You Are Here(48)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

She stretched to pick a dandelion, then laid it beside the stone. It wasn’t a bouquet of daisies or freshly picked tulips or anything close to perfect; it was all she could do right now, but it seemed somehow appropriate all the same.

“Nice to meet you, Tommy,” she said.

As she walked back toward the car, she couldn’t help the corners of her mouth from turning up into a smile. There was suddenly so much she wanted to say to Peter, so many unexpected possibilities. She knew, as she hurried across the grass with a widening grin, that he’d think she was crazy; how could he not? The way she’d been bouncing from mood to mood, wanting to strangle him one minute and needing him there the next. But how could he have possibly understood her when she hadn’t even understood herself? Now, suddenly, she knew what she wanted: She wanted to talk, really talk; she wanted to listen, and she wanted to change. She wanted to keep driving. She didn’t ever want to stop.

But when she reached the car, bypassing her side and looping around to where Peter now sat, making notches on the worn leather steering wheel with the edge of the key, he looked up at her with an expression so grimly set and determined that she forced her mouth back into a straight line. When she opened the door, the dog lifted his head, then dropped his chin again.

Emma stared at Peter, who seemed to be summoning the courage to say something, his fingers working the key in circles, refusing to meet her eye. It occurred to her that now was her chance, that if there were things that needed to be said, then this was the moment, because the way Peter was looking at her—the vague outline of an apology forming in his eyes—made her stomach twist with the possibility that she was too late.

“Peter,” she began, but he shook his head.

“Wait,” he said, his green eyes focused on some point beyond the windshield, his foot tapping a nervous beat against the dusty floor mats. “Me first.”

“I just —”

“Emma, please,” he said, and the way he was looking at her, it was like the moment itself—so bright with expectation only seconds before—was now spiraling away, taken up by the wind like a stray leaf.

“The thing is,” he began, the words coming out in a rush, “there are some battlefields around here I’d really like to see.”

She knew she should cut in before he could say anything too final, before he could do anything they’d come to regret. Tell him she wasn’t ready for him to go yet, let him know she was sorry, explain that she could change, that she had changed. But she also knew that to say those things would be to seem as bullheaded and stubborn and hasty as the person who was driving him off in the first place, and because she was determined to seem different—to be different—she closed her hands into little fists at her side and bit the side of her lip and waited for him to go on.

“You don’t need me tagging along anymore,” Peter was saying, looking as if he was still trying to convince himself of this fact. “You’ve got a lot of things going on with your family, and I don’t want to intrude. And I figure that as long as my dad’s gonna kill me anyway, I might as well see a few more things along the way. Especially since I’ll probably never be allowed out of my room again.”

He looked up at her as if all this was inevitable, as if he’d always known this would happen here in this shaded cemetery in western North Carolina, with the wind rearranging the grass and the trees a symphony of rasps and groans. His hair was blown sideways off his forehead, and his eyes were quiet, the bright intelligence replaced by something deeper, something sadder, maybe.

“Are you—?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”

She attempted a small smile, but she couldn’t help feeling that she was falling back inside herself, despite her best efforts to stay afloat. She knew he had every right to do this, that in his position she wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing. She’d offered him so little, and even now, as she walked around to the other side of the car and slipped inside, she still couldn’t bring herself to say the one thing that might fix all this, at once an apology and a wish: Stay.

“And hey,” he said, “I could come back and pick you up afterward, unless your family …”

“I found my way down here,” Emma said shortly. “I’m sure I can figure out a way back home.”

“Okay, then,” Peter said, gripping the wheel.

Emma nodded. “Okay.”

He turned the key in the ignition and said it again: “Okay.”

As they left, the tires bounced over the unripened crab apples that littered the drive, and the stained-glass windows of the church threw tinted colors on the hood of the car. Emma leaned an elbow on the side and told herself it was for the best, that her reasons for coming down here had had nothing to do with Peter in the first place, and that once he was gone—doing whatever it was he wanted to do, touring empty fields across the South, searching for reminders of something long since erased—she’d finally be able to focus on what was important again.

It was a short drive to Nate’s house, just a few miles farther down a narrow road that cut through the kind of hills that in another season would be perfect for sledding. There were farms with hay stacked like building blocks, battered mailboxes and white fences, bird feeders and bluish grass. Emma hadn’t been for a visit in years, and she’d nearly forgotten the humble charm of the little house, set near a muddy lake with a sinking dock and an overturned rowboat that looked as if it hadn’t seen the water in years.

Peter turned the key and the car went silent, and Emma pressed her nose up against the window to look out at the place they’d carried her home after she was born, the place where her brother had died and her family had begun the slow process of unraveling. The horizon was crowded by the smoke-colored mountains, and from a distance the trees looked like feathers coating some giant, hunchbacked bird, the wind tipping them this way and that like needles on a scale.

The whole world smelled of pine and mulch, and they sat looking out at the house together, neither of them quite sure what to say. Emma tried not to feel so deflated, but this was what she’d come all the way down here for, and it now seemed silly and pointless. What had she hoped to do in dredging up the past? What good could that possibly have done? A part of her simply wasn’t ready for the trip to be over, but another part of her knew it was more than that. She wasn’t yet ready for Peter to leave.