You Are Here(3)
There was another box within the bigger one, a small shoebox that opened with a little cough of dust. Inside was a stack of papers, some of them wrinkled, others pressed flat, and Emma held them up to the light one at a time: old school reports and handmade birthday cards, a love letter Dad had written to Mom before they were married, and various announcements of honors and awards. Toward the bottom she discovered Nate’s birth certificate, and she traced a finger over the letters and smiled, already reaching for the next one. She glanced at Annie’s and then Patrick’s, too, and when she got to her own, she studied it carefully, fingering the edges of the rough paper, the announcement of Emma Quinn Healy’s arrival into the world. It wasn’t until she twisted to pick up the pile she’d made on the floor beside her that she noticed there was still one left in the box.
The name on the paper said Thomas Quinn Healy. And his birth date, printed in neat black letters along the bottom, was exactly the same as hers.
Emma’s thoughts assembled themselves slowly in her head, and she had, for the briefest of moments, a fleeting sense of understanding. Finally, she thought, looking at the fifth birth certificate in her hands. There was finally an answer to all those years of loneliness, a reason for the vague feeling she’d always had that something was missing.
But before she had a chance to wonder all the things she would have wondered—a mysterious brother, a long lost twin, all the deep, dark secrets of childhood revealed—she found the other piece of paper, the very last one in the box: a death certificate dated just two days later.
Chapter two
As he looped beneath the highway and swung onto the road leading to the New Jersey Turnpike, Peter Finnegan was reassured by the sound of the maps flapping in the backseat, twisting in the wind as if trying to take flight. Some were rolled and fastened with rubber bands; others were folded neatly and pinned down by small stacks of books. Peter hadn’t just brought directions for the tristate area, but also guides to Moscow and London and Sydney, not because he planned to visit there—not on this trip, anyway—but because there was a certain comfort in them. They were creased and fraying and worn, but it was still easy to lose himself in the lines and keys and markings, the gentle scribblings of rivers and the sharper points of the mountains. He never felt so sure of his place in the world as when he pinpointed it on an atlas.
Back home in upstate New York, Peter’s bedroom was much the same. It looked a lot like the last outpost to some unexplored region of the world, or else the situation room of a government agency, strewn with maps and notes and thumbtacks as if something—either a great war or a great discovery—were imminent. Some of the maps were fairly basic, with states the color of bubble gum peering up at him from opened books on the floor beside his bed, the kind of sunshiny atlases where the lakes and rivers are so blue you nearly expect a fish to poke his head out and wave a fin in greeting. Most of these were left over from Peter’s younger days, when he’d made a game out of memorizing the state capitals, inventing characters out of the names: Ms. Helena Montana, the old woman who sat rocking herself to sleep on a porch overlooking the mountains, or Mr. Montgomery Alabama, the slow-talking Southern gentleman who could always be counted on to wear his finest suit.
But there were other maps too. Road maps, with their unruly lines, and topographical ones with rings upon rings circling the sunken paper mountains like the inside of an ancient tree. Some showed the climate, and others marked off national treasures or parks. A few focused in on specific towns, while others panned out to include the entire country, welcoming the pale oceans that crept into the frame on either side. There were a few yellowing military maps from various time periods, and even one dating back to the Civil War, unearthed last summer at the local farmers’ market.
The shelves that lined the rest of the room featured a combination of required reading for school— The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath —and an astonishing assortment of books about cartography, geography, and of course the Civil War, another peculiar fascination of Peter’s. It was sometimes hard to know which had come first, the maps or the soldiers, but somewhere along the way they’d come to coexist, and now along the edges of the shelves there were lines of little metal soldiers dressed in blue and gray, who had to be nudged aside each time you needed a book, running the risk of a domino effect, the possibility of an entire fallen unit.
Peter was not unaware of how all this looked. Not only could it pass for the room of the nerdiest kid in school—an observation not wholly inaccurate—but it might very well be mistaken for the home of some delusional nutcase who appeared to be making preparations for a march back through time, as if hoping to follow the carefully outlined maps straight back into the Battle of Antietam.
Peter, however, had no such plans.
Though this is not to say he didn’t have other ones. In fact Peter Finnegan had more plans than anyone he knew. And not the normal kind, the see you after school or what are you doing Saturday night? or meet me in the cafeteria kind.
Instead Peter planned to go to Australia and Africa and Alaska and Antarctica, and that was just the A s. The list grew from there, ballooning to include Bali and Bangladesh, China and California and Chicago. He had marked carefully on the map the place where you might catch a ferry from Ireland to Scotland, had researched mountain climbing in Switzerland and cage diving with sharks off the coast of South Africa. He’d included places like Boston, too, Maine and Canada and even Boise, where he would sample potatoes dipped in butter or ketchup, potatoes fried, peeled, boiled, mashed, and baked. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a fan of the potatoes Dad cooked back in upstate New York. They’d be different in Boise. That’s what happened when you clawed away the drab details of your real life and shed them for something different, something more exciting and altogether more real. That’s when life really started. In some faraway place, exotic or rustic, foreign or familiar—but somewhere, elsewhere, anywhere but here.