You Are Here(21)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

She’d always had a worrying ability to see right past everything.

“I’m really sorry,” Peter said finally, his jaw set as he turned away, keeping to the dirt path that wound toward a distant grove of trees. Emma hurried to catch up to him.

“That’s it?”

“What else is there?”

She frowned. “You could at least say it like you mean it.”

“I do mean it,” he said without pausing. “It’s a terrible thing.”

“Well, aren’t you curious about why they never told me?” she asked, stopping abruptly in the middle of the path. It took him a moment to notice she’d fallen behind, and when he did, he spun around with his eyebrows raised high above the rim of his glasses. They remained there like that for a few beats too long, squared off and uncertain, each nearly lost to the darkness.

“I’m sure they had their reasons,” he said eventually.

“Well, I want to know what they were,” she said. “I mean, maybe something really bad happened. Maybe there was an accident or something, or someone wasn’t watching him carefully enough, and—”

“Emma,” Peter said, cutting her off, a look on his face that fell halfway between sympathy and impatience. “This isn’t a movie. Bad things just happen sometimes.”

She was struck by the sound of his voice, so full of reproach. After a moment he turned to start walking again, his head bowed and his arms held stiffly at his sides.

“That’s it?” she called after him. “ That’s your answer? Bad things just happen sometimes?” She shook her head, then pushed past him, plunging farther down the path on her own. “That’s not good enough. At least not for me.”

She could hear his footsteps on the dry ground, the snap of twigs as he followed her. She wasn’t sure whether he had an answer for that, whether he’d planned to respond, because before either could say anything more, they broke through the band of trees and stumbled out into a clearing. Emma stared at the sight before her, rings of gravestones like crop formations rising from the wine-colored shadows. There were rows upon rows of unmarked headstones fanning out in half-moon shapes, tiling the manicured lawn.

“What is this?” she whispered, following Peter between the lines of pale stones, which spiraled outward like veins across the bruised and broken land. The whole ghostly formation centered around a looming monument, the white marble bright in the dark, and it was here that Peter paused. After a moment Emma realized that he was speaking, his voice low and his head bent, murmuring almost unconsciously.

She moved closer, standing just beside him, so that their shoulders were nearly touching as they tilted their heads to look up at the monument.

“Peter?” she asked, but he didn’t look at her.

“Lincoln’s address,” he said, without any trace of embarrassment. “This is about where he made it.”

Emma nodded, falling quiet again to let him continue, listening as he chanted the words as if in prayer. And when he finished, she closed her eyes.

“‘The world will little note,’” she said softly. “I like that line.”

Peter nodded. “‘The world will little note,’” he repeated, “‘nor long remember what we say here.’”

“They thought it would be just a footnote,” she said, thinking how they couldn’t have possibly known, those soldiers buried beneath this very ground. They couldn’t have realized that this speech, this battle, this particular moment would live on so powerfully. It had refused to stay a footnote. It had refused to be forgotten.

Peter swept an arm across the cemetery. “Some people say it’s haunted.”

“You believe in that sort of thing?”

“Not really,” he said with a little shrug. He seemed about to say something more, then changed his mind, turning to start the walk back. But Emma stood where she was, suddenly reminded of another cemetery—the ending point to this trip—and of her brother, who had been buried there after only two short days in the world. Emma rubbed her hands together, suddenly cold. She closed her eyes, and it was almost as if he were there beside her, not a ghost or a memory, but just a feeling of great comfort, like she suddenly had at her side the one person in the world who would ever understand her.

She smiled, letting her eyelids flutter open again, but when she turned to look, it was not her brother—neither real nor imagined—but Peter who was standing just inches away from her, lost in thought and smiling, too.

Chapter twelve

When he pulled into the parking lot of the diner, Peter turned off the engine and reached for the door handle without looking at Emma, since he already felt certain he could guess the look on her face. There was a blinking neon sign that read sid’s diner in orange letters and below that declared that what appeared to be the hollowed-out shell of an old barn was the scrumptious civil war sensation.

It didn’t look like much of a sensation from the outside, where only one other car was parked in the gravel lot, a faded blue pickup truck with a rusted shovel in the back. But Peter could see inside the windows to where the walls were plastered with old wartime flags and posters and a few old muskets hung above the counter. It was like the worst of all theme restaurants. Like Medieval Times, he thought, only without the jousting. And probably not quite as cool, if such things could ever really be considered cool in the first place.

But Emma—who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the walk back from the cemetery—didn’t seem to mind. They left the dog to poke at the garbage bins outside and then walked in to find themselves set adrift somewhere between 1860 and 1960, the room alternating between actual antiques from the Civil War and outdated furniture from when the diner must have first opened. There were only two other customers, a pair of men hunched low over their steaming mugs of coffee as they scraped the crusted dirt from their boots onto the metal legs of the stools.

Peter and Emma slid into an orange vinyl booth and sat examining the menu and the ketchup bottle and the dirty silverware, making fans and tubes and tiny squares out of their napkins rather than speaking to each other. Peter’s eyes roamed the walls, the framed declarations and tattered flags, the Union caps and Confederate slogans, and he thought of explaining their significance to Emma, but he wasn’t sure this was the best way to break the silence.

Once they’d ordered from a bored-looking waitress—Custer’s Custard Pie for Peter and Abolitionist Apple Strudel for Emma—they resumed their own separate investigations of the cutlery, playing with forks and spoons, inspecting the edges of the table and the tears in the seat where the yellow stuffing bloomed. Peter could very nearly feel it, the way the space had suddenly expanded between them. He didn’t have much practice with this kind of thing, but the trip ahead—four more states and five hundred more miles—was beginning to seem far longer than it had at first.