You Are Here(20)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

Peter was waiting at the bottom of the hill. “We can do that, too.”

“Super,” Emma managed. From what she could make out, they were standing in a valley bordered by shadowy ridges that looked like great sleeping monsters in the dark. For a moment she was calmed by the thought that this could be anywhere—any old meadow in any old town, the kind of place where dogs run in circles and kids fly kites and flowers grow each spring—but then a face seemed to materialize out of the fog, a metal statue of a soldier gazing impassively over the site of his own death, his horse frozen beneath him, his gun forever at the ready.

“Are you sure we should be here?” Emma asked, and when her words were met with only a heavy silence, she turned to see that Peter had paused before the statue. His head was bent over the plaque, and it struck her as somehow impolite to bother him now, like interrupting someone at a funeral, so solemn was the look on his face, reverent and humbled at once. The dog had circled back and now sat rigidly at her side, his mismatched eyes darting between the pale stone monuments and the rows of cannons that formed an uneven line across the field.

Emma watched Peter’s back, the rise and fall of his shoulders, wondering and worrying, trying to guess how much of these desolate grounds he’d want to see tonight, how far into the past he’d be tempted to wander. There were other things too: She wondered where they would sleep later on, and how far it was to Washington. She wondered if her parents were still calling the phone she’d left in the car, whether Patrick would ever speak to her again, what they would do with the dog when they got to Annie’s. All these worries seemed to expand in the darkness, until Emma felt nearly short of breath, and she tried not to fidget as she waited for Peter to finish whatever it was he was doing.

After a moment he turned around, his face pale in the dark. “Isn’t it …,” he began, then trailed off, apparently unable to find the right word. Emma could think of several that might fit the bill—“creepy,” “depressing,” “morbid”—but she didn’t say any of them.

“This part’s called East Cemetery Hill,” he said quietly, waving his hand in a circle. “And over there was Culp’s Hill, where the Union formed their fish-hook line.”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “Fish hook?”

“It was named for the shape of their defense,” he told her, then whistled for the dog as they began walking again. Through the trees she could see splintered headlights as they neared the road and whatever lay beyond, and their feet made loud crunching noises in the dirt. Peter held a tree branch for her as she ducked beneath it, her foot getting snagged on a twisted root. There was a wooden fence strung out along the length of the two-lane road, and Emma squinted to make out a run-down farmhouse and a few crooked trees on the other side of it.

“Lincoln made his address just up there,” Peter said, already looking awestruck as they waited for a truck to lumber past, then jogged across together. “It’s one of the most famous speeches—”

Emma snorted, and Peter glanced back at her, his eyebrows raised.

“Give me a little credit,” she said indignantly. “I might not know a lot, but I do know about the Gettysburg Address.”

He grinned. “Okay, then.”

As they walked deeper into the woods, he told her about battle formations and casualties, unexpected victories and retreats; he brought the whole messy past lurching into the present with newfound significance. And much to her surprise Emma found herself listening as he spoke, as he took a field like any other and turned it into a story, tracing for her a history that had happened on the very spot they were standing.

“So why do you care so much about this stuff?” she asked, the question settling heavily between them. It was clear she’d interrupted Peter in some sort of reverie; he shook his head as if remembering himself and his whereabouts, then turned to her and blinked. Emma cleared her throat. “I guess it just seems sort of random,” she said. “I mean, why the Civil War?”

“It’s not really about the war,” he said softly. They were at the edge of another field now. The moon had slipped behind a bank of clouds, and though he was standing just feet away from her, it was hard to make out his face. “It’s not even about any of the issues really, slavery or the Union or any of the other stuff that kept it going for so long.”

“So what, then?”

He shrugged. “It’s about seeing something get put back together again, I guess. Especially after coming so close to falling apart. I mean, if a whole country can bounce back from something like that, then it sort of seems like anything’s possible.”

Emma breathed in, tilting her head back to look up at the sky, where the stars were punching holes in the endless darkness. Beside her the dog turned circles in the grass, and the wind died so suddenly it was as if the world had stopped breathing.

“Peter,” she said quietly, so quietly it took a moment for him to face her, with an expectant look that nearly made her change her mind. But his words were still rattling through her head, and the night had grown still, and she could almost feel the secret she’d been carrying struggling to work its way out of her. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

He grinned at her. “You’re secretly a Civil War enthusiast?”

“No,” she said. “I once had a twin brother.”

His face changed, slipping just slightly, but his eyes remained steady on hers. “Once?”

“I found a birth certificate in our attic,” she said. “Just last week. But there was a death certificate, too. From a couple days later.”

Peter lowered his chin, and Emma watched him carefully, trying to make out what he was thinking. His brow was furrowed, and he was staring at the ground so intensely that he might have been calculating the number of blades of grass in the field.

It struck her then, as it had so many times before, that his way of seeing the world must make life fairly difficult. When he looked at a house, it was like he could only ever see a network of pipes and beams, as if the rest of it—all the little details that made it what it was, the furniture and family photos, the chipping paint and sagging ceiling—were hardly there at all. It was like he saw deeper into things than most people, an explorer winding his way into the tiniest corners of a cave, while Emma, on the other hand, seemed to always see her way around things, skirting the edges of whatever lay in front of her, the interesting and the extraordinary as much as the mundane and the dull.