You Are Here(39)

“Look at that,” she’d say, pointing to what turned out to be a post office with the kind of awe usually reserved for monuments and other such wonders.

Peter didn’t mind. He found the whole thing fairly silly—that Emma would drive all these miles to Annie’s only to squander the opportunity to ask about her twin brother—but he was also secretly pleased at the way Emma was acting toward him, with a closeness that felt like a prize he’d somehow managed to win. He didn’t care if it was only a reaction to Annie; he was perfectly happy to widen his eyes and ooh and aah over the rather ordinary post office building.

It wasn’t long before he spotted another pay phone, a slanted structure near the river, and Annie and Emma waited patiently while he once again dialed and then hung up, but there was a strange comfort in the numbers, and words had never come easily to him anyway.

“You have a cell phone,” Emma pointed out when he walked back outside, thrusting a finger at his pocket.

“I know.”

“So why do you keep using pay phones?”

“Because then he won’t know it’s me.”

“Well, isn’t that the point of calling?” she asked. “For him to know it’s you?”

Peter shrugged. “It’s nice to have the option to hang up.”

The sun rose higher over the white city, and the three of them ambled through its maze of monuments and parks. Nobody talked much, and Peter was grateful for this. It seemed a place too important for chitchat, and he was nearly overwhelmed by it all, the buildings he’d so often seen in pictures suddenly blown up into three dimensions, towering gateways to government and democracy. They peered up at the tall spike of the Washington Monument, stared at the sun-drenched buildings on Capitol Hill, poked their heads through a fence to gaze past the landscaped lawn stretching up to the White House.

At the Lincoln Memorial, Peter stood breathlessly and ran through the words to the Gettysburg Address again—this time only in his head—and it was as if Lincoln himself had blessed the trip, like the tall man in the big stone chair was smiling down on all of them. And as they walked away from the columned building, Peter felt happy and dizzy and lightheaded all at once, closing his eyes and imagining his own map of the city, tracing a thin line across it in his mind, marking their route as others might record the day in a journal or a photo album.

They ate lunch at an outdoor café in Georgetown, squinting at each other across a table that reflected the sun like a spotlight. Once their food arrived, Peter attempted to make small talk—something he was not in the least bit adept at—but Emma still didn’t seem to be making much of an effort, and the silence had become even more noticeable since they sat down.

“So,” he said around a mouthful of turkey sandwich, looking from one to the other. “You guys lived here for a while when you were younger?”

Neither made any sort of move to answer, and Peter swallowed his food, thinking that he now understood why people found his own silences so frustrating.

“We moved up from North Carolina when I was a baby,” Emma said finally. “Just me and Patrick and my parents, though.”

“It was just after I left for college,” Annie explained. “So I was already up in Boston then.”

“Where?”

“Harvard.”

Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter lowered his sandwich and looked at Annie with interest. “What was it like?”

“Peter’s hoping to go there for a degree in Civil Warology.”

“That’s not a thing,” he pointed out. “It would be a degree in History.”

“I know,” she said with a sigh. “It was a joke.”

“It’s a great school,” Annie told him, ignoring her sister. “But there are lots of other great ones out there too.”

“He could get in,” Emma said, picking the onions off her burger, and Peter sat up a bit straighter in his seat. “He’s almost worse than you guys.”

Annie shot her a look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re smart,” she said. “Guess.”

“What’s it like there?” Peter asked, and Annie shrugged.

“It’s really not all that different from the campus at home, other than being in a city.”

“It must be,” Peter said, though even as he did, he was picturing the little college on the hill, the way the afternoon shadows fell across the buildings as he passed by on the way home from school. He thought of the lake with the swans and the oak-lined paths and the sturdy little chapel that sat above it all.

And he thought of his house just down the street.

“It’s not really about the campus anyway,” Annie was saying now. “Wherever you go will be great, but it’s more just because of what you’re doing there. The place is beside the point.”

“The place is never beside the point,” Peter said matter-of-factly, and Annie shrugged and excused herself to go to the bathroom.

“What’s up with you?” Emma asked once she’d gone.

“My dad wants me to stay home for school.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Really? That’s kind of sweet.”

“ Sweet?”

“Yeah, maybe he wants to keep an eye on you.”