You Are Here(23)
“What happened, you were too busy with the atlas as a kid to have any fun in the car?”
“Sitting in the backseat of a police car like a criminal isn’t exactly fun.”
Emma laughed. “You could build up a lot of street cred that way.”
“Yeah, I looked like a regular thug with my bowl haircut and glasses.”
“Who would’ve thought you’d turn into an actual criminal all these years later?”
He knew she was joking, but Peter felt suddenly nervous anyway, adjusting his hands on the wheel and glancing up at the rearview mirror as if he were expecting someone to be tailing them.
Emma looked down at her lap. “My birthday’s next week, you know,” she said, and Peter glanced over at her, trying to compose his face in a way that might suggest that this was news to him, although he knew—had always known—just exactly when her birthday was, despite the fact that his was only a few days later and she unfailingly missed it every year.
“I wanted it to be different this year.”
“Different from what?”
She shrugged. “My family’s not great with birthdays.”
Peter thought of his past birthdays, the well-intentioned gifts his dad always gave him—baseball cards or action figures or a skateboard—which were always so perfectly and completely wrong, and no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, the day always left them both with a sour taste in their mouths.
“My family’s just …,” Emma was saying, her face small and pale against the rest of the world as it scrolled past. “They just never manage to get things quite right, I guess.”
“Most don’t,” Peter said shortly.
“Yeah, but my family’s different.”
He set his mouth in a thin line. “Most are.”
They rode in silence for a few miles, easing off onto quieter roads, the car moving purposefully through the deepening dark. The barest sliver of a bone-white moon had already appeared low in the pale sky, and a fog hung at knee level in the fields. As they reached the top of a sloping hill, they could see the lights of the town of Gettysburg glowing white in the pocket of a valley. Emma leaned forward and blinked out at the town, but Peter was more interested in the shadowy areas that bordered it, the wheat fields and orchards and pastures that had once been the stage for so many important battles.
“So, I guess that’s sort of the reason for the trip.”
“Your birthday?” Peter asked, but even as he did, and even as she looked away, he suspected there were many reasons—not just a restlessness that he, too, could understand, but also a search for something bigger, something that maybe not even Emma yet understood—and for now, the rest didn’t need to be put into words.
Chapter eleven
The moment they stepped out of the car, the dog began turning in small, pitiful circles, flattening his ears and pausing every now and then to cast a doleful glance in their direction. Peter didn’t seem to notice; he stood with his back to the car, the keys in one hand as he stared out over the ink-black patchwork of fields. But when the dog let out a low whine, Emma thought that maybe she understood: There was something about this place, an eerie stillness, an almost tangible feeling that something irreversible had been stitched across the land, and it made her shiver too.
“Ready?” Peter asked, turning to her with a faint smile, and Emma nodded, not entirely sure what she was agreeing to. There was nobody else around. All the tourists had returned to their hotels. The employees who spent their days going through the motions of those blood-soaked skirmishes had long since hung up their uniforms and retreated to the bars in town, and the local kids had surrendered their playground to the muffled hour just before dusk.
But Peter was already half trotting down a steep hill and toward the fields that broke off from the road, and even the dog—who’d been hanging back uncertainly—now went streaking out ahead of him with that uneven three-legged gait of his, a white blur in the darkness.
“You can’t see much,” Emma ventured, her voice made thin by the wind. She skidded down the damp grass in her flip-flops, narrowly avoiding a rabbit hole. “Sure you wouldn’t rather just come back in the morning?”
Peter was waiting at the bottom of the hill. “We can do that, too.”
“Super,” Emma managed. From what she could make out, they were standing in a valley bordered by shadowy ridges that looked like great sleeping monsters in the dark. For a moment she was calmed by the thought that this could be anywhere—any old meadow in any old town, the kind of place where dogs run in circles and kids fly kites and flowers grow each spring—but then a face seemed to materialize out of the fog, a metal statue of a soldier gazing impassively over the site of his own death, his horse frozen beneath him, his gun forever at the ready.
“Are you sure we should be here?” Emma asked, and when her words were met with only a heavy silence, she turned to see that Peter had paused before the statue. His head was bent over the plaque, and it struck her as somehow impolite to bother him now, like interrupting someone at a funeral, so solemn was the look on his face, reverent and humbled at once. The dog had circled back and now sat rigidly at her side, his mismatched eyes darting between the pale stone monuments and the rows of cannons that formed an uneven line across the field.
Emma watched Peter’s back, the rise and fall of his shoulders, wondering and worrying, trying to guess how much of these desolate grounds he’d want to see tonight, how far into the past he’d be tempted to wander. There were other things too: She wondered where they would sleep later on, and how far it was to Washington. She wondered if her parents were still calling the phone she’d left in the car, whether Patrick would ever speak to her again, what they would do with the dog when they got to Annie’s. All these worries seemed to expand in the darkness, until Emma felt nearly short of breath, and she tried not to fidget as she waited for Peter to finish whatever it was he was doing.