You Are Here(24)

After a moment he turned around, his face pale in the dark. “Isn’t it …,” he began, then trailed off, apparently unable to find the right word. Emma could think of several that might fit the bill—“creepy,” “depressing,” “morbid”—but she didn’t say any of them.

“This part’s called East Cemetery Hill,” he said quietly, waving his hand in a circle. “And over there was Culp’s Hill, where the Union formed their fish-hook line.”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “Fish hook?”

“It was named for the shape of their defense,” he told her, then whistled for the dog as they began walking again. Through the trees she could see splintered headlights as they neared the road and whatever lay beyond, and their feet made loud crunching noises in the dirt. Peter held a tree branch for her as she ducked beneath it, her foot getting snagged on a twisted root. There was a wooden fence strung out along the length of the two-lane road, and Emma squinted to make out a run-down farmhouse and a few crooked trees on the other side of it.

“Lincoln made his address just up there,” Peter said, already looking awestruck as they waited for a truck to lumber past, then jogged across together. “It’s one of the most famous speeches—”

Emma snorted, and Peter glanced back at her, his eyebrows raised.

“Give me a little credit,” she said indignantly. “I might not know a lot, but I do know about the Gettysburg Address.”

He grinned. “Okay, then.”

As they walked deeper into the woods, he told her about battle formations and casualties, unexpected victories and retreats; he brought the whole messy past lurching into the present with newfound significance. And much to her surprise Emma found herself listening as he spoke, as he took a field like any other and turned it into a story, tracing for her a history that had happened on the very spot they were standing.

“So why do you care so much about this stuff?” she asked, the question settling heavily between them. It was clear she’d interrupted Peter in some sort of reverie; he shook his head as if remembering himself and his whereabouts, then turned to her and blinked. Emma cleared her throat. “I guess it just seems sort of random,” she said. “I mean, why the Civil War?”

“It’s not really about the war,” he said softly. They were at the edge of another field now. The moon had slipped behind a bank of clouds, and though he was standing just feet away from her, it was hard to make out his face. “It’s not even about any of the issues really, slavery or the Union or any of the other stuff that kept it going for so long.”

“So what, then?”

He shrugged. “It’s about seeing something get put back together again, I guess. Especially after coming so close to falling apart. I mean, if a whole country can bounce back from something like that, then it sort of seems like anything’s possible.”

Emma breathed in, tilting her head back to look up at the sky, where the stars were punching holes in the endless darkness. Beside her the dog turned circles in the grass, and the wind died so suddenly it was as if the world had stopped breathing.

“Peter,” she said quietly, so quietly it took a moment for him to face her, with an expectant look that nearly made her change her mind. But his words were still rattling through her head, and the night had grown still, and she could almost feel the secret she’d been carrying struggling to work its way out of her. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

He grinned at her. “You’re secretly a Civil War enthusiast?”

“No,” she said. “I once had a twin brother.”

His face changed, slipping just slightly, but his eyes remained steady on hers. “Once?”

“I found a birth certificate in our attic,” she said. “Just last week. But there was a death certificate, too. From a couple days later.”

Peter lowered his chin, and Emma watched him carefully, trying to make out what he was thinking. His brow was furrowed, and he was staring at the ground so intensely that he might have been calculating the number of blades of grass in the field.

It struck her then, as it had so many times before, that his way of seeing the world must make life fairly difficult. When he looked at a house, it was like he could only ever see a network of pipes and beams, as if the rest of it—all the little details that made it what it was, the furniture and family photos, the chipping paint and sagging ceiling—were hardly there at all. It was like he saw deeper into things than most people, an explorer winding his way into the tiniest corners of a cave, while Emma, on the other hand, seemed to always see her way around things, skirting the edges of whatever lay in front of her, the interesting and the extraordinary as much as the mundane and the dull.

She’d always had a worrying ability to see right past everything.

“I’m really sorry,” Peter said finally, his jaw set as he turned away, keeping to the dirt path that wound toward a distant grove of trees. Emma hurried to catch up to him.

“That’s it?”

“What else is there?”

She frowned. “You could at least say it like you mean it.”

“I do mean it,” he said without pausing. “It’s a terrible thing.”

“Well, aren’t you curious about why they never told me?” she asked, stopping abruptly in the middle of the path. It took him a moment to notice she’d fallen behind, and when he did, he spun around with his eyebrows raised high above the rim of his glasses. They remained there like that for a few beats too long, squared off and uncertain, each nearly lost to the darkness.