You Are Here(8)

Patrick looked at her from beneath wet eyelashes. “And we were the only people in the whole damn park.”

“And we played in the puddles by the duck pond.”

“And I tried to teach you about the ducks.”

“But I wouldn’t listen.”

“Which just shows how far you’ve come,” he teased, reaching out a hand to pull her up from the step. Her clothes were damp now, but there was something leisurely about the shower. A few people scurried past to duck into coffee shops or pubs, but neither of them seemed in much of a hurry to find shelter.

“See?” Patrick said, smiling at her as he started toward the corner. “I wasn’t the worst brother in the world.”

Emma hesitated for a moment before following him, thinking of her other brother, the one she’d never had the chance to know. She hadn’t, until this moment, realized that she wouldn’t tell Patrick about what she’d discovered in the attic. There was still too much she didn’t understand, and it seemed as good a plan as any to act now and think later, to start moving in the right direction and save the questions for when she got there. She wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but suddenly the quest to uncover a secret had begun to feel like something secretive too.

Down the street a man with a trumpet began to play a bluesy song, and Emma closed her eyes to listen, the notes trembling out over the dampened block. When she opened them again, the sun was already beginning to split the clouds, and the world had gone from gray to silver.

“Ready to go?” Patrick asked, and Emma thought of the car parked uptown, of all the miles ahead of her, the many states and roads and possibilities, and she nodded.

She was ready.

Chapter four

Cutting through the broad state of Pennsylvania, Peter couldn’t help noticing the many green signs pointing off toward various colleges and universities. Some were bigger than others, some with fancy reputations, some he’d read about and some he hadn’t. Growing up just down the street from a college, it was sometimes easy to forget there were so many others out there. He rarely managed to get much farther than the hilltop campus, where each autumn students from across the country filtered into the stately buildings, books in hand and ready to learn.

Peter had been waiting for years to join their ranks. Not there, of course, but somewhere like it, a place with an impressive name and a reputation to match. He felt he’d been ready to go off to school since at least the fifth grade, when he first saw an article about Harvard in the New York Times and swore to himself that he, too, would one day stroll across an unfamiliar campus, passing beneath ivy-covered arches in the company of thousands of other kids, all of them just as smart, just as odd, just as full of potential as Peter himself.

But he’d also known from a fairly young age that if he were to leave things up to his father, he’d probably end up at the community college a few towns over, getting lifts to class from the town’s police force and clipping coupons for the rest of his life. Money had always been an issue for the Finnegans, a problem so constant that it had almost stopped seeming like a problem at all. It was just the way things were. But Peter was smart, and he knew it. And it was this—his ability to recite the first fifty digits of pi, to list all the countries of the world in alphabetical order, to calculate the square root of any number almost instantly— all this, he knew, was his ticket out of here.

But one night recently, when he’d first brought up the subject of applications over dinner, the sounds of the chapel bell ringing out from the campus just up the hill, he’d been shocked to discover that Dad actually hoped he’d choose to go there, of all places. It was true that the school had plenty to offer: history and philosophy, football games on October weekends, weathered stone buildings, and a national ranking high enough to suit Peter’s lofty standards. But more important—and a fact not specifically mentioned in the glossy brochures—was that it was right down the street.

“It’s just as good as the Ivy Leagues,” Dad told him that night, arranging the pasta on his plate into a stringy volcano. It was one of those rare evenings when both his uniform and the TV were off, and he’d managed to assemble a dinner that didn’t require the microwave. “And they offer a lot of scholarships for kids like you.”

Peter narrowed his eyes at him across the table, but Dad seemed to be focused on his plate, pouring an additional helping of red sauce straight from the jar into the heart of the pasta volcano and then staring at it as if he expected an eruption. Peter couldn’t help wondering if this was a punishment of some sort—this unforeseen effort to keep him close to home—or a cruel form of torture. Was Dad trying to put him in his place? Remind him of his roots? Be sure he knew that the socially challenged and motherless kid of a small town cop didn’t belong at a place like Harvard or Princeton or Yale?

Because if he could get a scholarship here, couldn’t he get one at any number of other schools? Places scattered across the country, in towns he’d never seen, states he’d never visited. It was no secret that he and his father barely understood each other, but it seemed hard to believe Dad actually thought that—given the choice—Peter would want to stay home for college.

The only thing harder to believe was that Dad even wanted him there in the first place.

Peter tried to imagine being the only one in the freshman dorms whose father was not an investment banker from Manhattan, or a doctor from LA, or a lawyer from Chicago, but the town sheriff, the one who might very well be responsible for arresting his new friends when they got drunk and went streaking into the mucky pond at the foot of the hill.