You Are Here(40)
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“He’s a cop, Peter. He’s probably just looking out for you.”
“Yeah, because I’m so much trouble,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Then why do you think?” Emma asked. “Because of money?”
Peter lifted his shoulders. “Maybe. I’m sure that’s part of it, at least.”
“But?”
“But it’s not fair,” he said, aware of the bitterness in his voice. “I mean, he’s practically ignored me my whole life, and when he does get around to paying attention, he always ends up acting like some ass**le cop. And then all of a sudden he decides I should stick around?”
“Maybe he’s finally changing.”
“No,” Peter said, shaking his head. “He never changes.”
“Well, then maybe he’s always wanted you there. Maybe he’s just never been able to say it,” Emma said gently. “The thing about parents is that you always just assume they’re supposed to be good at their jobs, because they’re parents. But they’re usually not. So this might be the only way he knows how to tell you.”
Peter frowned. “Tell me what?”
“That he wants you to stay. That he’d miss you otherwise.”
“But the whole point of going to college is that it’s your one chance to escape where you’re from. You get to start over.”
“Oh, that’s the point of college,” Emma teased. “Good to know, since I thought you’d had your nose in a book all these years for fun.”
“Well, it was for fun, actually,” he said with a smile. “But you know what I mean. You’re always trying to escape too.”
“Yeah, but you’re just talking about geography,” she said. “And that’s not always everything.”
Later, as they walked back to the apartment, Peter noticed that Annie had picked a different route. He tried not to let this bother him, but as they headed deeper into an unfamiliar neighborhood and farther from her street, it was all he could do not to ask what was going on; it seemed impolite to question her sense of direction when she’d lived here for over ten years. So instead he studied the spidery cracks in the sidewalk, distracting himself by formulating a new map in his head.
It didn’t surprise him that Emma hadn’t noticed; she was too busy pretending to ignore Annie. And so when they came to a stop before a narrow house with chipped yellow paint and a faded blue door, Emma very nearly bumped into her sister.
“What’s this?” she asked, frowning up at the building, which seemed to slump to one side. Through one of the downstairs windows they could see the huddled form of a sleeping cat, and the wind chimes hanging from the front porch tinkled in the breeze.
“It’s where you lived when you were little,” Annie said with a small smile. “It used to be white with blue shutters, and there wasn’t a porch, but …”
Emma’s face changed, her eyes widening, her mouth turning up at the corners, and she began to pace back and forth along the sidewalk, her head tipped back to take it all in. “Oh, yeah,” she said, pointing at the driveway, the lacework of cracks in the asphalt. “This must be where I tripped when I was still learning to walk.” She raked back the hair from the left side of her face to display a tiny scar that Peter had never noticed. “Three stitches. And we used to take our Christmas photo in front of that tree.” She jogged over to the front corner of the house, where the cement showed beneath the wood paneling. “And that must be where Patrick crashed the car.”
Peter looked on as she pinballed around the yard, and he couldn’t help himself from smiling whenever she did, as if it were something contagious. It was like watching someone reclaim their past, or better yet discover it for the first time. Seeing her this way made him think, unexpectedly, of the pay phone by the river, and all the other pay phones along the way, silent and empty monuments to some great failure, whether his or his father’s Peter couldn’t tell.
But he wished now he’d had the courage not to hang up. All this time he’d been grateful that his dad hadn’t called, but he suddenly wished just the opposite: that rather than teaching him a lesson by letting him go, letting the quiet between them stretch the length of the country, his dad would ask him to come home.
He also knew that the braver thing to do would be to stop waiting, to quit wondering, to go searching and seeking and asking. The braver thing to do was exactly what Emma was doing now. It was being determined to discover the past. It was not letting anything get in your way.
Unfortunately, Peter wasn’t anything like Emma.
He watched her now, pacing the front yard as Annie pointed at the second floor of the house, which seemed to strain forward, leaning toward the telephone wires where a few birds were huddled together.
“Remember how you and Mom used to make signs welcoming me home from school?” Annie asked. “You’d hang them in the windows at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You used to be so excited to see me.”
The smile slipped from Emma’s face. “And you used to be so excited to come home.”
Annie blinked a few times, as if unsure how to respond. “I still am,” she said eventually, but something had shifted, and they stood looking at each other without knowing what to say. A bank of clouds passed overhead, pulling a shadow across the house and the little party standing outside of it, and so one by one they turned to leave, making their way back up the street single file, Annie followed by Emma followed by Peter.