Peter, however, had no such plans.
Though this is not to say he didn’t have other ones. In fact Peter Finnegan had more plans than anyone he knew. And not the normal kind, the see you after school or what are you doing Saturday night? or meet me in the cafeteria kind.
Instead Peter planned to go to Australia and Africa and Alaska and Antarctica, and that was just the A s. The list grew from there, ballooning to include Bali and Bangladesh, China and California and Chicago. He had marked carefully on the map the place where you might catch a ferry from Ireland to Scotland, had researched mountain climbing in Switzerland and cage diving with sharks off the coast of South Africa. He’d included places like Boston, too, Maine and Canada and even Boise, where he would sample potatoes dipped in butter or ketchup, potatoes fried, peeled, boiled, mashed, and baked. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a fan of the potatoes Dad cooked back in upstate New York. They’d be different in Boise. That’s what happened when you clawed away the drab details of your real life and shed them for something different, something more exciting and altogether more real. That’s when life really started. In some faraway place, exotic or rustic, foreign or familiar—but somewhere, elsewhere, anywhere but here.
“What’s the point?” Dad would say whenever Peter slid a travel magazine across the dinner table, or showed him some advertisement for a sale on airline tickets or a kids-stay-free deal at a roadside motel. “You want to pay for a crappy room with a broken mattress and a moldy showerhead, when you can stay in the comfort of your own home for free?”
He’d sweep an arm across the kitchen to demonstrate those very comforts, highlighting the rusty faucet and partially unhinged cabinets with all the enthusiasm of a game-show host. The whole house—which they’d moved into just after Peter was born and his mother died, events separated only by minutes, a double feature of joy and tragedy that had forever confused that day—was decorated in various shades of green, which had faded over the years to give the place an algae-like feeling, gauzy and faded, like they were living in a long-forgotten shipwreck under the sea.
Peter was hard-pressed to pick out the so-called comforts of the place, and thought a change of scenery—a seaside cottage in Cape Cod, or a tourist trap near the Grand Canyon—might do them both a great deal of good. But Dad seemed just as content to flop down on the couch each night after work, still decked out in his police uniform, so that he looked like an extra in one of those TV shows, an officer thrown aside as the criminal makes his break. For him the comforts of home included a can of beer, a bowl of peanuts, and a baseball game with the volume turned low enough that he might dip in and out of sleep.
And so, until today, the only place checked off Peter’s list—which took up half a spiral notebook, including addendums and footnotes—was New York City, which he’d once visited with his class on the biannual school field trip. He’d been just nine, and had fallen asleep on the bus ride down—something that later seemed horribly unfair, like he’d been swindled by his heavy eyelids—and had missed the scenery, though he could have quite easily directed the bus driver from Route 12 to I-87 and straight on into the city without thinking twice.
But it was the outside world he’d most wanted to see, the river gorges and hillsides that marked a transition from one place to another. When he woke up, enormous buildings had sprouted on either side of the bus as if by magic, and he’d spent the day trailing after the rest of his class in an unblinking daze. On the way home he’d somehow fallen asleep again, lulled by the rocking motion of the bus, and Hank Green had put a straw up his nose, and Liza and Maggie Kessler—evil twins if there ever were—had drawn a handlebar mustache on his face with red marker that took three days to rub out completely.
His class had gone back three times since then, but that was Peter’s only trip. The second time he’d had chicken pox, and he’d come down with a bad case of strep throat on the third. Last year he’d been excluded as a punishment for “smart-mouthing” his teacher, though he’d only been trying to correct her after she repeatedly mispronounced “fallback plan,” describing the Union’s second-day battle strategy at Gettysburg as a “fall- black plan.” Afterward, when she’d sent him to the principal’s office, Peter had refused to admit to the “heckling” he was accused of and therefore sat in mute silence until his dad arrived, his badge prominently displayed, looking vaguely pleased at the idea of his son’s first foray into troublemaking. Peter had always suspected his father would have known better how to raise a kid who threw eggs at people’s windshields or set off stink bombs in the school bathroom. As it was, the man had no clue how to deal with a too-skinny, bespectacled boy who somehow preferred maps and battlefields to baseball and video games.
They’d fashioned a sort of invisible line inside the house, which seemed to work for them most of the time. Dad rarely appeared at Peter’s door or questioned where he’d been when he spent his summer afternoons wandering around town. And in return Peter was careful to tiptoe around the crumpled figure of his father in the evenings, occasionally throwing away an empty beer can or refilling the bowl of peanuts if he was feeling generous.
So just the other day when there was a knock on Peter’s door, he looked up from his maps in surprise. He’d been planning not a trek through the Himalayas or a walkabout in the Australian outback but just a short jaunt north to Canada, to Montreal or Quebec, where he might cross the border as confidently and casually as if he were a purveyor of maple syrup, or perhaps a hockey aficionado, who had been doing it his whole life.
“I thought you were gonna take out the garbage,” Dad said, staring at the array of flattened maps that tiled the floor. “What, did you get lost or something?”
He laughed as if the joke had only just occurred to him, though he tended to use it at least once or twice a week, and it had long stopped being even remotely funny to Peter, who simply chose to ignore him. After a moment Dad’s mouth snapped back into a straight line, and he put on his aviator glasses, despite the dimness of the room. “So, planning your big escape?”
Peter sat back on his heels. “I’m not trying to escape,” he said, knowing this wasn’t entirely true. “Though it might be nice to go somewhere.”
“You know, not everyone can afford to just pick up and go somewhere whenever they want,” Dad said, with a somewhat contemptuous look at the maps spread out like blueprints at his feet. “Not everyone has the means to just go traipsing around the globe.”
Peter braced himself for yet another lecture about the many vices of those with money, the students who clogged the town each fall, the professors who taught them, the very notion of stipends and trust funds and endowments. Dad believed in a hard day’s work and building character and home cooking (in theory, at least). He believed in responsibility and cleaning up your own mess and having a strong work ethic. He believed in being homegrown and salt of the earth. He hated high horses.
But for once the speech went no further. Instead he turned to Peter, gazed across that wide gulf between them, a body of water both dangerous and deep, home to man-eating fish and life-threatening creatures that made the idea of ever crossing seem far-fetched at best.
“You want to be careful about wandering,” he said, as if giving a presentation to a group of second graders about to embark on a nature walk. “It’s a good way to get yourself lost.”
chapter three
It was nearly lunchtime when the car had begun to falter, a sound like someone dragging a metal trash can to the end of the driveway. There was a buckling feeling, like the whole vehicle was struggling to stay in motion, and Emma lifted her foot and listened to the engine heave, then counted to twenty with her eyes fixed on the dashboard. By the time she reached eighteen, the red emergency light had blinked on, and she felt her heart quicken as she merged into the slow lane and coasted toward the rest area, trying not to think of what Patrick might do to her if she ruined his car for good.
But just as soon as it had come on, the light went off again, a
nd the car chugged up the incline with admirable determination. Emma maneuvered into a parking spot beside a camper van and breathed a sigh of relief as she switched off the ignition.
The trip, it seemed, wasn’t over just yet.
The rest stop consisted of five different fast-food places and a gift shop, with outdoor picnic tables and a set of bathrooms she could smell from the parking lot. Emma decided to let the car recuperate while she had lunch, and made her way up to the crowded building, an A-frame structure that looked as if the architects had hoped people might forget they were not at a ski lodge in Vermont but rather at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike.
She waited in line at a burger stand amid the noisy thrum of people, bleary-eyed mothers and kids covered in ketchup and weary truck drivers who stretched their legs and yawned and seemed to be enjoying the diversion from the road. Emma ordered a burger and fries and then carried her tray past the orange plastic tables and arcade games to the glass door that led outside. There were six picnic tables on the side of the building farthest from the highway, and most were already occupied by families wearing shirts with the names of the various states they’d traveled through. Emma took a seat at the last open table, dabbing uselessly at a puddle of spilled soda with her napkin before unwrapping her burger.
This whole thing had started just yesterday morning, while Patrick was packing up his car to return to the city after spending a couple of days at home. Emma had been planning to go with him all along, ever since he’d shown up in the Mustang and the idea to steal it had first occurred to her, but she’d thought it better to spring it on everyone at the last minute. So when she showed up to say good-bye with a backpack slung over one shoulder, everyone stared at her. Emma smiled back at them brightly, then tossed her bag into the trunk.
“And where might you be going?” Patrick asked, raising one eyebrow.
“I thought I’d come stay with you for the weekend.”
He laughed, but not like it was funny. “I’ve got my summer research stuff to finish up this weekend,” he said. “And I’m teaching two classes on Monday that I still need to prepare for.”
“I’ll stay out of your way,” she said. “I promise. It’s just that there’s nothing to do around here, and I thought it might be fun.”
Dad looked equally unsure. “What about work?”
Emma’s job as a camp counselor had fallen through when not enough kids showed up on the first day, so he’d hired her as a research assistant to pass the time over the summer. This basically meant running back and forth between home and the library to fetch and return books. She was pretty sure he could survive without her.
“You’ll be busy finishing up your revisions anyhow,” Mom reminded him. “And I’ve got my article to write. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. The house will be quieter this way.”
Emma thought to point out that as noisy teenagers go, she fell pretty low on the scale, but decided against it. New York was only the first step in her plan, and if she were to mess things up now, before even really having a chance to begin, she’d be stuck at home for the rest of the summer with nothing to do but wonder about things from afar.
Ever since she found the birth certificate, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she should go down to North Carolina. Her grandfather was buried in a cemetery not far from Nate’s house—in the same town where she’d been born—and though she’d never been there before, there was no reason not to think that Thomas Quinn Healy was buried there too.
She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find. It was just a feeling she had, that she should make the trip. She had two parents and three siblings, none of whom understood her at all. Emma felt she owed it to the one brother who might have known her better to pay him a visit. It was as simple as that.
The night before, she’d trailed around the backyard after Mom, helping to clean up after the party and trying to figure out how to ask the question on her mind without really asking anything at all. Mom had always had a tendency to be vague and tight-lipped about the past; she’d never been the type to carry baby pictures in her wallet or tell childhood anecdotes at the dinner table. Emma had always assumed this was because she—like the rest of them—was too focused on her work to see anything outside of it. But now she realized that in the hiding of whatever had happened back then—the disappearance of her twin brother from the family story—other things must have gotten lost as well.
“Do you ever miss North Carolina?” she’d begun, finally, and Mom had stiffened. She was holding a soda can between two fingers, and it took her a moment to let go, dropping it into a garbage bag with a loud clink.
“I guess so,” she said. “But no more than any of the other places we’ve lived. Plus, your brother’s still down there, so we get to visit—”
“My brother?”
“Nate,” Mom said, giving her a funny look. “What’s up with you?”
Emma shrugged, torn between the desire to ask more and the fear that it might ruin her plans. She’d already made up her mind about driving to North Carolina, and while there was no doubt that it was completely irrational—it was foolish and illogical and probably more than a little bit stupid—she was just restless enough not to care. She wanted to go somewhere unknown and unfamiliar, somewhere farther than the college, beyond the hill and outside of this town. Quite simply, she wanted to go.
The plan was simple. She’d borrow Patrick’s car in New York (this sounded far more harmless than stealing it) and then stop in DC, where she could stay with Annie, finally working her way down to North Carolina, where Nate and his fiancée lived in the same house her parents once had. If everything worked out, she could be there in a week, just in time for her seventeenth birthday. And after so many years of unsatisfying birthdays—of wishing for goody bags and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and yellow cake with chocolate frosting, but instead getting encyclopedias and magnifying glasses and leather-bound poetry collections—where better to spend it than with the one person who’d once shared the day with her?
It didn’t, in the end, take as much convincing as she’d expected before Patrick finally caved, and they’d only been on the road for half an hour before she’d gotten him to agree to spend the rest of the afternoon with her too. They left the top down on the convertible, though the rush of air made it too loud to talk, and they drove on with chapped lips and wind-burned faces, their bare elbows dangling over the doors as the landscape reeled past. They passed low-slung barns and crumbling silos, the little car groaning each time it crested a hill, only to fall again with a resigned whirring noise.
It took more than an hour to emerge from the depths of the forgotten half of the state of New York and onto the main expressway, where they left behind the rambling fields and wooden fences for the highways with their sharp medians and yellow lines of paint.
“So what should we do this afternoon?” Patrick asked, once the wind had died down enough for them to talk. “Central Park? Brooklyn Bridge? How about the Met? There’s a great exhibit on now. Contemporary art.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “I hate museums.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Nobody hates museums.”
“Well, nobody actually likes them, either,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing people like to say they’ve done, but don’t really like doing.”
Patrick laughed. “That’s absurd.”
“So is contemporary art,” said Emma, unmoved.
“Okay, so what’s your brilliant plan for the day?”
Emma looked off to where the quilted landscape around the road had begun to gather itself in gray-brown clusters of shopping malls and car dealerships, dizzying billboards and the occasional office complex. The sun was bright against the distant city, which rose black and uneven beyond a labyrinth of bridges. She held her breath against the smell of it, the faint stench of garbage and exhaust that drifted over from New Jersey, the sudden closeness of the buildings that stifled the air around them.
This was the cit
y where she’d lived when she was little, where she’d gone to kindergarten in a plaid skirt and played soccer on a field near the highway, where she’d learned to ride a bike on the uneven sidewalk outside their West Village apartment. By the time her parents made it up to Manhattan to take teaching positions at NYU and Columbia, all three of Emma’s brothers and sisters were gone, off to college or else already impressing a new audience of adoring bosses and coworkers. But this was where Emma had lived from the time she was five until she was eight, and so now she realized she had no interest in seeing Times Square. She didn’t want to visit the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island or any of the other landmarks that told stories of the city’s past. And she certainly didn’t want to go to the Met.
For once, it was her own past that she was concerned about, and it suddenly seemed important to connect the dots on her way to North Carolina, to discover not just the beginning, but the other chapters as well, the checkered timeline of a history that was dangerously close to being forgotten.
“Can we go see the old apartment?”
Patrick raised his eyebrows. “Feeling nostalgic?”
“A little,” she admitted, turning back to the skyline unfurling before the little car.
Later, after they’d parked and dropped their bags at Patrick’s and taken the long subway ride down the west side of Manhattan, the two of them stood before a building on the corner of Greenwich and Bank streets. Emma ran her eyes up the burnt-colored bricks to the fourth window on the right, and then below that to the gum-stained steps, where she used to sit twisting a jump rope around the wrought-iron railings.
“I’m pretty sure it was this one, right?” Patrick was saying, backpedaling to get a better look. “It’s been forever, huh?”
You Are Here Page 2