You Are Here(54)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

Peter had pulled over to the side of the road once he was far enough away from the state troopers, and he now jabbed at the numbers on the keypad, impatient for the next message.

“Sorry about that,” it began, and Peter smiled almost reflexively when he heard her voice again. “I think my brothers have somehow reverted to whatever age they were when we last lived in this house. Anyway, this is my version of an apology. I know it’s not great, but I’ve messed up everything else so far, so why not this, too?”

There was a short silence, and then she cleared her throat. “So, look. I’ll go to all those old battlefields with you, and I’ll even listen to you talk about them, if you’ll come back here and pick me up first. There’s just one more thing I need to do before heading home. I understand if you’re already too far away, or if you just don’t want to come, but it would mean a lot if you did. So if you can, meet me back in the cemetery tomorrow morning at eleven, okay?”

Peter kept the phone pressed to his ear long after it had gone dead. And then, once he felt prepared to start the engine again, he swung into a U-turn and pointed the car east once more.

But there was one thing he needed to do first, and it wasn’t long before he found himself standing outside a gas station that straddled an intersection between two backcountry roads, a small cabin of a building that was now more yellow than white. There was a phone booth to one side of it, looking out of place between an air pump and a display of feeble-looking purple flowers, and Peter heaved open the rusted door.

The glass was clouded with dirt, and the space inside smelled of cigarettes and stale beer. He dug in his pockets for change while reading the various inscriptions etched into the booth, proclamations of love and hate and revenge and loss, all tagged with initials in an effort to leave some kind of mark on the world.

Nearly out of money by now, he only managed to come up with two nickels and a penny, and so he picked up the phone and dialed the operator to make a collect call. He played with the cord as he listened to it ring, wondering what his dad had been doing, wondering if he’d even accept the call. But a moment later his voice came over the line, a gruff hello that gave nothing away.

“Hi, Dad,” Peter said, making an effort to keep his voice steady. “How are you?”

There was a brief pause. “How am I?”

“Yeah, sure. How are you?”

“What is this, a social call?” Dad practically spit into the phone. “How am I? Well, I’m fantastic. Really. Just wonderful.”

“That’s great,” Peter said, bobbing his head.

Dad snorted. “And where the hell are you? Or is it too much to ask to be kept up to speed on your whereabouts?”

“I’m in Tennessee. On my way back to North Carolina.”

“On your way back to North Carolina,” Dad muttered. “I guess there’s no point in asking why you’re not on your way back to New York?”

“I’ll get the car back to you, Dad,” Peter said. “I promise.”

“It’s not the car I’m worried about,” he said, and then coughed into the phone and made a few grumbling noises.

They seemed to run out of things to say then, caught between polite conversation and their usual dynamic, between anger and relief.

“So what the hell are you doing down there, anyway?” Dad asked eventually. “Looking at colleges or something?”

Peter pressed the phone harder against his ear. “Not really, no. I’ve got some time to decide all that.”

“I heard there are some good ones down there.”

“I know,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking it probably makes sense to apply to a whole bunch of different places. Just to see what happens.”

“What about … ?”

“Yeah,” Peter said, nodding into the phone. “There, too.”

“But I thought you hated this place,” Dad said with barely disguised shock. “I thought you’d rather be anywhere but home.”

“Maybe that was just because I’d never been anywhere else,” he said. “It’s hard to know what you’re looking for when you’ve only seen one thing.”

“And now what? You’re some big-time traveler, ready to come home?”

“Guess so,” Peter said, tracing a heart that had been carved into the glass door of the phone booth. He thought carefully about his next words. “People can change, you know, Dad,” he said hopefully, but when, after a few beats of silence, it didn’t appear that there would be a response to this, he sighed and leaned against the booth. “Anyway, I wanted you to know I’m not coming home just yet. I’ve got to go back and get Emma first.”

To Peter’s surprise Dad seemed to find this funny, the phone rattling with his laughter, a sharp and unfamiliar sound. “Is that what this is about?”

“What?”

“A girl?”

Peter hesitated. “Would that make it better?”

“Trust me, son. Nothing’s gonna make this better,” Dad said, but Peter could hear the amusement in his voice all the same, an overtone of relief that seemed to stretch across the conversation. It wasn’t coming easily, and it wasn’t yet natural for them. But it was there all the same.

“You know,” Dad said after a moment, “I once drove your mother up to the Canadian border. Only trip we ever really took. We didn’t tell our parents either, and by the time we got back, we were in a whole world of trouble.”

Peter found he was holding his breath. “Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“No, I mean why did you go?”

“She wanted to see Niagara Falls.” He fell quiet, and Peter let the silence swell between them. “She had a thing for waterfalls. Kind of the way you are with those damn battlefields, I guess.”

Peter smiled. “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”

There was a long pause, and for a moment Peter was afraid his dad wasn’t going to answer. But then his voice came over the line again, his words soft and measured.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I will.”

It seemed impossible that it had only been twenty-four hours since he and Emma last stood in this same cemetery before this same sleepy church. The sky was clear this morning, cloudless and breezy, and the place now had an almost springtime feel to it. A group of sparrows scattered when Peter pulled the car into the drive, taking a few hops before launching themselves skyward, and the sun made everything looked tinged in gold, as if lit up from the inside out.