You Are Here(29)

“This was a huge turning point,” Peter said. “All these battles.”

“Hmm,” Emma murmured absently, glancing up here and there when a mock explosion rippled through the crowd in gasps of surprise and delight.

“It rained on the last day,” Peter said, pressing on with a sort of pathetic determination, a faltering resolve to try one more time. “There was a huge storm that evening, after three full days of the bloodiest battle the country has ever seen.” He paused and looked reverently out over the land. “That’s something, don’t you think? How it kind of washed everything away?”

Emma peered up at the sky, which was turning a deepening shade of gray. “If we don’t get going soon, we might have a storm of our own.”

Peter sighed, and he took a few steps in the direction of the parking lot before Emma jogged over to catch up with him, appearing at his elbow with a look of confusion.

“I didn’t mean right now,” she said, falling into step beside him, and he shrugged, hoping his face didn’t look as injured as he felt by her lack of interest. She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to make you—”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You did.”

She didn’t seem to have much to say to this, tucking her hands in the back pockets of her jean skirt, her elbows jutting out like wings from her sides.

Peter shook his head. “How come you’re always in such a rush?”

“I don’t know,” she said, then changed her mind. “I’m not.”

“You are.”

She opened her mouth to dispute this, then closed it again. They walked the rest of the way to the car in silence, and it wasn’t until he’d started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot that Peter finally spoke again.

“Well, thanks, I guess.”

“For what?”

“For putting up with that. I’ve always wanted to see it.”

Emma looked up in surprise. “You’d never been?”

He shook his head.

“But I thought—”

“Nope.”

“You knew where everything was,” she said. “I mean, I just assumed …”

“I’ve read a lot of books,” he said shortly. “I find it interesting.”

At the entrance to the highway, he turned toward the signs for Philadelphia. The dog stuck his head between the seats, looking from one to the other like a kid whose parents have been arguing. Ahead of them the sky had begun to lighten again.

“It’s pretty cool, the way you know so much about all that stuff,” Emma said eventually, and Peter looked over, aware that this was her way of apologizing. “I’d never have the patience for it.”

“For what?”

“Learning all the facts and dates and details,” she said. “Caring enough about the past to bring it to life like that.”

Peter smiled in spite of himself. “I thought that’s what you were doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“With your own family.”

“Not really. It’s not exactly like I’m—”

“But you are,” he told her. “Like it or not, you’re kind of a historian too.”

Chapter thirteen

The day she turned seven, an entire conference room of world-renowned anthropologists sang “Happy Birthday” to her in a hotel in San Diego. The foremost expert on Native American culture gave her an arrowhead, and the keynote speaker—a man so old the whole podium shook beneath his hands—asked whether she wanted to come up and help him with his speech.

She didn’t.

For her tenth birthday Emma’s parents threw her a small dinner party at home, where she—the guest of honor—was the youngest one by at least thirty years. The dean of the college spilled wine on her party dress, and the conversation quickly turned to the role of birthday wishes in traditional fairy tales. After she blew the candles out from atop an organic carrot cake, a biology professor leaned over and asked Emma what she’d wished for.

She pretended not to hear him.

All she’d ever wanted was a normal birthday, with a swimming pool or a magic show, a big-nosed clown twisting balloons into dogs, cupcakes with sugary frosting, and ice cream melting on plastic plates. But most years the big day was instead colored by gifts like maps and bug boxes, puzzles and history books, things she was told she’d come to appreciate someday, though as the years ticked by and the pile of unused presents in her closet multiplied, Emma began to seriously doubt that that day would ever come.

But now her seventeenth birthday was just four days away, and here she was hurtling toward North Carolina, carried south along I-270 by Peter Finnegan and his stolen blue convertible. And in a rare display of all those things that had so far eluded her in life—determination and persistence and dogged curiosity—she was secretly hoping to spend her birthday on her own terms, at the resting place of the person who’d once shared it with her.

They were well into Maryland when Emma took charge of the music, switching off the jazz station Peter had found and popping in a CD instead. After listening to the same song four times in a row, Peter leaned forward and jabbed at the stop button.

“Hey,” Emma said, reaching to turn it back on.