brother would have been the same way. She liked to imagine that he might have been the sort of person to appreciate silly jokes and funny movies, the kinds of things that evoked blank stares from the rest of the family. He would have scoffed at science and laughed at math. He would have found poetry to be pretentious and confusing. He would have been her accomplice, her cohort, her partner in crime.

In fact, in the days since her discovery of the short and presumably tragic existence of Thomas Quinn Healy, Emma had begun to reflect on her life with the eye of a filmmaker. It was far easier than she might have expected to conjure up the brother she’d never known—a bit taller than herself, slightly less skinny, same dark hair and pale eyes—and she found herself simply adding him into all those places in her past where it had seemed something was missing.

Like the time Jimmy Winters gave her a bloody nose in the third grade. Emma had been in the process of explaining to him the difference between apes and humans—only very subtly implying that he might come closer to the former—when he knocked her cold on the wood chips. But if her brother had been there, standing at her side the way twin brothers do, she felt sure he would have stepped in between them, clocking Jimmy before he even had a chance to close his meaty little hand—opposable thumb and all—into a fist.

In much the same way, Thomas Quinn Healy—Tommy, for short—was now inserted into every family Christmas, every trial of summer camp, every day she’d endured alone in the school cafeteria, surrounded by the pretentious children of other professors or the too-rowdy kids belonging to the townies.

None of this was particularly difficult to imagine. The surprise wasn’t how easily he fit into the gaps in her life. It was how naturally he took up residence there, quickly becoming a permanent fixture in her short history, a welcome revision of her past.

chapter six

There’d been an edge of static in the air as Peter walked home from the Healys’ house after breakfast yesterday, that undercurrent of electricity that precedes summer storms. The sky had turned a sallow green in the distance, and the trees waved recklessly at the gathering winds. Peter kept his head low and his hands in his pockets, blinking away the bits of dust that were blown carelessly about. He paused at the end of his driveway, frowning at the squat and darkened house, then continued around it and toward the backyard.

Where a plot of grass should have been—a swing set or a barbecue, a basketball hoop or a bench—was instead a second driveway, a haphazard and bulging circle of asphalt like a tumor growing off the main one. There were three cars parked there at the moment, lined up neatly with their headlights pointing at the kitchen window like a cavalry awaiting charge. There was an ancient, rusted-out Chevy that had been there as long as Peter could remember, a maroon minivan his dad had recently impounded after it had been left for two weeks in front of the grocery store, and a blue Mustang convertible, not unlike the one he’d seen Emma drive off in just yesterday morning.

This one had shown up a couple of months ago, discovered on the side of the highway by some kids a few miles outside of town. Peter always wondered about the stories behind these abandoned cars, left like orphaned children on country roads. Most of the ones that came in were here on a more temporary basis—someone ran out of gas or collected one too many parking tickets, and the car was towed in to wait until its owner showed up to reclaim it—but the lengthier residents of this little parking lot always fascinated him. He imagined one day being the kind of person who was so accustomed to life on the road that leaving a car behind—to break up the monotony, to get a change of scenery, to hitch a ride and feel a different sort of vehicle surge beneath you—was just one more story to add to an ever-growing repertoire.

He walked past the minivan and toward the convertible, running a hand along its hood. The sky to the north had turned an angry purple now, and the air felt charged and ready. Peter looked over at the house, and the empty windows of the kitchen gazed back at him. He jiggled the handle on the convertible, but the door remained shut tight, and though he knew about the drawer full of keys in his dad’s desk, he pulled his library card from his back pocket and slid it down into the groove between window and door—a move he’d learned from a book, though he doubted it would work on a more reliable car—and the lock sprang open.

Peter didn’t have a car of his own. His driver’s license, which he’d gotten just less than a year ago, was more or less decoration, permanently stuffed into the depths of his wallet. He’d learned to drive on his dad’s squad car and had since seen very little of the road. But still, he liked to sit out here on certain gray afternoons, facing down the house and the sky as if in challenge, his foot poised above the gas pedal, his hands resting on the wheel, just a key turn away from motion and distance and velocity.

He sat down now on the scarred white leather of the driver’s seat and closed the door as the rain started up, sweeping heavily over the car. Peter leaned his head back and closed his eyes and listened to the sound, like a thousand drummers attacking their instruments at once, but hollow and faraway and somehow comforting.

He’d always considered himself a wholly practical person, dependent on numbers and facts and statistics. But logical or not, there was something about sitting inside these motionless cars, these vehicles without destination or purpose, that always stilled his busy mind long enough for him to think about his mother.

Peter didn’t wish for his life to be different in the far-reaching, deeply hopeful way that others often do, and he rarely imagined what things would be like if she were still alive. How could he? She was somewhere beyond his memory, a hypothetical answer to the rhetorical question of his life.

But his dad had never attempted to discuss her absence other than to occasionally announce—with a sense of resigned finality—that “bad things just happen sometimes.” Even when he was very little, Peter had absorbed this information, had embraced it by the time he was five, hated it at seven, welcomed it again at ten, and rebelled against it at twelve. Now that he was nearly seventeen, it had become simply the statement it was: a chain of words that had dictated much of his father’s life, and as a result his own.

He knew enough to realize that when she died giving birth to him all those years ago, a part of his father must have died as well. He understood this to be the way these things happen, the scripted etiquette of sudden death: the grieving widower, the crying baby, the rain falling across the freshly dug grave site. Peter had seen it a million times in the movies, but it bore such little resemblance to what was at stake now—to what amounted to his life—that he sometimes had trouble finding himself within the scenario.

Sometimes he was surprised that Dad didn’t just come out and blame him for what had happened. Because even though he didn’t actually say it, Peter could often feel it just the same. He knew his father loved him in his own way, but it was also like he couldn’t bear to look at him sometimes, and Peter had felt the push and pull of this his whole life, of a dad who considered his presence both a blessing and a curse. It was like being on a roller coaster, pitched forward and then jerked back, ignored until he felt he barely existed in the house anymore, and then loved so fiercely and briefly it nearly took his breath away. It was like falling and falling and falling until the very last moment, when you were absolutely sure you’d hit the bottom, and then being swept upward again.

And so Peter could only ever manage to care about his dad with love measured in inches, slid forward and drawn back like an uncertain card player. It would be too easy to say
if things had been different
or
if she were still here
or
if he weren’t the way he is
, because those things were immutable facts; nothing could make them otherwise. So he worried and observed; he thought too much and he moved too cautiously; he studied his father the way he did everything else, wishing things could be different.

Outside the car a peal of thunder made the ground tremble and the trees quake. Peter watched the raindrops slide down the windows, making streaky patterns on the stark canvas of the world just beyond, and he breathed in the musty smells of rain and dampness and old leather. He looked over at the empty passenger seat, the deep well that had been molded over the years by the unknown driver’s copilot. It made him think of the way he’d often see mothers driving their kids around town, so cautious and careful, inching forward at intersections, wary of the car seats in back or the children buckled in beside them. And when they came to an abrupt stop—when a dog darted out into the road or a light changed unexpectedly—they never failed to fling an arm out to brace their kids, an instinctive measure of safety and concern for their charges.

Sometimes when he sat out here in the car, unprotected and exposed, Peter couldn’t help feeling that way too. Like the weight of some invisible hand was keeping him safe.

He didn’t even realize he’d been sleeping when he woke later to the drumbeat of rain on the windshield. But there was a new sound too, something louder, and when Peter finally blinked his eyes open, his heart stuttered in his chest. Someone was rapping knuckles against the hard glass of the window beside him, and a moment later the person bent at the waist to reveal the angry face of his dad.

“Inside,” he said, his voice almost comically muffled from where Peter still sat inside the car, now fully awake. “
Now
.”

Peter dropped his chin and fumbled with the door handle, and by the time he stepped outside and into the storm—which seemed to grow in intensity, a melodramatic prelude to whatever rebuke was sure to come his way—Dad had already disappeared into the house. Peter crossed the paved driveway, pulling uselessly at his collar as the water soaked straight through his shorts and T-shirt. He shoved open the back door and kicked off his soggy sandals, then stood dripping all over the welcome mat as three of Dad’s poker buddies regarded him with interest.

“Baby’s first carjacking,” Officer Maron said with a grin, and beside him Lieutenant Mitchell—a pudgy man with an astonishingly large gap between his two front teeth—let out a low whistle.