You Are Here(19)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

His own phone hadn’t made a sound since he’d set off from home earlier, and he wasn’t sure exactly how he felt about that. He wondered if his dad might have spoken to the Healys by now; though they weren’t much better off in the information category, they at least had somewhat of an idea of Emma’s whereabouts, based on the fact that she’d been with Patrick until this morning. Still, Peter didn’t like to imagine what might be going through Dad’s head right now. He wondered if it was an angry silence or a careless silence, this thing between them. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

But it was nearly dark now, the domed sky closing in all around them, and he had a foot on the gas pedal and two hands on the steering wheel, he had Emma Healy beside him and a strange dog in the backseat, and he was heading to Gettysburg, a place he’d been fascinated with since he was eight years old and was first told about the unfathomable tragedies of that long-ago war.

Everything else was beginning to seem faraway and unimportant.

The dog turned in three cramped circles in the backseat, then settled down with his nose tucked beneath a paw, and Peter felt a quick rush of affection for him, a fellow outcast, as unlikely a stowaway as himself on this trip that nobody really understood.

Emma leaned forward to turn on the radio, then fiddled with the dial, landing on each station for a minute or so before flipping through to the next one. When she caught Peter looking at her with raised eyebrows, she shrugged and switched it off again.

“Maybe we should play a car game or something,” she suggested.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The license plate game?”

“What’s that?”

“You try to spot as many license plates from as many different states as you can,” she explained. “You’d probably love it. It’s very ‘fun with geography.’”

“Sounds slow.”

“So is geography.”

He made a face at her. “What else you got?”

“The animal game?”

“Let me guess,” he said. “See how many animals you can spot?”

Emma grinned. “Sheep are worth two points each.”

“Thank God we’re not in Ireland,” he said. “Where do you come up with these anyway?”

“They’re pretty standard road trip games,” she said.

“What happened, you were too busy with the atlas as a kid to have any fun in the car?”

“Sitting in the backseat of a police car like a criminal isn’t exactly fun.”

Emma laughed. “You could build up a lot of street cred that way.”

“Yeah, I looked like a regular thug with my bowl haircut and glasses.”

“Who would’ve thought you’d turn into an actual criminal all these years later?”

He knew she was joking, but Peter felt suddenly nervous anyway, adjusting his hands on the wheel and glancing up at the rearview mirror as if he were expecting someone to be tailing them.

Emma looked down at her lap. “My birthday’s next week, you know,” she said, and Peter glanced over at her, trying to compose his face in a way that might suggest that this was news to him, although he knew—had always known—just exactly when her birthday was, despite the fact that his was only a few days later and she unfailingly missed it every year.

“I wanted it to be different this year.”

“Different from what?”

She shrugged. “My family’s not great with birthdays.”

Peter thought of his past birthdays, the well-intentioned gifts his dad always gave him—baseball cards or action figures or a skateboard—which were always so perfectly and completely wrong, and no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, the day always left them both with a sour taste in their mouths.

“My family’s just …,” Emma was saying, her face small and pale against the rest of the world as it scrolled past. “They just never manage to get things quite right, I guess.”

“Most don’t,” Peter said shortly.

“Yeah, but my family’s different.”

He set his mouth in a thin line. “Most are.”

They rode in silence for a few miles, easing off onto quieter roads, the car moving purposefully through the deepening dark. The barest sliver of a bone-white moon had already appeared low in the pale sky, and a fog hung at knee level in the fields. As they reached the top of a sloping hill, they could see the lights of the town of Gettysburg glowing white in the pocket of a valley. Emma leaned forward and blinked out at the town, but Peter was more interested in the shadowy areas that bordered it, the wheat fields and orchards and pastures that had once been the stage for so many important battles.

“So, I guess that’s sort of the reason for the trip.”

“Your birthday?” Peter asked, but even as he did, and even as she looked away, he suspected there were many reasons—not just a restlessness that he, too, could understand, but also a search for something bigger, something that maybe not even Emma yet understood—and for now, the rest didn’t need to be put into words.

Chapter eleven

The moment they stepped out of the car, the dog began turning in small, pitiful circles, flattening his ears and pausing every now and then to cast a doleful glance in their direction. Peter didn’t seem to notice; he stood with his back to the car, the keys in one hand as he stared out over the ink-black patchwork of fields. But when the dog let out a low whine, Emma thought that maybe she understood: There was something about this place, an eerie stillness, an almost tangible feeling that something irreversible had been stitched across the land, and it made her shiver too.

“Ready?” Peter asked, turning to her with a faint smile, and Emma nodded, not entirely sure what she was agreeing to. There was nobody else around. All the tourists had returned to their hotels. The employees who spent their days going through the motions of those blood-soaked skirmishes had long since hung up their uniforms and retreated to the bars in town, and the local kids had surrendered their playground to the muffled hour just before dusk.

But Peter was already half trotting down a steep hill and toward the fields that broke off from the road, and even the dog—who’d been hanging back uncertainly—now went streaking out ahead of him with that uneven three-legged gait of his, a white blur in the darkness.

“You can’t see much,” Emma ventured, her voice made thin by the wind. She skidded down the damp grass in her flip-flops, narrowly avoiding a rabbit hole. “Sure you wouldn’t rather just come back in the morning?”