Sometimes when he sat out here in the car, unprotected and exposed, Peter couldn’t help feeling that way too. Like the weight of some invisible hand was keeping him safe.
He didn’t even realize he’d been sleeping when he woke later to the drumbeat of rain on the windshield. But there was a new sound too, something louder, and when Peter finally blinked his eyes open, his heart stuttered in his chest. Someone was rapping knuckles against the hard glass of the window beside him, and a moment later the person bent at the waist to reveal the angry face of his dad.
“Inside,” he said, his voice almost comically muffled from where Peter still sat inside the car, now fully awake. “ Now.”
Peter dropped his chin and fumbled with the door handle, and by the time he stepped outside and into the storm—which seemed to grow in intensity, a melodramatic prelude to whatever rebuke was sure to come his way—Dad had already disappeared into the house. Peter crossed the paved driveway, pulling uselessly at his collar as the water soaked straight through his shorts and T-shirt. He shoved open the back door and kicked off his soggy sandals, then stood dripping all over the welcome mat as three of Dad’s poker buddies regarded him with interest.
“Baby’s first carjacking,” Officer Maron said with a grin, and beside him Lieutenant Mitchell—a pudgy man with an astonishingly large gap between his two front teeth—let out a low whistle.
“What a proud moment.”
Peter ignored them and looked over at Dad, whose mouth was set in a thin line.
“It’s not like I was taking it anywhere,” he began, but Dad’s left eye had started to twitch, which usually only happened when someone stole a stop sign or smashed the neighborhood pumpkins on Halloween. He grabbed a deck of cards and slammed them hard on the kitchen table.
“You boys set up,” he said, his eyes still on Peter. “I’ll be right back.”
He stalked off toward the stairs, and the other three men looked at Peter sheepishly, averting their eyes and busying themselves with the poker chips as if suddenly embarrassed for him. Nobody liked to see someone stumble into the path of Sheriff Finnegan when his twitchy eye was acting up. Peter took a deep breath, then followed the heavy sound of Dad’s footsteps.
He was in Peter’s bedroom, of all places, his back to the door. He seemed to be deep in thought, contemplating the maps still spread out across much of the floor.
“Sometimes I just like to sit out there,” Peter said to his dad’s broad back, and he saw the muscles in his shoulders tense and then slacken again. “It’s not like I was going anywhere. I didn’t even have the keys.”
“Exactly,” Dad said, spinning around, fixing him with a hard look. “So answer me this: How does someone get into a locked car without keys?”
Peter pushed at his glasses and looked away. This was a famous tactic of Dad’s, the pseudorhetorical question. It was far more effective than a simple accusation, in that it required an answer. And he had no problem waiting around until he got one.
“I was just sitting,” Peter said, surprised to hear the resentment in his voice. “Is there a law against sitting these days?”
“In stolen property, yes.”
Peter snorted. “It was hardly stolen.”
“Whether or not you had intent to steal it is beside the point,” Dad said, pacing a little circle around the room, the maps fluttering in his wake. “You were trespassing.”
“Dad, come on,” Peter said, suddenly weary. “Can’t we just talk normally?”
His father raised an eyebrow. “Normally?”
“Without the cop jargon,” he sighed. “You’re off duty.”
“Sure doesn’t feel like it,” Dad said. “Not when I come home and find that my kid’s broken into an impounded car.”
“I wasn’t—”
Dad cut him off. “I don’t care,” he said, his eyes flinty. He spread his palm over the globe on Peter’s desk and then spun it hard. “If you want to run as far away as you can next year, then that’s fine with me. But for now you’re still living in my house.”
Peter lifted his chin. There was hardly any point in arguing with Dad even when he was in the right—which was definitely not the case now that Peter’s frequent break-ins had been discovered—but still, something in his throat felt tight, and the backs of his eyes were burning, and he couldn’t explain the anger that gripped him except to wonder whether it had always been there and he just hadn’t realized.
He knew, even before he said it, that it was a stupid thing to do. But he cleared his throat anyway. “It’s my house too.”
“Really?” Dad said, looking almost amused by this. “Because you sure as hell don’t act like it. You can’t wait to get out of here, turning your nose up at a good paying job and spending all your time over at the Healys, talking about books or whatever it is you do.” His face was nearly white as he took a few steps closer, and for a brief and unreal moment Peter wondered if he might hit him. But then his voice grew quiet, and he straightened his shoulders. “Like this family isn’t good enough for you.”
Peter had always known this is what his father thought of him, but hearing him say it out loud was like being stopped short, like running up against a brick wall. It struck him for the first time ever that maybe his dad was actually jealous of the Healys, of what they meant to Peter, of what they represented. But instead of feeling sorry or sad, Peter only found himself getting angrier. Because what right did Dad have to be so resentful of the Healys’ time with Peter, when he never showed the slightest bit of interest himself?
“I grew up in this town,” Dad was saying now. “Your mother grew up in this town. She loved this place. And it’s not good enough for you?”
He flicked a hand through the air as if to swat at a fly, but Peter just stood there, stunned and reeling. It felt like a betrayal of some kind, bringing up his mother in the midst of an argument like this, and it caught him completely off balance.
For as long as Peter could remember, Dad had held onto his grief with a silent and stoic determination, retaining a sorrowful monopoly on all those things that mattered, stories and memories and pictures. Because of this, Peter knew astonishingly little about his mother.
When he was younger, he used to make an effort, a kind of pitiful doggedness to his attempts. At dinner Dad would pass him a casserole dish of green beans, and Peter would immediately demand to know whether his mother had liked them.
“No,” Dad would answer shortly, grabbing for the salt. The same held true for carrots and potatoes, chicken and steak, apples and bananas, until Peter began to wonder if his mom had eaten anything at all. If he were to believe his father, she didn’t like sprinkles on her ice cream or dressing on her salad. She didn’t like mittens or porches, Christmas trees or the ballet, teddy bears or fresh snow. Each of his questions was always punctuated by a short “no,” and once he was old enough to understand that his mother probably had liked things like soap and flowers and socks—that his father’s answers had simply become a habit, a reflex as rote as saying “bless you” after someone sneezes—he stopped asking altogether.
He couldn’t help feeling sometimes like he wasn’t entitled to the same kind of sadness as Dad, who had known her and loved her and laughed with her, who must have seen her make a sandwich and fly a kite and bite her fingernails and cry at the movies. He’d been witness to all those things that made her who she was, and he seemed to have decided somewhere along the way that all this was his alone to bear.
And so now all Peter could do was stare at him, angry that he’d invoked her name like that, sharply and carelessly, throwing it at Peter like a weapon he’d been storing away. It took him a moment to collect himself enough to respond.
“Then why do you even want me here?” he said eventually, before good sense could step in and give him a chance to turn around, to walk away, to keep his mouth shut. “If you really think that’s how I am, then why do you try so hard to keep me here? Why do you make me feel so guilty about wanting to le
ave?”
Dad leaned against the desk and gave Peter a wounded look, causing him to falter and fall silent. When he spoke again, his words were quieter, more restrained.
“I’m here now, and we mostly just ignore each other anyway,” Peter said, his face hot with guilt or regret or maybe both. “So what’s the point?”
They stared at each other—each looking surprised to have stumbled into such foreign territory and found the other there too—and Peter thought to say more. But he wasn’t sure what was left, and before he had a chance to do anything else, Dad lowered his head and scratched at the back of his neck and grunted. It was hard to tell if he was hurt or angry or upset, and Peter thought it was probably all of these things and more.
From downstairs they could hear Dad’s buddies laughing loudly over something in the kitchen. Peter took a small step sideways, leaving the doorway clear, and without another word—without even looking at him—Dad walked straight past him and out of the room, moving heavily down the stairs.
As soon as he was gone, Peter sank down on his bed and rubbed his eyes. His back and shoulders ached as if they’d been throwing actual punches, not just verbal ones. He felt drained and exhausted, but also strangely relieved, like he’d been holding his breath for years and could now finally exhale.
Near his foot was a map of Gettysburg, and he looked down at the ridges and grooves running across the land. It wasn’t just the nation that the war had divided; it was families, as well. Everyone had been fighting for what they thought was right, no matter who was on the opposite side of the line, whether it was your father or your brother or your son. It was about issues and causes and ideas, and what more could you ask of a person, Peter thought, than to risk all that they were for all they believed they could be?
Later that night, after the sounds of the poker game had grown quiet in the kitchen—the clinking of chips and shuffling of cards, the rowdy laughter and softer groans of failure when luck started to run out—Peter tiptoed down the stairs. He paused at the bottom and peeked around the corner to see all four men on the couches in the family room, their socked feet propped on the coffee table, an impressive display of empty beer cans arranged before them. From where he stood, Peter could only see the back of Dad’s head, but despite the volume of the baseball game on TV, the others looked to be in various stages of sleep: one snoring, one with his eyes half closed, and the other with his mouth stretched open in an enormous yawn.
Peter slipped past the doorway and through the kitchen, moving silently around the table littered with stray cards and peanut shells and into the small hallway that bridged the kitchen and the garage, where he nudged open the door to his dad’s office.
He could count the number of times he’d been in here: once when he’d been stung by a bee and rushed in without thinking; once when Dad forgot to bring some paperwork into the station and called to ask Peter to find it for him. Another time a rainstorm had caused the window to leak, and the two of them had worked to plug the hole together, keeping the water from ruining the many plaques and certificates that checkered the walls, tokens of appreciation from a town grateful for his dad’s service.
Peter knew that one of the cabinets along the side of the room held two narrow shoeboxes filled with pictures of his mom. When he was little, he used to ask to look at them from time to time, and Dad would walk stiffly into the office while Peter hung back, clinging to the doorframe. He was always amazed at how gingerly Dad cradled the boxes, handling them with utmost care, as if they were important evidence in a criminal case rather than faded old snapshots.
Standing in the office now without permission, Peter felt nearly dizzy, and he moved quickly to the large oak desk in the middle of the room and pulled open the bottom drawer. There was a brown envelope that he’d seen before, the one where Dad dropped the keys each time a new car took up residence in the lot out back. He fished through until he found the set he remembered coming in months ago along with the blue convertible—an ugly blue rabbit’s foot that had been dangling from the ignition that day like something that had curled up and died in the car—and he pulled them out and closed his hand around them.
It wasn’t that he was necessarily going anywhere.
But it was nice to know he could.
chapter seven
Emma’s life before this—first in North Carolina, then Washington, then New York City—was difficult to bring into focus. There were still the lingering outlines of houses and apartments, vague reminders of wallpaper patterns, a garage with a basketball hoop, a backyard with a swing set. But it was hard to separate what she knew from what she had seen in home videos and photo albums, from stories pried from unwilling memories.
Nobody in her family parted easily with information about the past. There were few tales of birthday parties or summer vacations unless they happened to coincide with a historical event, a book signing, or an academic conference. Her parents always teased Emma for her impatience—that skittish streak that kept her always on edge—but it was they who were hard to pin down. They had minds only for certain intellectual pursuits, and as she grew older, Emma saw that it was just getting worse. In a way it was not unlike a disease. Her dad was being slowly ravaged by poetry. Her mom had very nearly succumbed to the study of burial rites worldwide.
Somewhere along the way her family seemed to have come unglued; when, Emma wasn’t exactly sure. But she was beginning to wonder whether it had more to do with her forgotten brother than the natural forces of distance and time.
When her cell phone began to ring—dancing along the planks of the rest stop picnic table—Emma looked up in surprise. A few feet away the dog was lying on the grass, looking hopeful about the appearance of more fries, and he pricked his ears forward and eyed the phone. Emma could see on the screen that it was her parents calling, and she suspected that Patrick had now spoken to them. He was probably furious with her, and though she knew she should pick up, she couldn’t bring herself to do it, instead watching the phone until it fell silent again.
They’d be nearly frantic by now, she was sure, but she had no intention of turning back, so what good would it do anyway? It would only be a few more hours until she reached DC, and she could call them when she got to Annie’s. By then she’d be nearly halfway to North Carolina, too far for them to object to her continuing on.
She stood to toss her garbage in one of the bins, giving the dog one more pat as she headed back over to the little blue car, which was now sandwiched between two campers in the parking lot. As she squeezed by the one wallpapered with Texas-themed bumper stickers, she was surprised to find the dog at her side. He sat back and thumped his tail against the pavement, his bad leg tucked up close to him, his head cocked first to one side, then the other.
“You trying to hitch a ride?” she asked, stepping around him. He sat there and watched as she closed the door, then jammed the keys into the ignition, turning them once, twice, and then again. But the engine refused to catch, and she sat in the quiet car and leaned her head back on the seat, telling herself not to panic. After a moment she tried again, and a thin trail of smoke rose from the seams of the hood. Emma stared at it, and then beyond, to where the dog was still watching her, his mouth hanging open in a great doggy smile, looking like he was very much amused by her current predicament.
“It’s not funny,” she said as she strode past him and back toward the building. He trotted after her, a white shadow beneath the high ball of the sun.
In her pocket the phone began to ring again, and Emma was about to hit ignore when she changed her mind. She waited until it had stopped—until her parents gave up for at least another few minutes—then scrolled down until she found a different number.
If she were to call Patrick, he would only yell at her about the car and demand that she turn back. Her parents would want to come pick her up, and Annie would wonder why she thought it was okay to show up unannounced in the first place. If she were to call a tow truck, they would only charge her
far too much and then put her back out onto the road, where the car would probably break down again in another fifty miles or so.
But Emma was on her way, and she knew for sure that she couldn’t stop now. And so she sat down at a picnic table and called the only person she could think to call.
Peter picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Emma.”
“Hey,” he said, unable to hide his surprise. “How’s the trip?”
“Okay so far,” she said, and beside her the dog tilted his head as if to make the obvious point that the trip was not, in fact, okay so far.
“Good,” he said. “Are you still in the city?”
“Not exactly.”
“Where are you then?”
“In Jersey,” she said, biting her lip. “Not far from Philly. You wouldn’t still want to come along, would you?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and Emma could almost hear Peter’s mind at work. He had a way about him that might seem a bit odd to other people, but she’d grown used to it over the years. They’d known each other since her family first moved here when she was eight. Like her, Peter didn’t have many friends at school. He seemed mostly to prefer his own company, though he’d always been different around Emma. She didn’t think this could be called a friendship exactly, but she didn’t necessarily mind having him around either. He spent nearly as much time at her house as she did, and it didn’t escape her notice that, in many ways, he fit into her family far better. He knew everything there was to know about the Civil War, and had a tendency of bringing any subject around to it in the same way the rest of her family couldn’t help letting their own specialties creep into everyday conversation. But he could also remain quiet for impressively long periods of time without feeling the need to say anything, and this suited Emma just fine.
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