“Right,” he said, stepping aside. “Sorry.”
Emma walked past him and into her sister’s apartment, which looked impossibly tidier since Charles had moved in. The living room was carpeted in white, with black leather furniture and glass tables on top of which stood glass bowls filled with glass fruit.
“Is Annie home yet?” Emma asked, turning around to find that Charles had once again moved to the center of the doorway and was now blocking the entrance of both Peter and the dog, stammering and gesturing and trying to be generally polite about the whole thing.
“Hey, they’re with me,” she said, ducking back under his arm and trying to shoo the dog forward. Charles stuck out a foot to stop him, and the dog sniffed at it for a moment before losing interest.
“Peter Finnegan,” Peter said, holding out a hand.
“Yeah, I know,” Charles said, looking from the outstretched hand back to the dog. “The car thief.”
Emma thumped Peter on the back. “Hey, you’re famous.”
“Look, I’m allergic to dogs,” Charles said. “And we just had the apartment cleaned, and—” He paused to sneeze loudly, looking torn between retreating to get a tissue and standing guard at the door.
Emma folded her arms, ready to square off. She’d come this far and wasn’t going to be turned away by anyone but her sister, but a moment later the heavy door behind them swung open again. The dog leaped to his feet, and Charles heaved another sneeze as Annie emerged from the stairwell, looking worn out from the day behind her and none too pleased about being greeted by the strange little entourage in her doorway.
“I wondered if you’d be showing up here at some point,” she said, nodding at Charles to move his foot so she could squeeze past them all and into the apartment. She dropped her briefcase and sat down heavily in one of the leather chairs. “Mom and Dad are going nuts, you know. They seem to think you’ve stolen a car.”
“We did,” Emma said from the hallway. “Two, if you count Patrick’s.”
Annie sighed. “Well, you may as well come in.”
Charles stepped aside, looking on wearily as the dog made sunken paw prints in the plush carpet, crisscrossing the room until he’d examined every inch of it. Peter stood awkwardly beside the couch, and Emma sat down opposite her sister.
“So,” Annie said, smoothing the nonexistent wrinkles from her wrinkle-free suit, then plucking an invisible piece of lint from the couch. “Did you have a sudden urge to see the White House, or were you just really bored at home?”
“We’re only passing through,” Emma explained. “We were hoping maybe we could stay the night.”
“Passing through to where?”
Emma shrugged, feeling this wasn’t exactly the time to explain about discovering the birth certificate, not with Peter looking so out of place and Charles rubbing his red-rimmed eyes and Annie appearing less than thrilled by the situation in general.
“Are you gonna call Mom and Dad?”
Annie nodded. “I have to.”
“You can’t bend the rules, just this once?”
“Come on, Emma,” she said, which Emma knew really meant Grow up. It didn’t surprise her in the least that before they were formally invited in, before they were offered a drink or told to put their bags in the guest room, Annie was already up and across the room, liberating the portable phone from its white plastic cradle.
“Everyone’s been going crazy,” she muttered as she waited for someone to pick up. “You can’t just waltz in here unannounced and then expect me to … Hi, Mom?”
There was silence in the too-white living room as Emma, Peter, Charles, and the dog all trained their eyes on Annie, who spun to look out the window as she listened.
“Yeah, no, she’s here,” she said, whirling back around as if to be sure Emma hadn’t decided to make a run for it. She cupped a hand over the phone and raised her eyebrows at Peter. “You are Peter Finnegan, right?”
Peter nodded stiffly.
“Yup, he’s here, too,” she said into the phone, then held it out for Emma to take.
“You must be joking,” she heard Mom say, as soon as she put the receiver to her ear. There was a deep grunt of agreement, and Emma realized Dad was on the line too. “Where exactly do you think you’re going?”
“And why?” added Dad.
Mom’s voice came out a few octaves higher than it normally did. “And without asking!” she yelped. “And not even a phone call to let us know you’re okay! You could have at least had the courtesy to pick up when we’ve been trying you over and over and over—”
“I’m sorry; I just—”
“And taking that car!”
“That wasn’t exactly me,” Emma began, but was interrupted again.
“Excuse me?” Mom said. “You think Patrick’s car marched itself out of New York City on its own?”
“Oh, that car,” she said dully. “I meant the other one—”
“Don’t even get me started on that,” Mom breathed, and Dad echoed this sentiment with another hearty grumble. “I’m so sure a nice boy like Peter Finnegan would just take a car from his father’s lot completely unprompted and then just happen to meet up with you somewhere. How are you getting around with two cars anyway?”
“Patrick’s broke down,” she explained. “I left it at the Walt Whitman rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike.”
“ You did what?” Mom said, and Emma closed her eyes to listen as she went on, outlining all the ways Emma had managed to screw up in the past few days. Her parents’ reaction didn’t surprise her one bit, but even as she stood there with the phone squawking in one ear, she recalled the purpose of the trip in the first place. She suddenly missed her twin brother—palpably, like a pain just beneath her rib cage, and she wondered how it was possible to miss someone you’d never even met.
Across the room Annie was watching her with a superior smile, somehow satisfied with the idea of justice being served. Charles was clutching a box of tissues to his chest as if it were a coat of armor, and Peter was looking at Emma with such apparent concern that she forced herself to turn away from her audience for fear of crying.
What had she hoped would happen, coming here? No matter what she’d told Peter, it hadn’t just been about a comfortable bed and a shower. It hadn’t just been a place to stay. A part of her had wanted to sit down with Annie—not the stiff, grown-up version of her sister she’d come to know, but the one she’d glimpsed during rare and unguarded moments, the one who’d giggled with her when they’d nearly knocked over the tree while putting up Christmas lights, or who’d helped with her math project over Easter. Emma realized she’d been hoping to find the sister she wished she had, rather than the one she actually did, and now she felt stupid and disappointed and beyond exhausted, the sheer unfairness of it all bearing down on her.
“… and you’ll drive back first thing tomorrow morning, and if you don’t think you can handle that, then Dad and I will come down and pick you up ourselves.”
Emma sighed. “Tomorrow morning?”
“Maybe we should give them a day to recover,” Dad suggested. “Have them stay with Annie, and they can come back Wednesday morning instead.”
“They need time to recover from gallivanting around the country?”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “They’ve been doing a lot of driving.”
“We really have,” Emma chimed in, only to be met by a stony silence. “Wednesday would give us some time to rest up for the drive back.”
“Fine,” Mom said after a moment. “You stay with Annie tonight and tomorrow night, and then you and Peter drive straight back home the next morning. Agreed?”
All Emma could muster was a weak, “Fine.”
“And make sure Peter calls his dad and lets him know he’s okay too.”
Emma glanced across the room, where Peter was now looking at her with pleading eyes.
“Um, could you maybe give him a call?” she asked Mom, her eyes still on Peter, who looked
so relieved it was as if he could actually hear both sides of the conversation. “Just in case Peter doesn’t get through tonight?”
“He needs to call his dad, Emma. He’s been worried too.”
“Okay, but just in case?”
“Fine,” Mom agreed. She took a deep breath, and then—as if they’d just had a heart to heart, some warm and genuine chat about their feelings—she wrapped up the whole thing by saying, “You know we love you very much.”
Emma nodded. “I love you too.”
And then they were gone.
When she turned back around, the dog banged his tail against the coffee table a couple of times, and Charles disappeared into the bathroom in the midst of a sneezing fit. Annie stalked off toward the bedroom, muttering something about this apartment not being a hotel.
Emma looked over at Peter and shrugged. They were clearly unwanted and in no small amount of trouble, sentenced to be shipped home again in a little more than twenty-four hours. But still, she couldn’t help feeling hopeful.
“You bought us an extra day?” Peter asked with a small smile, and she nodded, grinning. A lot could happen in a day.
chapter sixteen
At breakfast the next morning Peter concentrated on his plate while Annie and Emma argued about the day ahead.
“You really don’t have to come with us,” Emma said. “We’re fine on our own.”
Peter smiled as he chewed his frozen bagel, which was still hard as a hockey puck.
“Well, it’s not like you’re in town that often,” Annie said. “And it’s not like I’ve taken a lot of days off.”
“A lot?” Charles said, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t remember the last time.”
“You really don’t have to,” Emma said again. “We’ll go wander a little, see the sights. We’ve been getting around just fine. Peter’s like an atlas, anyway.”
He smiled again, though nobody was looking at him.
Annie stood to put her plate in the sink. Even when she wasn’t dressed for work, she looked somehow tailored, in nice black pants and matching heels, which clicked on the tiled floor of the kitchenette as she returned with a second cup of coffee. Peter thought she and Emma looked very much alike, though he knew Emma would be angry with him just for thinking it. But the resemblance was undeniable, and if you were to throw Emma into the shower, comb her hair back into a sleek ponytail, wrestle her into a suit, and make her take an etiquette class, you might end up with Annie: a stiffer, straighter, more precise version of her younger sister.
The two were now glaring at each other across the table while Charles picked at his grapefruit obliviously, twice managing to spray himself in the eye. Peter fed the rest of his breakfast to the dog, who was sprawled underneath the glass table, and waited for a decision to be made.
“Well, I already called in to work,” Annie said. “So I guess you’re stuck with me.”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” Emma said. “I just don’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“Well, you might have thought of that before showing up without calling in the first place,” said Annie. “Not to mention bringing along your boyfriend and that mutt.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Emma said without even glancing at Peter, who popped a grape into his mouth, completely unbothered. Because the thing was, he felt like her boyfriend right now: exchanging knowing glances with Charles as the two sisters argued, bearing witness to family squabbles over breakfast. It felt a bit like playing house, and he could almost imagine they really were dating, that he’d been ushered home to meet her family, allowed to look in on even the most intimate moments between them, those that would otherwise remain hidden to the world at large. And so he sat and drank his orange juice, grateful to have a seat at the table in any capacity, feeling deeply and wonderfully at home.
Emma, however, still seemed less than thrilled at the prospect of having her sister for company today, and by the time they set off toward the Lincoln Memorial, the two of them were barely speaking to each other. Every so often Annie would mutter something like “completely inconsiderate” or “just trying to be nice,” and in response Emma would loop an arm through Peter’s and study the surrounding buildings—grand-looking embassies and looming government offices—with a remarkable display of forced enthusiasm.
“Look at that,” she’d say, pointing to what turned out to be a post office with the kind of awe usually reserved for monuments and other such wonders.
Peter didn’t mind. He found the whole thing fairly silly—that Emma would drive all these miles to Annie’s only to squander the opportunity to ask about her twin brother—but he was also secretly pleased at the way Emma was acting toward him, with a closeness that felt like a prize he’d somehow managed to win. He didn’t care if it was only a reaction to Annie; he was perfectly happy to widen his eyes and ooh and aah over the rather ordinary post office building.
It wasn’t long before he spotted another pay phone, a slanted structure near the river, and Annie and Emma waited patiently while he once again dialed and then hung up, but there was a strange comfort in the numbers, and words had never come easily to him anyway.
“You have a cell phone,” Emma pointed out when he walked back outside, thrusting a finger at his pocket.
“I know.”
“So why do you keep using pay phones?”
“Because then he won’t know it’s me.”
“Well, isn’t that the point of calling?” she asked. “For him to know it’s you?”
Peter shrugged. “It’s nice to have the option to hang up.”
The sun rose higher over the white city, and the three of them ambled through its maze of monuments and parks. Nobody talked much, and Peter was grateful for this. It seemed a place too important for chitchat, and he was nearly overwhelmed by it all, the buildings he’d so often seen in pictures suddenly blown up into three dimensions, towering gateways to government and democracy. They peered up at the tall spike of the Washington Monument, stared at the sun-drenched buildings on Capitol Hill, poked their heads through a fence to gaze past the landscaped lawn stretching up to the White House.
At the Lincoln Memorial, Peter stood breathlessly and ran through the words to the Gettysburg Address again—this time only in his head—and it was as if Lincoln himself had blessed the trip, like the tall man in the big stone chair was smiling down on all of them. And as they walked away from the columned building, Peter felt happy and dizzy and lightheaded all at once, closing his eyes and imagining his own map of the city, tracing a thin line across it in his mind, marking their route as others might record the day in a journal or a photo album.
They ate lunch at an outdoor café in Georgetown, squinting at each other across a table that reflected the sun like a spotlight. Once their food arrived, Peter attempted to make small talk—something he was not in the least bit adept at—but Emma still didn’t seem to be making much of an effort, and the silence had become even more noticeable since they sat down.
“So,” he said around a mouthful of turkey sandwich, looking from one to the other. “You guys lived here for a while when you were younger?”
Neither made any sort of move to answer, and Peter swallowed his food, thinking that he now understood why people found his own silences so frustrating.
“We moved up from North Carolina when I was a baby,” Emma said finally. “Just me and Patrick and my parents, though.”
“It was just after I left for college,” Annie explained. “So I was already up in Boston then.”
“Where?”
“Harvard.”
Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter lowered his sandwich and looked at Annie with interest. “What was it like?”
“Peter’s hoping to go there for a degree in Civil Warology.”
“That’s not a thing,” he pointed out. “It would be a degree in History.”
“I know,” she said with a sigh. “It was a joke.”
“It’s a great school
,” Annie told him, ignoring her sister. “But there are lots of other great ones out there too.”
“He could get in,” Emma said, picking the onions off her burger, and Peter sat up a bit straighter in his seat. “He’s almost worse than you guys.”
Annie shot her a look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re smart,” she said. “Guess.”
“What’s it like there?” Peter asked, and Annie shrugged.
“It’s really not all that different from the campus at home, other than being in a city.”
“It must be,” Peter said, though even as he did, he was picturing the little college on the hill, the way the afternoon shadows fell across the buildings as he passed by on the way home from school. He thought of the lake with the swans and the oak-lined paths and the sturdy little chapel that sat above it all.
And he thought of his house just down the street.
“It’s not really about the campus anyway,” Annie was saying now. “Wherever you go will be great, but it’s more just because of what you’re doing there. The place is beside the point.”
“The place is never beside the point,” Peter said matter-of-factly, and Annie shrugged and excused herself to go to the bathroom.
“What’s up with you?” Emma asked once she’d gone.
“My dad wants me to stay home for school.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Really? That’s kind of sweet.”
“ Sweet?”
“Yeah, maybe he wants to keep an eye on you.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“He’s a cop, Peter. He’s probably just looking out for you.”
“Yeah, because I’m so much trouble,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Then why do you think?” Emma asked. “Because of money?”
Peter lifted his shoulders. “Maybe. I’m sure that’s part of it, at least.”
“But?”
“But it’s not fair,” he said, aware of the bitterness in his voice. “I mean, he’s practically ignored me my whole life, and when he does get around to paying attention, he always ends up acting like some asshole cop. And then all of a sudden he decides I should stick around?”
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