You Are Here

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “My car sort of died,” she admitted. “But I’m not quite ready to turn back yet.”

  “Well, where are you planning on going?”

  “North Carolina.”

  Emma held her breath as she waited for Peter to ask all the logical questions— why? and where exactly? and for how long? —but was surprised when he asked her something entirely different.

  “Could we make a detour?”

  “Where to?”

  “Gettysburg.”

  “The battlefield?” She lifted her eyes to the sky, wondering if she’d made a mistake in calling Peter after all. Gettysburg? “That’s got to be at least a few hours out of the way.”

  “I could always go on my own, then pick you up afterward,” he suggested, and Emma looked around at the trucks rumbling in off the highway, the men with tall hats and heavy boots, the families eating French fries by the handful.

  “No,” she said a bit too quickly. She was already in enough trouble as it was, she thought. Might as well see some sights along the way. “Gettysburg sounds great.”

  Once they’d made the arrangements—an exchange of directions and landmarks and information—Emma left the dog behind and wandered back inside. It would be hours before Peter made it down here, and so she set about passing the time, losing a few quarters at the arcade, observing the flood of people from a bench beside a gumball machine, and leafing through magazines at the gift shop. There were rows upon rows of New Jersey souvenirs, glass thimbles with the state flag and spoons stamped with the official flower. There were coins and mugs and snow globes with the boardwalk underneath, the sand whirling beneath the glass like a snowstorm.

  Emma ran a finger across a dusty pack of cards—each with a picture of one of the state’s many so-called attractions—and wondered at the kind of people who collected these things. It was at moments like this one that she was grateful her family was so different. They might not watch stupid movies or care about who won the Super Bowl. They might not be able to get through dinner without bringing up a long-dead poet or famous mathematician, but they also didn’t collect pens from different states. What they collected was far more important than that: words and stories, causes and facts. And it occurred now to Emma that perhaps her role in all this was to catch what they didn’t, to find and preserve and hold on to the memories that had slipped from their grasp.

  Before heading back outside, Emma stopped in the bathroom and stuffed her pockets with paper towels, then grabbed an empty soda cup and filled it with water. Out on the patio the dog was sprawled beneath the table she’d been sitting at earlier, and he scrambled out from under the bench to join her. He shied away at first when she tried to clean him up, gently untangling the burrs from his coat and dabbing at the dried mud, but soon enough he rested his head on her knee and let her continue. She picked the twigs from his fur, massaged the dirt from the pads of his paws, cleaned a small cut on his snout. Around them the parking lot continued to rearrange itself, the cars coming and going without pause, and the sun slipped lower in the sky, the shadows lengthening across the pavement. The dog let out a weary sigh, and Emma did too.

  A few feet away a rectangular billboard advertised area events and attractions from behind a thick pane of yellowing plastic. The notices formed a border around a large map of Northern New Jersey, its colors muted by weather and time. Emma’s eyes kept returning to the center of it, where a red circle with a tiny arrow jutting down like a spike of lightning announced you are here, and she couldn’t help wishing it were always so easy to locate herself.

  chapter eight

  What Peter hadn’t told Emma was that he was already on the road—shooting south toward Gettysburg as if he’d been summoned to battle there himself—and this alone should have struck him as a warning sign. If she knew that he’d already gone through the trouble of stealing a car and sneaking away from his dad, and not for her sake, not for any grand reason, but simply out of frustration at the latest in a long string of frustrations, then it wouldn’t seem like such a very big deal that he was now on his way to rescue her.

  And much to his surprise Peter found himself hoping that Emma would think it was just that. A very big deal.

  He checked his phone one more time—just to be entirely, completely, utterly certain that the call had actually taken place—and felt a strange sense of excitement that made his stomach wobble and his hands flutter on the steering wheel. A smarter person would have told her that he couldn’t come, would have stopped himself from getting off at the next exit, making a slight change in direction and heading east toward New Jersey. But although Peter was smart about a rather impressive range of things, dealing with girls was simply not one of them.

  Up until Emma called, he’d been driving on sheer worry, propelled by a nervous fear of what Dad might do when he got off work later this evening to discover that both his son and the car were gone. Peter tried to distract himself by thinking of all the places he might now visit, the national parks and historical monuments he’d always wanted to see. But what if they weren’t what he imagined? What if the battlefields were overrun by tourists? What if the Smoky Mountains weren’t that much better than the hills of upstate New York? What if the World’s Largest Ball of Twine didn’t turn out to be very big at all?

  Peter had never been much of a rule breaker or a boundary crosser, had rarely attempted to stick a toe over any sort of line, and he could blame Dad all he wanted for this. But a small part of him also knew that the reason he’d never ventured anywhere was because of the worry that the reality of the world wouldn’t match up to his dreams.

  Still, their argument yesterday had triggered something inside of him, and Peter had spent much of the night staring at the lacework of shadows across his ceiling, wakeful and restless. The keys to the blue convertible were tucked away in the toe of one of his sneakers, and he got up twice during the night to fish them out, turning over the cool metal in his hands, running a finger along the rabbit’s foot as if testing his luck.

  The thing was, he and Dad didn’t usually fight. They snapped at each other from time to time—they cast dirty looks and sighed with heavy, pointed sighs—but mostly they just kept their distance. So when Peter had padded down the stairs this morning, already stiff and awkward at the idea of their inevitable interaction, he wasn’t surprised that Dad didn’t even look up from the paper.

  “Morning,” he greeted him, and he saw Dad’s left eye twitch, just slightly, though his gaze never wavered from the sports section. This was their usual way of dealing with things—to ignore them, to pretend they’d never happened, to forget about them and hope they might go away—and normally that was just fine with Peter. But as he poured himself a bowl of cereal, he realized for the first time how much the silence bothered him.

  Last night hadn’t been an argument over picking up his dirty socks or forgetting about what was in the oven so that the whole house smelled like a campfire. It hadn’t even been about where he wanted to go to school next year. It had been much deeper than that. They’d talked about his mother—the rarest topic of all in a house where most topics went untouched—and the very mention of her should have warranted something more than this evasive shuffling of newspapers and clinking of cereal bowls.

  And so Peter fixed a falsely bright smile on his face as he sat down. “Anything going on in the world?”

  “The Mets lost to the Cubs,” Dad grunted, not bothering to look up from the paper. This, of course, was a deliberate jab at Peter, a reminder of Dad’s disappointment that his only son found sports to be pointless and boring (running in circles around some bases? tossing a ball into a hoop? grown men tackling each other on a muddy field?).

  Normally, these attempts at conversation flickered out with the first sports reference of the morning, but today Peter beamed at Dad across the table. “Hope they can pull it together this season.”

  Dad raised his head to look at him with undisguised suspicion. “What’re you trying to talk about basebal
l for?”

  Peter shrugged. “What else would we talk about?”

  “Look, if you’re trying to make some kind of point—”

  “I’m not trying to do anything other than talk.”

  “I’d think you were all talked out after last night,” Dad said coldly, setting down the newspaper as he collected his plates. He dumped what was left of the mushy cereal into the garbage, then stood washing his dishes at the sink, his back to the table.

  Peter cleared his throat, determined. “Last night you said that Mom—”

  But Dad whirled around, spraying the room with soapy water. “Don’t you know when to quit?” he said, his voice hard. “Just leave it already.”

  Peter took off his glasses, wiping away the flecks of soap with the end of his shirt. He was on the verge of losing his nerve, and wasn’t entirely sure why he was still pressing the issue. He took a deep breath.

  “You were saying how much Mom loved this town,” he ventured again, the forced cheeriness now entirely gone from his voice. Because this was the thought that had kept him up last night. He’d known that they’d grown up here, that they’d met in high school and gone to prom together and been married in the chapel on the hill. But he didn’t know any of the particulars, and hearing something other than a fact—that she was born this year and died that one—had reminded him that she must have once taken walks here, picked flowers in the park, and said hello to neighbors on the street. It was a testament to how little he knew about her that it took something as mundane as this to send him vaulting into a past that didn’t belong to him, fueled by curiosity and frustration and a desperate longing to shout when all he’d ever been allowed were a few timid whispers.

  But Dad was looking at him now with such abject disbelief that Peter nearly brought a hand to his face to make sure nothing was growing there.

  “Of course she loved it here,” Dad said, and for a moment Peter thought maybe this was the beginning of something, that they’d sit back down together, lean across the milk-stained tablecloth, and have an actual discussion. But then Dad’s left eye began to twitch again, and he brought a heavy hand down on the back of Peter’s chair and lowered his face. “It was her home.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “She was smart,” Dad said mildly, as if this quality weren’t necessarily numbered among the things he missed about her. “Very smart.”

  Peter opened his mouth, but Dad scraped back a chair and sat down again across the table, giving him a long look.

  “She didn’t feel like she had to go running off to see the world,” he said, bowing his head to examine the tablecloth. He used his fingernail to chip at a crusted piece of ketchup left over from last night’s dinner. “Her life was here. She was happy here.”

  “It’s not that I’m un happy here,” Peter said quietly. “It’s just that there are other things, other places …”

  There was a long silence, interrupted only by the dripping of the kitchen sink and the hum of the air-conditioning from the next room. Finally, Dad shook his head, frustrated, and stood up to leave. He tipped the contents of his coffee mug into the sink, tried twisting the faucet off again, then grabbed his sunglasses and hat from the counter. Peter watched all this with a sort of detached fascination, aware that something had shifted between them, an opening of something that perhaps should have been left closed.

  Dad had a hand on the back door when he turned around once more. His eyes flicked across the room, taking in the drab green curtains and the faded floor tiles, the fraying tablecloth and his improbable son.

  “She wasn’t happy here in spite of being smart, you know,” he said. “She was happy here because of it. She was smart enough to know a good thing.”

  “Then I guess she was smarter than I am,” Peter said, his voice barely audible. The words emerged almost before he could think to stop them, and it was obvious by the way the door slammed that Dad had heard him loud and clear.

  Later that morning, when Peter pulled the blue car out to the end of the driveway, his hands were shaking. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing, only that it felt like it was already too late to take it back. And as he drove deeper into the state of New York—moving so quickly along the well-known map routes that it almost felt like falling—his mouth was dry and chalky with the very real fear that at any moment a police car would flip on its lights and peel out after him.

  He knew that if it weren’t for Emma, he probably wouldn’t have made it very far. It simply wasn’t in his nature, this tendency toward flight, this ability to break the rules without a second thought. No matter what he told himself, no matter how much he’d like to believe he’d have made it all the way to Gettysburg, in reality, he probably would have only stopped for pizza a few towns over, wandered to the farthest corners of the county, maybe waited until it was dark out before slinking back home to accept his punishment.

  But then his phone had begun to ring, and the trip had suddenly changed from something meandering and lonely and spiteful into something more purposeful, an unlikely adventure with Emma, a journey filled with incredible possibilities. It was no longer just an afternoon jaunt. It was an expedition. It was a voyage.

  It was unlike anything he’d ever done before.

  All afternoon Peter tried not to imagine what Dad’s reaction would be when he found out. After the first fifty miles he stuck a Post-it note over the clock on the dashboard, because all he could think about was the rapidly approaching hour when his father would arrive home from work to discover an empty house and a missing car. And it wasn’t until five o’ clock came and went, and the sky fell a shade darker, and the rest stop grew closer, and the phone in his pocket failed to ring, that Peter was struck with a new worry. That perhaps his dad had noticed that he wasn’t there, and just didn’t care enough to do anything about it.

  But for the moment, at least, he was on his way, and he distracted himself by thinking about all the landmarks he’d always wanted to visit, not just the battlefields—which stretched up and down the coast like a scar across the land—but all the other things too: the Appalachian Trail and the Washington Monument, the Liberty Bell and the Smithsonian. In Pennsylvania alone there was the Hershey Museum (with its unimaginable amounts of chocolate) and the National Aviary (with its unending varieties of birds) and the town of Punxsutawney (home to the world’s most famous groundhog). In Virginia he’d visit Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown; South Carolina had the world’s largest peach (an astounding one hundred and thirty-five feet tall and seventy-three feet wide), and Georgia had America’s Smallest Church (which held only thirteen people). There was Disney World and Cape Canaveral, the wetlands and the Outer Banks, South of the Border and the Kennedy Space Center, and that was all just the East Coast.

  But when he pulled into the rest area, a solitary patch of ugly concrete in northern New Jersey, and saw Emma sitting there—hunched on a picnic table beside a large white dog, her legs pulled up so that her chin rested on her bare knees, somehow managing to look bored and worried and excited all at once—Peter realized that this was even better.

  chapter nine

  Emma wasn’t exactly sure what she’d been expecting—something more Peter, perhaps a minivan or a Volvo, something blocky and safe, a low-slung, sensible car with good mileage. So when the blue convertible came lurching up alongside the curb, she couldn’t help laughing.

  It was nearly the same as the other one—the one parked lifelessly across the lot—and Peter looked so comically out of place in it, his usually combed hair ruffled by the wind, his glasses speckled with bits of dirt, his arm slung over the passenger seat in a display of forced casualness.

  “Hi,” she said, and he grinned back at her somewhat less certainly, then looked down in surprise when the car gave a little jerk forward.

  “Uh, let me just go park,” he said, twisting his mouth in concentration as he fiddled with the gearshift. “I’ll be right back.”

  Emma slid off the pic
nic table, and beside her the dog leaped to his feet too. They eyed each other until Peter reappeared a few moments later, clutching the keys and looking somewhat sheepish.

  “I didn’t have much of a selection, and it seemed to run okay …,” he started to explain, throwing a hand in the general direction of the parking lot. The collar of his shirt was twisted and crumpled, and his shorts were too baggy for his skinny legs, and he was shifting from one foot to the other, clearly nervous about her or the car or the situation in general.

  Emma attempted a reassuring smile. “It’s perfect,” she told him, because after nearly four hours here she would have been happy if he’d shown up driving a lawn mower. “Did you have any trouble getting it?”

  “No,” Peter said a bit too quickly. “None.”

  She nodded, and they stood for a moment in an uncomfortable silence, Emma only now really absorbing the idea of it: that she and Peter Finnegan were about to embark on a road trip together. She cleared her throat—to say what, she wasn’t exactly sure—but before she could think of something, the dog limped over and bumped at the back of her leg, causing her knee to buckle. She swung her head around as he backed up a few steps, looking pleased with himself.

  “Whose dog?” Peter asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Nobody’s,” she said. “He’s been keeping me company.”

  Peter accepted this information the same way he did most everything else, without comment or judgment, only a thoughtful and unreadable nod of his head.

  “Can we grab some food before we get going?” he asked, glancing over toward the hulking lodge of a building, and though Emma would have been just as happy to never set foot there again, she nodded and led the way.