You Are Here(6)

“Do you ever miss North Carolina?” she’d begun, finally, and Mom had stiffened. She was holding a soda can between two fingers, and it took her a moment to let go, dropping it into a garbage bag with a loud clink.

“I guess so,” she said. “But no more than any of the other places we’ve lived. Plus, your brother’s still down there, so we get to visit—”

“My brother?”

“Nate,” Mom said, giving her a funny look. “What’s up with you?”

Emma shrugged, torn between the desire to ask more and the fear that it might ruin her plans. She’d already made up her mind about driving to North Carolina, and while there was no doubt that it was completely irrational—it was foolish and illogical and probably more than a little bit stupid—she was just restless enough not to care. She wanted to go somewhere unknown and unfamiliar, somewhere farther than the college, beyond the hill and outside of this town. Quite simply, she wanted to go.

The plan was simple. She’d borrow Patrick’s car in New York (this sounded far more harmless than stealing it) and then stop in DC, where she could stay with Annie, finally working her way down to North Carolina, where Nate and his fiancée lived in the same house her parents once had. If everything worked out, she could be there in a week, just in time for her seventeenth birthday. And after so many years of unsatisfying birthdays—of wishing for goody bags and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and yellow cake with chocolate frosting, but instead getting encyclopedias and magnifying glasses and leather-bound poetry collections—where better to spend it than with the one person who’d once shared the day with her?

It didn’t, in the end, take as much convincing as she’d expected before Patrick finally caved, and they’d only been on the road for half an hour before she’d gotten him to agree to spend the rest of the afternoon with her too. They left the top down on the convertible, though the rush of air made it too loud to talk, and they drove on with chapped lips and wind-burned faces, their bare elbows dangling over the doors as the landscape reeled past. They passed low-slung barns and crumbling silos, the little car groaning each time it crested a hill, only to fall again with a resigned whirring noise.

It took more than an hour to emerge from the depths of the forgotten half of the state of New York and onto the main expressway, where they left behind the rambling fields and wooden fences for the highways with their sharp medians and yellow lines of paint.

“So what should we do this afternoon?” Patrick asked, once the wind had died down enough for them to talk. “Central Park? Brooklyn Bridge? How about the Met? There’s a great exhibit on now. Contemporary art.”

Emma rolled her eyes. “I hate museums.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Nobody hates museums.”

“Well, nobody actually likes them, either,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing people like to say they’ve done, but don’t really like doing.”

Patrick laughed. “That’s absurd.”

“So is contemporary art,” said Emma, unmoved.

“Okay, so what’s your brilliant plan for the day?”

Emma looked off to where the quilted landscape around the road had begun to gather itself in gray-brown clusters of shopping malls and car dealerships, dizzying billboards and the occasional office complex. The sun was bright against the distant city, which rose black and uneven beyond a labyrinth of bridges. She held her breath against the smell of it, the faint stench of garbage and exhaust that drifted over from New Jersey, the sudden closeness of the buildings that stifled the air around them.

This was the city where she’d lived when she was little, where she’d gone to kindergarten in a plaid skirt and played soccer on a field near the highway, where she’d learned to ride a bike on the uneven sidewalk outside their West Village apartment. By the time her parents made it up to Manhattan to take teaching positions at NYU and Columbia, all three of Emma’s brothers and sisters were gone, off to college or else already impressing a new audience of adoring bosses and coworkers. But this was where Emma had lived from the time she was five until she was eight, and so now she realized she had no interest in seeing Times Square. She didn’t want to visit the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island or any of the other landmarks that told stories of the city’s past. And she certainly didn’t want to go to the Met.

For once, it was her own past that she was concerned about, and it suddenly seemed important to connect the dots on her way to North Carolina, to discover not just the beginning, but the other chapters as well, the checkered timeline of a history that was dangerously close to being forgotten.

“Can we go see the old apartment?”

Patrick raised his eyebrows. “Feeling nostalgic?”

“A little,” she admitted, turning back to the skyline unfurling before the little car.

Later, after they’d parked and dropped their bags at Patrick’s and taken the long subway ride down the west side of Manhattan, the two of them stood before a building on the corner of Greenwich and Bank streets. Emma ran her eyes up the burnt-colored bricks to the fourth window on the right, and then below that to the gum-stained steps, where she used to sit twisting a jump rope around the wrought-iron railings.

“I’m pretty sure it was this one, right?” Patrick was saying, backpedaling to get a better look. “It’s been forever, huh?”