You Are Here(26)

Once they’d ordered from a bored-looking waitress—Custer’s Custard Pie for Peter and Abolitionist Apple Strudel for Emma—they resumed their own separate investigations of the cutlery, playing with forks and spoons, inspecting the edges of the table and the tears in the seat where the yellow stuffing bloomed. Peter could very nearly feel it, the way the space had suddenly expanded between them. He didn’t have much practice with this kind of thing, but the trip ahead—four more states and five hundred more miles—was beginning to seem far longer than it had at first.

“So,” Emma said finally, more like a sigh than a word. It was the first time either of them had spoken since they’d ordered, and they both seemed slightly unhinged by the sound of it.

“So,” Peter said back. He was aware this was perhaps not the world’s most brilliant response, but he wasn’t sure exactly what the moment called for; it wasn’t like Emma to look this way, weary and overwhelmed and just a little bit sad, sitting in the orange light of the diner in front of her half-eaten plate of dessert.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and serious. “Do you think this was a mistake?”

“The apple strudel?”

“No,” she said, but he was pleased to see a hint of a smile. “The trip.”

He shook his head.

“You’re not ready to turn back then?”

“Not unless you are.”

“Okay, then,” she said with a nod, though she still looked a bit uncertain, and Peter could understand why: After all, they had nowhere to sleep tonight and were no doubt in a world of trouble with their parents. They were somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, and in many ways it had all stopped seeming like a game.

It had all started in the cemetery, of course, when she’d turned to him as if expecting someone else, her eyes widening just slightly, her face going abruptly pale. Gettysburg was supposedly one of the most haunted places in the world, with frequent sightings of ghosts in the trees, cameras inexplicably jamming when people tried to take photographs, glimpses of women in white and all manner of wandering spirits. But Peter knew that not all ghosts wore white sheets and roamed through cemeteries; there were other ways of being surprised by the past, and he suspected Emma had been thinking about the brother she’d never had the chance to know, and this was something he could understand too.

But she wasn’t the only one who was unsettled by the evening. Peter also found himself troubled by the thought of the dead brother they were chasing down the coast, though he knew his reasons were somewhat more selfish.

All these years he’d taken such pride in his acceptance by the Healys, who seemed to find him endlessly interesting, engaging in a way his own father never recognized. But now he was wondering whether there’d been more to it than that. He couldn’t help thinking that maybe he reminded them of the son they’d never had the chance to know, that maybe that was the only reason they ever asked him over, or set an extra place for him at the dinner table. And this gave him a funny feeling, a wobbling in his stomach, like a joke that had gone over his head.

He glanced up at Emma, who was still intent on her food, and he thought of her family, of the way Mr. Healy collected certain books for when he knew Peter was coming over, and how Mrs. Healy always made him a mug of hot chocolate to sip while they discussed the famine ships or the Boer War or the Indian removal. He thought of the way he felt so at home there, the way he seemed to belong, as welcome as if he’d been a part of the family himself.

And it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, he’d been using them for the exact same reason they’d been using him.

When they finished eating and filed back outside, they were pleased to find that the dog was still there to greet them, apparently having nowhere better to go either. He wiggled from head to toe when Emma spilled the contents of a napkin—half her apple strudel and the crust of Peter’s pie—onto the ground for him. The air was thick with fireflies making lazy circles, dipping in and out of the pools of light from the diner, which transformed them from floating lights back into winged, black insects.

Emma hoisted herself up onto the trunk with an expectant look in his direction, but Peter had noticed a phone booth just outside the diner and was already walking back over. It took him a few tries to jimmy open the door, which was rusted along the top, and the inside smelled like a litter box. Aware that Emma was watching from just outside, he dug in his pocket for a few coins and then dialed his number at home.

He let the phone ring twice, his heart skipping around, but before his dad could pick up, Peter slammed the receiver into its cradle and walked back outside.

Emma raised her eyebrows at him, but he only shrugged.

“So what now?” she asked, letting her legs dangle against the bumper of the car. Maybe it was the darkness, or the heaviness of the food in their stomachs, or the chill that had crept into the air without them noticing. But the trip now had a fragile feel to it, gone from sunglasses and milk shakes and the wind on their faces to this: the two of them staring at each other in the back lot of an old diner, unsure of their next move and uneasy about all the ones that had come before this.

“Are you gonna want to see more of this stuff in the morning?” Emma asked, and Peter tightened his jaw, trying to ignore the tiniest bubble of irritation that had risen up in his throat. Just an hour ago she’d been interested and engaged, asking questions about the history of the place, genuinely fascinated by his knowledge of it. But now she’d once again grown tired of it all, and Peter was mad at himself more than anything for feeling wrong-footed and surprised, when he should have known better by now.