You Are Here(45)

But Emma had fallen silent again, and it seemed there was little for Peter to do now other than lower his foot on the gas and ease the car into the fast lane, putting more miles between himself and his father, between here and home, between who he wished to be and who he actually was. For the moment, at least, it seemed just that easy to fall farther off the map, and for once he was more than happy to do so.

Emma’s phone, which was resting in her lap, began to buzz again, a sound now as familiar as the odd musicality of the car itself, and she stared at it for a good long while before casually raising a hand and tossing it out the side of the car.

Peter opened his mouth, glancing up to the rearview to see the tiny piece of plastic go skittering off the road. He started to pull over, but Emma put a hand on his arm.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Keep going.”

“What’d you do that for?” he asked, incredulous, thinking what a stupid thing it had been to do, how completely and utterly Emma.

“Because,” she said calmly, “they’re just going to keep calling. But we made our decision. We’re going.”

“But what if there was an emergency?”

“Like what?” she said. “And anyway, you still have a phone.”

“Yeah, but what if we got separated?”

“Why would we?”

“But just, what if?”

“We won’t,” she said, her tone so final that Peter decided it was easier to just drop the conversation altogether and concentrate on the road instead.

Emma’s brother’s house—their final destination—was tucked in the far western corner of North Carolina, where the state tapers off until it runs headfirst into Tennessee. This meant they had to cut across all of Virginia, and he frowned as he did the calculations in his head, tallying up hours and miles, accounting for his newly acquired and slightly paranoid tendency of obeying the speed limit.

“Do you want to get there today or tomorrow?” he asked Emma, who turned around and fixed him with a look bordering on disdain.

“Why would I want to get there tomorrow if I could get there today?”

Peter noticed that she’d dropped the “we” in this situation, and tried not to feel hurt. “Well, we’ve got about another eight hours to go,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d want to get there at night.” It seemed to him that there would be few things more creepy than visiting your dead brother’s gravesite in the dark, but who was he to argue?

Emma gave a noncommittal grunt. “Let’s see how it goes, I guess.”

But even once lunchtime came and went, the silence between them remained, and so Peter kept driving. They passed several fast-food restaurants, rest stops advertising ice-cream shops, and family diners that blended in with the gray blankness of the highway. But Emma hadn’t said a word in what seemed like hours, and asking whether she wanted to stop for food seemed like a fairly dangerous endeavor.

He could understand why she was upset, maybe even a little bit angry, but he wanted her to hurry up and realize that in the midst of this whole mess he was still there for her, the only one who really understood her. Even if this wasn’t entirely true. Even if he was still more than a little bit mystified by her.

Even if things weren’t exactly going according to plan.

Around three o’clock his stomach began to make an embarrassing amount of noise, and Peter decided it was time to step up and do something about the deteriorating state of this road trip. Plagued by worry and trailed by doubt, Emma needed to take her mind off things, to hit the pause button and forget about the grim purpose of this strange pilgrimage and have a little fun. And though Peter was well aware that he was not exactly Mr. Good Times, he was nevertheless determined to give it a shot.

According to the road signs they were thirty miles outside Roanoke, and that seemed as good a place as any. Peter cleared his throat.

“We could maybe stay around here tonight.”

“It’s only three.”

“So?” he said. “There’s tons of stuff we could do.”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “Really?” she said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “In Roanoke, Virginia? What exactly did you have planned?”

“They have a famous transportation museum.”

“I’m not even going to ask why you know that,” she said. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough fun with transportation to last us a while?”

Peter patted the wheel of the car as if to soothe its feelings. “There’s also the famous star,” he said. “It’s eighty-eight and a half feet tall and looks like a giant Christmas decoration.”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“It uses seventeen thousand five hundred watts of power,” he said, ignoring her. “It was built in 1949.”

She was looking at him now with genuine astonishment.

He took this as encouragement. “It’s the second largest one in the world. El Paso went and built a bigger one.”

“Bastards,” she said, grinning for the first time in a while.

“Yeah, well, theirs lies flat. This one is propped up, so you can see it from down below. And there’s supposedly a park with a scenic overlook at the top.”

“Seriously, how do you know all this stuff?”