You Are Here(34)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

Peter looked on as she pinballed around the yard, and he couldn’t help himself from smiling whenever she did, as if it were something contagious. It was like watching someone reclaim their past, or better yet discover it for the first time. Seeing her this way made him think, unexpectedly, of the pay phone by the river, and all the other pay phones along the way, silent and empty monuments to some great failure, whether his or his father’s Peter couldn’t tell.

But he wished now he’d had the courage not to hang up. All this time he’d been grateful that his dad hadn’t called, but he suddenly wished just the opposite: that rather than teaching him a lesson by letting him go, letting the quiet between them stretch the length of the country, his dad would ask him to come home.

He also knew that the braver thing to do would be to stop waiting, to quit wondering, to go searching and seeking and asking. The braver thing to do was exactly what Emma was doing now. It was being determined to discover the past. It was not letting anything get in your way.

Unfortunately, Peter wasn’t anything like Emma.

He watched her now, pacing the front yard as Annie pointed at the second floor of the house, which seemed to strain forward, leaning toward the telephone wires where a few birds were huddled together.

“Remember how you and Mom used to make signs welcoming me home from school?” Annie asked. “You’d hang them in the windows at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You used to be so excited to see me.”

The smile slipped from Emma’s face. “And you used to be so excited to come home.”

Annie blinked a few times, as if unsure how to respond. “I still am,” she said eventually, but something had shifted, and they stood looking at each other without knowing what to say. A bank of clouds passed overhead, pulling a shadow across the house and the little party standing outside of it, and so one by one they turned to leave, making their way back up the street single file, Annie followed by Emma followed by Peter.

“You should go easy on her,” Peter whispered, feeling both brave and hypocritical at once, waiting for Emma to either snap at him or ignore him. But to his surprise she slowed down and nodded.

“It’s just that she was always so close, just a city or two away, and she hardly ever visited,” she said, her eyes trained on Annie’s back as she led them all home. “I mean, no wonder we have nothing in common. I never got a chance to know her.”

“You’re family,” Peter said simply.

“Maybe so, but I don’t get her.”

“Maybe she doesn’t get you, either.”

“That’s the point,” Emma sighed. “Nobody understands anyone else in my family, and nobody even tries. Least of all with me.”

“It’s not just your family, you know,” Peter pointed out, and then stopped himself. He wanted to say more, to tell her how he suspected everyone felt a little bit alone, that maybe it was impossible to ever be fully understood, and that she wasn’t the only one in the world who felt that way. But he was afraid of breaking the newfound complicity between them.

“Maybe not,” Emma said. “But it sometimes feels that way.”

It wasn’t long before they came across a small city park where a four-man band was playing on the pavilion. Emma made them stop to listen, and as they watched, Peter could tell that the trumpet player—clearly the worst of the quartet—was struggling to keep up with the rest of them. Every so often a stray note would make itself heard amid the other instruments, and the poor man would heave a desperate breath into his horn as he limped through the song.

Peter glanced over at Emma and Annie, both looking on with a similar expression of mildest interest, their heads tilted the exact same way. Nobody else seemed to notice the lagging trumpeter as the trombonist entered the song at high volume and the saxophone kicked up at the chorus.

That was the thing about playing with a band, Peter thought. There was always someone else to rescue you when it seemed certain you might fall behind. Only the solo acts left themselves open to those kinds of disasters.

Chapter seventeen

When Charles arrived home from work later, it was with a large bag of takeout food, which he and Annie set about unpacking in the kitchen.

“You guys like sushi, right?” Annie asked as an afterthought, already carrying out a large plate full of little rolls of rice with bits of raw fish peeking out the middle. The dog lifted his nose to catch a whiff, then flattened his ears and backed away with a little whine.

“Don’t know,” Emma said, grabbing one with two fingers. Whatever was holding it together tasted like old seaweed, and she coughed and wrinkled her nose. It was like eating a slug, the way the whole thing went slithering down her throat. “What is this?”

“It’s eel,” Annie said, looking amused.

“No, the part on the outside.”

“Nori.”

“Well, it tastes like seaweed.”

“It is seaweed,” Charles said, grabbing one for himself with a grin. “Maybe I should have ordered a pizza instead.”

Annie stared at them. “You’ve never had sushi before?”

“I once had a goldfish named Sushi,” Peter offered.

“Right,” said Annie, evidently not sure how to respond to this. “So, what time are you guys planning to take off in the morning?”

Emma lowered her eyes to the bits of crab on her plate. It was hard to ignore Peter, who was looking at her with such alarm you might have thought there was a gunman standing directly behind her, and she knew he was wondering if they were really—after all they’d been through—just going to slink back home, tails between their legs, without putting up so much as a fight.

The truth was, Emma didn’t know the answer to that yet.

“Whenever we get up, I guess,” she said, still not looking at anyone in particular.

Annie nodded. “So what do you want to do tonight?”

“What are the options?”

“We could play a board game,” Charles said, launching himself off the couch and throwing open the cabinet beneath the flat-screen TV. “Monopoly?”

“Okay, then I call the top hat,” Emma announced, and Annie looked stricken.

“ I was always the top hat,” she said, and Peter and Charles exchanged a look. “Patrick was always the race car, Nate was the dog, and I was the top hat.”

“How am I supposed to know that?” Emma said. “It’s not like you guys ever played with me.”