You Are Here(65)

Dad snorted. “And where the hell are you? Or is it too much to ask to be kept up to speed on your whereabouts?”

“I’m in Tennessee. On my way back to North Carolina.”

“On your way back to North Carolina,” Dad muttered. “I guess there’s no point in asking why you’re not on your way back to New York?”

“I’ll get the car back to you, Dad,” Peter said. “I promise.”

“It’s not the car I’m worried about,” he said, and then coughed into the phone and made a few grumbling noises.

They seemed to run out of things to say then, caught between polite conversation and their usual dynamic, between anger and relief.

“So what the hell are you doing down there, anyway?” Dad asked eventually. “Looking at colleges or something?”

Peter pressed the phone harder against his ear. “Not really, no. I’ve got some time to decide all that.”

“I heard there are some good ones down there.”

“I know,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking it probably makes sense to apply to a whole bunch of different places. Just to see what happens.”

“What about … ?”

“Yeah,” Peter said, nodding into the phone. “There, too.”

“But I thought you hated this place,” Dad said with barely disguised shock. “I thought you’d rather be anywhere but home.”

“Maybe that was just because I’d never been anywhere else,” he said. “It’s hard to know what you’re looking for when you’ve only seen one thing.”

“And now what? You’re some big-time traveler, ready to come home?”

“Guess so,” Peter said, tracing a heart that had been carved into the glass door of the phone booth. He thought carefully about his next words. “People can change, you know, Dad,” he said hopefully, but when, after a few beats of silence, it didn’t appear that there would be a response to this, he sighed and leaned against the booth. “Anyway, I wanted you to know I’m not coming home just yet. I’ve got to go back and get Emma first.”

To Peter’s surprise Dad seemed to find this funny, the phone rattling with his laughter, a sharp and unfamiliar sound. “Is that what this is about?”

“What?”

“A girl?”

Peter hesitated. “Would that make it better?”

“Trust me, son. Nothing’s gonna make this better,” Dad said, but Peter could hear the amusement in his voice all the same, an overtone of relief that seemed to stretch across the conversation. It wasn’t coming easily, and it wasn’t yet natural for them. But it was there all the same.

“You know,” Dad said after a moment, “I once drove your mother up to the Canadian border. Only trip we ever really took. We didn’t tell our parents either, and by the time we got back, we were in a whole world of trouble.”

Peter found he was holding his breath. “Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“No, I mean why did you go?”

“She wanted to see Niagara Falls.” He fell quiet, and Peter let the silence swell between them. “She had a thing for waterfalls. Kind of the way you are with those damn battlefields, I guess.”

Peter smiled. “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”

There was a long pause, and for a moment Peter was afraid his dad wasn’t going to answer. But then his voice came over the line again, his words soft and measured.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I will.”

It seemed impossible that it had only been twenty-four hours since he and Emma last stood in this same cemetery before this same sleepy church. The sky was clear this morning, cloudless and breezy, and the place now had an almost springtime feel to it. A group of sparrows scattered when Peter pulled the car into the drive, taking a few hops before launching themselves skyward, and the sun made everything looked tinged in gold, as if lit up from the inside out.

There were several more cars in the lot today, so Peter had to park farther from the cemetery. He was so concentrated on scanning the churchyard, so distracted in searching to see if Emma was there yet, that it wasn’t until he got out of the car that he realized he’d parked next to a familiar light-blue convertible very much like the one he was driving.

He stood there staring at it, the keys dangling from his hand, before collecting himself enough to take a look at the license plates, which were—as he suspected—from New York. Behind him the dog let out a few sharp barks, hitching himself up from the seat, wobbly on his bandaged leg. Peter opened the back door and half lifted him from the car, the dog wriggling with excitement as he hobbled jerkily around the parking lot until he found a suitable patch of grass, where he promptly flipped onto his back and rolled around until his fur was streaked with mud. Peter was still watching him with amusement when Emma came barreling around the side of the church.

When she saw him, she stopped short, skidding a few inches on the pavement.

“You came,” she said, her eyes widening.

Peter grinned. “Happy birthday.”

It seemed to take a moment for it to register that he was actually there, but once it did, Emma’s face broke into a smile too, and she came bounding over to greet him. When she threw her arms around his neck, the two of them breathed matching sighs of relief, both thrilled to be reunited and surprised to find the other equally as happy. There no longer seemed any point in pretending otherwise.