You Are Here(32)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

“Um, could you maybe give him a call?” she asked Mom, her eyes still on Peter, who looked so relieved it was as if he could actually hear both sides of the conversation. “Just in case Peter doesn’t get through tonight?”

“He needs to call his dad, Emma. He’s been worried too.”

“Okay, but just in case?”

“Fine,” Mom agreed. She took a deep breath, and then—as if they’d just had a heart to heart, some warm and genuine chat about their feelings—she wrapped up the whole thing by saying, “You know we love you very much.”

Emma nodded. “I love you too.”

And then they were gone.

When she turned back around, the dog banged his tail against the coffee table a couple of times, and Charles disappeared into the bathroom in the midst of a sneezing fit. Annie stalked off toward the bedroom, muttering something about this apartment not being a hotel.

Emma looked over at Peter and shrugged. They were clearly unwanted and in no small amount of trouble, sentenced to be shipped home again in a little more than twenty-four hours. But still, she couldn’t help feeling hopeful.

“You bought us an extra day?” Peter asked with a small smile, and she nodded, grinning. A lot could happen in a day.

Chapter sixteen

At breakfast the next morning Peter concentrated on his plate while Annie and Emma argued about the day ahead.

“You really don’t have to come with us,” Emma said. “We’re fine on our own.”

Peter smiled as he chewed his frozen bagel, which was still hard as a hockey puck.

“Well, it’s not like you’re in town that often,” Annie said. “And it’s not like I’ve taken a lot of days off.”

“A lot?” Charles said, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t remember the last time.”

“You really don’t have to,” Emma said again. “We’ll go wander a little, see the sights. We’ve been getting around just fine. Peter’s like an atlas, anyway.”

He smiled again, though nobody was looking at him.

Annie stood to put her plate in the sink. Even when she wasn’t dressed for work, she looked somehow tailored, in nice black pants and matching heels, which clicked on the tiled floor of the kitchenette as she returned with a second cup of coffee. Peter thought she and Emma looked very much alike, though he knew Emma would be angry with him just for thinking it. But the resemblance was undeniable, and if you were to throw Emma into the shower, comb her hair back into a sleek ponytail, wrestle her into a suit, and make her take an etiquette class, you might end up with Annie: a stiffer, straighter, more precise version of her younger sister.

The two were now glaring at each other across the table while Charles picked at his grapefruit obliviously, twice managing to spray himself in the eye. Peter fed the rest of his breakfast to the dog, who was sprawled underneath the glass table, and waited for a decision to be made.

“Well, I already called in to work,” Annie said. “So I guess you’re stuck with me.”

“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” Emma said. “I just don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“Well, you might have thought of that before showing up without calling in the first place,” said Annie. “Not to mention bringing along your boyfriend and that mutt.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Emma said without even glancing at Peter, who popped a grape into his mouth, completely unbothered. Because the thing was, he felt like her boyfriend right now: exchanging knowing glances with Charles as the two sisters argued, bearing witness to family squabbles over breakfast. It felt a bit like playing house, and he could almost imagine they really were dating, that he’d been ushered home to meet her family, allowed to look in on even the most intimate moments between them, those that would otherwise remain hidden to the world at large. And so he sat and drank his orange juice, grateful to have a seat at the table in any capacity, feeling deeply and wonderfully at home.

Emma, however, still seemed less than thrilled at the prospect of having her sister for company today, and by the time they set off toward the Lincoln Memorial, the two of them were barely speaking to each other. Every so often Annie would mutter something like “completely inconsiderate” or “just trying to be nice,” and in response Emma would loop an arm through Peter’s and study the surrounding buildings—grand-looking embassies and looming government offices—with a remarkable display of forced enthusiasm.

“Look at that,” she’d say, pointing to what turned out to be a post office with the kind of awe usually reserved for monuments and other such wonders.

Peter didn’t mind. He found the whole thing fairly silly—that Emma would drive all these miles to Annie’s only to squander the opportunity to ask about her twin brother—but he was also secretly pleased at the way Emma was acting toward him, with a closeness that felt like a prize he’d somehow managed to win. He didn’t care if it was only a reaction to Annie; he was perfectly happy to widen his eyes and ooh and aah over the rather ordinary post office building.

It wasn’t long before he spotted another pay phone, a slanted structure near the river, and Annie and Emma waited patiently while he once again dialed and then hung up, but there was a strange comfort in the numbers, and words had never come easily to him anyway.

“You have a cell phone,” Emma pointed out when he walked back outside, thrusting a finger at his pocket.

“I know.”

“So why do you keep using pay phones?”

“Because then he won’t know it’s me.”

“Well, isn’t that the point of calling?” she asked. “For him to know it’s you?”

Peter shrugged. “It’s nice to have the option to hang up.”

The sun rose higher over the white city, and the three of them ambled through its maze of monuments and parks. Nobody talked much, and Peter was grateful for this. It seemed a place too important for chitchat, and he was nearly overwhelmed by it all, the buildings he’d so often seen in pictures suddenly blown up into three dimensions, towering gateways to government and democracy. They peered up at the tall spike of the Washington Monument, stared at the sun-drenched buildings on Capitol Hill, poked their heads through a fence to gaze past the landscaped lawn stretching up to the White House.

At the Lincoln Memorial, Peter stood breathlessly and ran through the words to the Gettysburg Address again—this time only in his head—and it was as if Lincoln himself had blessed the trip, like the tall man in the big stone chair was smiling down on all of them. And as they walked away from the columned building, Peter felt happy and dizzy and lightheaded all at once, closing his eyes and imagining his own map of the city, tracing a thin line across it in his mind, marking their route as others might record the day in a journal or a photo album.