You Are Here

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Peter grinned. “That would be great.”

  He followed them into the dining room, and took a seat at the large oak table, which was seemingly engaged in a mighty struggle to stay upright beneath so many piles of papers and books. The surface was littered with reading glasses and pens, random pieces of day-old fruit and two mugs of coffee that had left permanent ring stains in the dark wood. He spotted a ruler and a calculator, sheaves of typed pages and others decorated liberally with red pen, and not for the first time, Peter wished that he lived in a place like this, a dust-filled room that smelled of books.

  Mrs. Healy poured him a cup of tea, and Peter added some milk, watching the white liquid cloud his mug. Part of what he loved about coming here was this: the way they treated him like a colleague, a grown-up, a fellow intel lectual. There were never any silly questions about school unless he brought up a certain paper he’d written or a subject he happened to be enjoying. He liked how they never assumed he was there to see Emma either; in their minds, it was just as likely he’d arrived for a discussion of the peculiar rituals of ancient Mayan funerals or the newest collection of poetry by Seamus Heaney.

  There was something about them, too—an undercurrent of sadness, distant and lingering—that Peter found oddly comforting. He’d never had the chance to know his mother, and this absence often made him feel painfully alone. But every now and then—when Mr. Healy was scanning a bookshelf or Mrs. Healy’s eyes drifted to the sun-bleached windowsill—he could very nearly see it etched in their faces, a mystery that seemed both sad and sweet at the same time, like sleeping with a blanket even after you’d long outgrown it.

  Now Mr. Healy passed Peter a section of the newspaper, and the two of them sat reading about the affairs of the world, weather that threatened to tip the globe off its delicate axis and wars that could shake the planet to dust.

  “Well, it’s nice to have someone around to appreciate my cooking,” Mrs. Healy called out from the kitchen. “Since my own kids always seem so eager to escape.”

  Peter glanced at the doorway, where he could see her poking at the eggs on the stove. He was surprised by how easily she joked about this kind of thing, when just yesterday his own dad had accused him of more or less the same thing—trying to escape—only he’d done it with a look so dark and injured you would have thought Peter had suggested making a permanent move to New Guinea.

  “I don’t know about kids these days, Pete,” Mr. Healy joked from behind his newspaper, his gray eyebrows bobbing up and down. “I mean, what kind of sixteen-year-old wants to spend a weekend in New York City? Must be terribly boring.”

  Peter looked up from his tea. “She’s just gone for the weekend?”

  He noticed the Healys exchange a brief glance, and once again, Peter felt his face flush, worried they might find another meaning in his question. This was not a subject Peter took lightly. He’d had time to give it plenty of thought over the years, and the conclusion he’d come to—one that he was determined not to think of as wishful thinking—was that he didn’t like Emma. At least not in that way.

  She was pretty, of course, with those unsettling gray eyes and that way she had of smiling with only one side of her mouth, and there was something careless about her that made the other guys at school glance at her sideways in the halls. But although Peter couldn’t help being drawn to her, he chalked it up to more of a quiet affinity than a lovesick hopefulness. They were both loners in their own way—for Peter, out of necessity; for Emma, more of a choice—but he was fairly certain the bond they shared didn’t amount to anything more than that.

  He willed his face to return to its usual shade, a color pale enough to make his freckles stand out. “It’s just that I thought she might be gone longer.”

  “Nope,” Mrs. Healy said as she deposited two plates full of runny eggs onto the table, then snatched the newspaper from her husband’s hands. “Back on Monday.”

  Peter realized that Emma must not have told her parents about the full extent of her plan either. It was his experience that people who lied were either hiding something or looking for something, and he wondered which was the case with her. He frowned at the eggs on his plate, then stabbed at one with his fork. There was far less confusion in things like math and history, with their straightforward numbers and dates. It seemed that people were a great deal more difficult to figure out.

  chapter five

  Emma was halfway to taking a bite of her burger—mouth open and breathing in the sharp smell of onions—when she caught a glimpse of something white streaking past the rest stop. She lowered her hands and looked off toward the straggly woods to her back, where a thin layer of trees separated the expressway from an office complex that lay just beyond. Seeing nothing, she turned her attention back to her burger, and she was just about to bite down again when a few of the kids from a nearby table began to scream and laugh and jump up and down.

  It took a moment for Emma to realize it wasn’t a wolf. Standing a few yards away in the grass and eyeing her burger with an unblinking gaze, a huge white dog was balancing on three legs. What had once been his fourth—the front right one—was now no more than a stump, cut short just above where the knee would have been. But there was something about the way he carried himself, like he didn’t even know it was missing. He looked like a husky that had had a run-in with a bottle of bleach, pure white and enormous, but with a crust of mud along his belly and a collection of thorny brambles caught in his fur, which—along with the lack of a collar—gave him away as a stray.

  He took a few hobbled steps forward, waving the stump of his leg up and down as if to say hello. Emma could see that one eye was brown and the other a startling shade of blue, as he sat down a few feet away from her and wagged his tail. Behind her a few people hastily shuffled their kids away or grabbed their trays and headed for another table. But Emma watched, fascinated, as he approached her.

  She’d always loved dogs, but her parents had never allowed her to have one, and this, to Emma, seemed completely illogical: Wouldn’t the best way to remedy irresponsibility be to have something to be responsible for? She’d spent years campaigning against the decision, dragging her parents down the street whenever she spotted a puppy, twice bringing home stray dogs (both of which were reclaimed within a few hours) and even once kidnapping the neighbor’s puppy (also reclaimed within a few hours, though not quite as joyously).

  And so now, as the white dog stood trembling a few feet away, his coat muddy and smelling of mulch, she held out one of her French fries. And when he took a tentative step forward, she tossed it in his direction, watching as he tipped his head back and caught it handily, snagging it in midair with a clean snap of his jaw. Each time she looked up from her burger, he had inched a bit closer, scooting along the pavement until he was settled near the end of the picnic table. And when he was near enough to rest his chin on her sandaled foot, Emma reached down and offered him another fry, which he took from her fingers with a well-mannered wag of his tail, his whole body wriggling with gratitude.

  All her life Emma had dreamed of someday being a vet, even as her science grades continued their steady downward plunge. In fact she’d come so close to failing chemistry this year that her parents had forced her to have weekly tutoring sessions with Patrick, who spent hours rattling off formulas over the phone while Emma stared out her window, only half listening. Her grade had just barely improved—enough for her to pass the class, anyway—and her family was able to go on thinking of their youngest daughter as a scientific dunce.

  But she knew there was more to being a vet than just science, even if her family didn’t. Something about her shifted when she was around animals; she had a calming effect on them, a certain affinity that couldn’t be learned from a textbook.

  “It’s not enough to think puppies are cute,” Annie had told her. “There’s a lot of science involved. And math.”

  “That’s that subject with all the numbers,” Patrick had pointed out, while Mom and Dad looked
on with indulgent smiles.

  Emma had always known she was different from her siblings, but that was the first time she’d felt it, really felt it, something sharp and sudden as a bee sting.

  She’d grown used to being the token unexceptional one in a family of uncommon intellect, but sometimes it was an awfully lonely position. And though Emma was used to being on her own—may have even preferred it, in fact—she suspected this was only because it had become a habit, like anything else. It made her different from most kids her age, who clung to friendships like lifeboats, terrified of drifting too far. But Emma knew that if she were to allow someone into her life, then they might just discover what she secretly feared: that perhaps she was just as odd as the rest of her family, only without the brains to back it up.

  The way she figured, it was okay for poets to be quirky. Professors are supposed to be absentminded, and geniuses are notorious loners. But Emma wasn’t any of these things, and still she found herself easily distracted, prone to daydreaming and wandering, with a habit of zoning out when anyone attempted to explain things to her. She hated directions and instructions and had little patience for studying. She was almost seventeen and had no real friends. She wasn’t exactly normal, but she wasn’t exactly abnormal enough either.

  Lately she’d begun to wonder whether her twin brother would have been the same way. She liked to imagine that he might have been the sort of person to appreciate silly jokes and funny movies, the kinds of things that evoked blank stares from the rest of the family. He would have scoffed at science and laughed at math. He would have found poetry to be pretentious and confusing. He would have been her accomplice, her cohort, her partner in crime.

  In fact, in the days since her discovery of the short and presumably tragic existence of Thomas Quinn Healy, Emma had begun to reflect on her life with the eye of a filmmaker. It was far easier than she might have expected to conjure up the brother she’d never known—a bit taller than herself, slightly less skinny, same dark hair and pale eyes—and she found herself simply adding him into all those places in her past where it had seemed something was missing.

  Like the time Jimmy Winters gave her a bloody nose in the third grade. Emma had been in the process of explaining to him the difference between apes and humans—only very subtly implying that he might come closer to the former—when he knocked her cold on the wood chips. But if her brother had been there, standing at her side the way twin brothers do, she felt sure he would have stepped in between them, clocking Jimmy before he even had a chance to close his meaty little hand—opposable thumb and all—into a fist.

  In much the same way, Thomas Quinn Healy—Tommy, for short—was now inserted into every family Christmas, every trial of summer camp, every day she’d endured alone in the school cafeteria, surrounded by the pretentious children of other professors or the too-rowdy kids belonging to the townies.

  None of this was particularly difficult to imagine. The surprise wasn’t how easily he fit into the gaps in her life. It was how naturally he took up residence there, quickly becoming a permanent fixture in her short history, a welcome revision of her past.

  chapter six

  There’d been an edge of static in the air as Peter walked home from the Healys’ house after breakfast yesterday, that undercurrent of electricity that precedes summer storms. The sky had turned a sallow green in the distance, and the trees waved recklessly at the gathering winds. Peter kept his head low and his hands in his pockets, blinking away the bits of dust that were blown carelessly about. He paused at the end of his driveway, frowning at the squat and darkened house, then continued around it and toward the backyard.

  Where a plot of grass should have been—a swing set or a barbecue, a basketball hoop or a bench—was instead a second driveway, a haphazard and bulging circle of asphalt like a tumor growing off the main one. There were three cars parked there at the moment, lined up neatly with their headlights pointing at the kitchen window like a cavalry awaiting charge. There was an ancient, rusted-out Chevy that had been there as long as Peter could remember, a maroon minivan his dad had recently impounded after it had been left for two weeks in front of the grocery store, and a blue Mustang convertible, not unlike the one he’d seen Emma drive off in just yesterday morning.

  This one had shown up a couple of months ago, discovered on the side of the highway by some kids a few miles outside of town. Peter always wondered about the stories behind these abandoned cars, left like orphaned children on country roads. Most of the ones that came in were here on a more temporary basis—someone ran out of gas or collected one too many parking tickets, and the car was towed in to wait until its owner showed up to reclaim it—but the lengthier residents of this little parking lot always fascinated him. He imagined one day being the kind of person who was so accustomed to life on the road that leaving a car behind—to break up the monotony, to get a change of scenery, to hitch a ride and feel a different sort of vehicle surge beneath you—was just one more story to add to an ever-growing repertoire.

  He walked past the minivan and toward the convertible, running a hand along its hood. The sky to the north had turned an angry purple now, and the air felt charged and ready. Peter looked over at the house, and the empty windows of the kitchen gazed back at him. He jiggled the handle on the convertible, but the door remained shut tight, and though he knew about the drawer full of keys in his dad’s desk, he pulled his library card from his back pocket and slid it down into the groove between window and door—a move he’d learned from a book, though he doubted it would work on a more reliable car—and the lock sprang open.

  Peter didn’t have a car of his own. His driver’s license, which he’d gotten just less than a year ago, was more or less decoration, permanently stuffed into the depths of his wallet. He’d learned to drive on his dad’s squad car and had since seen very little of the road. But still, he liked to sit out here on certain gray afternoons, facing down the house and the sky as if in challenge, his foot poised above the gas pedal, his hands resting on the wheel, just a key turn away from motion and distance and velocity.

  He sat down now on the scarred white leather of the driver’s seat and closed the door as the rain started up, sweeping heavily over the car. Peter leaned his head back and closed his eyes and listened to the sound, like a thousand drummers attacking their instruments at once, but hollow and faraway and somehow comforting.

  He’d always considered himself a wholly practical person, dependent on numbers and facts and statistics. But logical or not, there was something about sitting inside these motionless cars, these vehicles without destination or purpose, that always stilled his busy mind long enough for him to think about his mother.

  Peter didn’t wish for his life to be different in the far-reaching, deeply hopeful way that others often do, and he rarely imagined what things would be like if she were still alive. How could he? She was somewhere beyond his memory, a hypothetical answer to the rhetorical question of his life.

  But his dad had never attempted to discuss her absence other than to occasionally announce—with a sense of resigned finality—that “bad things just happen sometimes.” Even when he was very little, Peter had absorbed this information, had embraced it by the time he was five, hated it at seven, welcomed it again at ten, and rebelled against it at twelve. Now that he was nearly seventeen, it had become simply the statement it was: a chain of words that had dictated much of his father’s life, and as a result his own.

  He knew enough to realize that when she died giving birth to him all those years ago, a part of his father must have died as well. He understood this to be the way these things happen, the scripted etiquette of sudden death: the grieving widower, the crying baby, the rain falling across the freshly dug grave site. Peter had seen it a million times in the movies, but it bore such little resemblance to what was at stake now—to what amounted to his life—that he sometimes had trouble finding himself within the scenario.

  Sometimes he was surprised that Dad di
dn’t just come out and blame him for what had happened. Because even though he didn’t actually say it, Peter could often feel it just the same. He knew his father loved him in his own way, but it was also like he couldn’t bear to look at him sometimes, and Peter had felt the push and pull of this his whole life, of a dad who considered his presence both a blessing and a curse. It was like being on a roller coaster, pitched forward and then jerked back, ignored until he felt he barely existed in the house anymore, and then loved so fiercely and briefly it nearly took his breath away. It was like falling and falling and falling until the very last moment, when you were absolutely sure you’d hit the bottom, and then being swept upward again.

  And so Peter could only ever manage to care about his dad with love measured in inches, slid forward and drawn back like an uncertain card player. It would be too easy to say if things had been different or if she were still here or if he weren’t the way he is, because those things were immutable facts; nothing could make them otherwise. So he worried and observed; he thought too much and he moved too cautiously; he studied his father the way he did everything else, wishing things could be different.

  Outside the car a peal of thunder made the ground tremble and the trees quake. Peter watched the raindrops slide down the windows, making streaky patterns on the stark canvas of the world just beyond, and he breathed in the musty smells of rain and dampness and old leather. He looked over at the empty passenger seat, the deep well that had been molded over the years by the unknown driver’s copilot. It made him think of the way he’d often see mothers driving their kids around town, so cautious and careful, inching forward at intersections, wary of the car seats in back or the children buckled in beside them. And when they came to an abrupt stop—when a dog darted out into the road or a light changed unexpectedly—they never failed to fling an arm out to brace their kids, an instinctive measure of safety and concern for their charges.