He felt a small degree of comfort knowing he was not the first person to raise a white flag and slink away in a miserable retreat across this very land.
It wasn’t long before he crossed the state line and came upon a sign for the first in a string of minor battlefields. He pulled the car off onto a gravel shoulder a few hundred yards short of the paved lot and the improvised tourist center, a small yellow trailer with an awning that flapped noisily in the wind.
It was almost evening now, and the sky was nearly colorless, a sharp wind raking the dirt along the ground. Unlike Gettysburg with its crowds of people, its maps and plaques and monuments, this was nothing more than a sprawling field, interrupted only by the occasional cluster of boulders and a couple of quivering jackrabbits lying low in the grass. There were only a few scattered cars in the parking lot, and a small group of men loitering near the visitors’ center, the brims of their caps pulled low. Other than that, the world was perfectly still. Everything felt muffled and hushed and empty.
Peter left the dog asleep in the car and walked over to lean against the fence that bordered the old battlefield, the grass and the rocks and the history, the great sad nothingness of it all. He wrapped his hands around the knotted wood and rocked back on it, his head bent. He knew the story of what had happened here. He knew about the North’s victory, a triumph he’d read about in stories and poems and journals. He knew that nearly three hundred men had died here, that dozens of horses had stumbled for the last time, all of it hidden by a thick cloak of fog. He knew about the muskets and the gunpowder; he knew about the cannons and the cries.
But he’d never known about it like this.
He’d never seen it from this side.
The men near the visitors’ center were walking back to their trucks now, and Peter noticed that one of them had a Confederate flag on his hat. More than one hundred years later and he still bore the scars of that loss. Peter couldn’t help marveling at the way these things rippled outward, changing everyone, not just those they actually touched. Even with all the years between, all the generations later, these men still chewed on their toothpicks and gazed out at this field with damp eyes, still scraped the toes of their boots against this hallowed ground. The past still had a hold on them, no matter how thin or fragile, no matter how many ghosts had moved on or how many years had piled up since.
All his life Peter had been fascinated by history. Yet his own history remained largely unexamined. He’d never managed to find the right combination of courage and insistence to pry it away from his dad, who carried the story of Peter’s mother with him as if it were his alone. And it had always seemed to Peter that there was nothing to be done about this.
But then he’d seen Emma standing in the cemetery like that—looking down at her brother’s grave like she’d waited her whole life for that moment, without ever knowing it—and he suddenly wished he could say good-bye to his mother, too. Because if Emma could go to such great lengths for someone she’d never met—if she could drive hundreds of miles through so many states—then why couldn’t he drive at least that far in the other direction to give his dad another chance to talk about his mom?
Emma had invented a history for her brother because he hadn’t lived long enough to have a story of his own. But Peter’s mother had, and he suddenly felt determined to know it, not just the big and important things, but the smaller ones too. Like what kind of candy she liked to eat at the movies, what her favorite animal was, whether she liked mittens and flannel sheets and secretly didn’t mind the early darkness that muffled their town in the winters. He wondered whether she was good or bad with directions, whether she knew how to read a map, or if she said the numbers aloud when doing a math problem. He thought about all the years of homemade cookies and woolen socks he’d missed out on, all the good-night kisses and comforting words, and he felt an aching in his chest like a knot that refused to come undone.
The sun had fallen below the horizon now, leaving in its wake just a few strands of pink clouds, which hung low in the sky like ribbons. Peter climbed up onto the fence, his heels braced against the lower rung, and watched the shadows shift across the battlefield. He dug at a rusted nail with his thumb and kicked his heels against the fence. He tried to think of his place on a map, to pin down his exact location, to work out the coordinates, but he couldn’t seem to concentrate on the precise geography of the moment, and so there was nothing for him to do but stare out across the field instead, his mind strangely quiet, unaccustomed to feeling lost.
He took off his glasses and let the world go blurry, let the shadows change shape and the bluish expanse of the field swim before him. He thought about what Emma had said back in Washington, about how certain she was that her brother was watching over her. He didn’t know if he’d ever be quite as sure as that, but he found he wanted to believe it too. And he thought that maybe if he were able to fill in some of the holes in his mother’s life—if he were to help his dad share those things he found hardest to voice—then somehow it might help fill out the missing pieces of their own lives too.
Peter wasn’t sure how long he sat there that evening. He didn’t know when the awning was folded into the trailer of the visitors’ center, or when the last of the cars pulled out of the lot. At some point he heard the dog stirring in the car, and he slid down off the fence and walked back over to carry him—bent and stooped and struggling—from the roadside. And then they sat there together—Peter huddled against one of the fence posts, the dog curled at his side—watching as the sky darkened around the moon’s spotlight, casting a yellowish glow across the field. Every so often Peter would wave a hand to scatter the cloud of fireflies that blinked orange in the night, but otherwise he remained still. He sat there because he had nowhere to go, and because he wasn’t yet ready to go to those places he needed to be.
He slept beneath the open sky for the second night in a row, his cheek pressed against the sweet-smelling grass and the musty dirt. The stars looked silver against the navy sky, and he blinked up at them dreamily from where he was sprawled on the ground. He didn’t mind the lightning bugs, didn’t care for a roof tonight, and didn’t hear the phone when it rang, missing all three of Emma’s calls. Just before falling asleep he thought about getting his maps, but in the end he let them be.
As it turned out, being lost wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
chapter twenty-five
Just after Peter drove away, after Emma squared her shoulders and took a deep breath and raised her hand to knock, the door swung open as if of its own accord, and she was left with her closed fist hanging in the air, gawking as her entire family tumbled out of the small space in a flurry of noise and activity.
“What … ?” she murmured, taking a step backward, looking wildly from Nate to Annie to Patrick, then behind them to where Mom stood on her tiptoes and Dad was rubbing his beard with a grin, and beyond that to Charles, who waved a tissue at her, and Megan, Nate’s fiancée, who lifted a hand in greeting.
“Why are you all … ?” Emma attempted to ask, staring as if she’d somehow knocked on the door of the wrong house. “How are you all … ?”
“Just thought we’d come down for a little impromptu vacation,” Mom said, breaking through her older children to give Emma a hug, then firmly steering her back through the little crowd. “See if anyone else might be inclined to show up.”
“Mom …,” Emma began, but she wasn’t sure where to even start.
Patrick clapped her hard on the back as she passed by him. “I gotta say, I’m kind of impressed you made it all the way down here,” he said. “Even if you did leave my car in New Jersey, of all places.”
“I’m really sorry; I just …”
“You couldn’t have at least done better than the turnpike?” Patrick asked, though she could see he was only teasing, the corners of his mouth twisting up into a grin. “I’m sure the old girl would’ve preferred a beachside vacation, or a trip to Atlantic City….”
“Glad
you made it,” Dad said, interrupting Patrick. “It sounds like quite a trip.”
“I’m not really sure congratulations are in order,” Mom said, throwing him a look. “But we’re happy you’re here.”
She stepped in to give Emma another hug, but Annie beat her to it, practically throwing herself at her younger sister.
“Happy early birthday,” she whispered, and Emma realized she’d nearly forgotten that it was tomorrow. What had only a week ago seemed reason enough to flee from home was now a quiet and unassuming milestone, an ending to a journey rather than the start of something new.
The house was cool and dark, and Emma felt suddenly tired, like she’d walked all the way from New York, like she’d sailed half the globe, like she was the last weary survivor of the world’s longest journey. They moved inside together, a knot of people clogging the narrow entryway with laughter and hugs, with shakes of the head and wagging fingers.
Emma attempted to find a beginning to her story, an explanation for the events of the past days, but it proved nearly impossible with an audience like this one, her whole family buzzing all around her. They were all talking over one another in an attempt to explain each of their unlikely presences here—an impulsive, last-minute road trip from New Jersey for Patrick, a worried drive from DC for Annie and Charles, an anxious flight for Mom and Dad—and Emma sat down on the couch in the living room and stared out the window at the spindly trees and the stippled lake and tried to assemble her own story, answers she didn’t yet have to questions she didn’t yet feel ready to think about.
There was so much they wanted to know.
“Where’s Peter?
“What happened to that dog?”
“Did you forget how to use the phone?”
“How could you not tell us you were leaving?”
“Hasn’t anyone ever explained to you the finer points of car theft?”
Emma tried to respond as best she could, grateful that their happiness at seeing her and their relief over her safety seemed, at least for the moment, to have forestalled the inevitable lecture about her little road trip, the doling out of a punishment and the consequences that were sure to follow. But even so, she couldn’t help breathing out again when they began to disappear one at a time: Mom to call Peter’s dad and let him know his son was still at large, Nate to fire up the grill, and the rest of them to get started on dinner.
Emma sat there and listened to the sounds coming from the kitchen, overwhelmed and still a bit stunned to see all of them here at once. She could hear someone cutting vegetables and pulling down pots, the singing of the gas stove, and the screen door banging shut. A cork popped, two glasses clinked, and then a short burst of laughter rang out. It had been so long since her family had all been together: Last Christmas, Nate and Megan had been delayed by a snowstorm, and by the time they arrived at home, Annie and Charles had already left to go back to DC for work. It was always this way; they were always just barely missing each other. But now here they were, all gathered together; each of them had dropped their classes and studies, their jobs and responsibilities, and they’d done it all for her.
Emma knew she was still in trouble, that there were still discussions and consequences to come. But right now it was as if that had all been forgotten. As if the past days had never even happened. She was suddenly surrounded by all the many people who cared about her, in the place where everything had started, which was all she’d really ever wanted in the first place.
So then how was it possible, she wondered—her thoughts drifting to Peter—that in the midst of so many people she could still feel so terribly lonely?
Later, Emma offered to help set the table, escaping into the quiet of the dining room. She could hear the rest of her family joking around in the kitchen: Patrick pelting sponges at Annie, Nate rattling off statistics about energy efficiency in dishwashers, and Mom helping Megan wash vegetables as she explained the basis for her latest research project. Charles had set out after Dad, who’d wandered off to the backyard garden when nobody was looking.
Emma circled the table, taking her time with the silverware, grateful for a quieter task and wondering if maybe she wasn’t cut out for this kind of togetherness. Perhaps her tendency to be alone wasn’t so much because nobody was ever around—as she’d always thought—but rather because she preferred it that way. Maybe she had a natural propensity for silence. Maybe she was doomed to a life of solitude.
“Well, at least your table manners didn’t fall by the wayside when you decided to become an outlaw,” Nate said, and Emma looked up to see him leaning against the doorframe between the kitchen and the dining room. He was the tallest of all of them, skinny and serious, altogether too intelligent for Emma. Patrick was exasperating and Annie intimidating, but Nate had always seemed unapproachable in a way the others hadn’t, like a respected professor who is equal parts admired and feared.
“You could’ve called, you know,” he said, pulling out a chair and watching her circle the table as she laid out the silverware. “I would’ve bought you a plane ticket.”
“That wasn’t the point.”
“No,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully. “I suppose it wasn’t.”
Emma could still feel him watching her as she folded napkins, and it was as if he was weighing something, making up his mind about her.
“Do me a favor, will you?” he asked finally, and she glanced up at him with raised eyebrows. “Can you run down to the basement and grab the silver salad bowl? It’s on one of the far shelves.”
“We already have one,” Mom said, walking in to set down a basket of bread.
Nate shook his head. “I think we need another.”
Mom frowned. “Why?”
“Just go grab it for me, will you?” Nate asked Emma, and she shrugged, heading off around the corner and down the stairs.
The basement was dimly lit, with only a few cobwebby bulbs dangling from between the rafters. It took a minute for Emma’s eyes to adjust, and she blinked around at the musty room, the shelves of drooping cardboard boxes labeled with the names of each of her siblings. This house had been the family’s before it had been Nate’s, and though the upstairs was now quite distinctly his, the basement still held years of unsorted junk, a staggering collection of memories both priceless and worthless.
Emma walked in a slow circle around the room, running a hand along the dusty shelves, her eyes watering. There was a box of dolls with no clothes, old board games with missing pieces, a shoebox full of marbles and pebbles and sea glass. She stood on her tiptoes to unearth an empty fish tank that had grown moldy with years, two deflated soccer balls, and a tiny baseball mitt.
In the back corner she spotted the salad bowl. It was old and tarnished and not something she particularly wanted to eat out of, but she picked it up anyway, measuring the weight of it in her hands. Just before she turned around, she noticed the box underneath it, which had T and E written in faded marker across the side.
Emma wiggled it out from the cupboard, blowing the layer of dust from its lid and setting it on the old corduroy couch that had probably been down here at least as long as she’d been alive. And then—for the second time in just about a week—she held her breath as she opened the box.
Last time, when she’d found the birth certificate, she hadn’t been expecting anything. But now she understood what T and E meant, was aware of the sorrowful implications behind a box so thick with dust; she guessed nobody had been able to bear looking at whatever was inside for a very long time. And sure enough, what she found made her hands tremble too. Nestled inside were two small baby blankets—one pink, the other blue—and two teddy bears, both still soft and new. There were two delicate rattles that looked as if they’d hardly been used, and a pair of matching knit caps, everything in twos, everything a set, as if her family hadn’t been able to bear using one without the other. Emma picked each item up, one at a time, trying to imagine what it must have taken to pack these things away, to have bought
them with so much hope, only to abandon them again so soon. It nearly broke her own heart seeing the tiny monogrammed letters across the edge of each blanket.
Beneath these was a small silver-edged photo album, and Emma breathed in at the sight of the engraved names: Tommy and Emma. She found herself almost smiling; she’d known somehow that he would have been a Tommy. And if he’d never had the chance to become any of the other things she’d imagined for him, she was happy that at least he’d had that.
The pictures inside had been taken mostly in the hospital: Mom smiling wearily from the bed, a baby crooked in each arm; Dad kneeling beside her with a goofy grin; Annie as a teenager, kissing baby Emma on the forehead; Patrick, lanky and buck-toothed at fifteen, holding up Tommy’s hand in a miniature high five. In the back of the album were a few pictures taken on the front lawn of this very house, of Mom and Dad each holding one of the twins up to the camera, bundled so that just their noses were visible. There was something different about her parents here; their eyes hadn’t yet misted over in the look Emma had always thought of as a kind of distant dreaminess, but which she now recognized for what it was: the scar left behind by their loss.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she heard footsteps on the sagging wooden stairs, and she thought about leaping into action, shoving the box back in its place and lunging for the salad bowl, pretending none of this had ever happened, but instead she stayed where she was—beside the open box, holding a photo of the entire family: Mom, Dad, Nate, Annie, Patrick, Emma, and Tommy—and waited until Mom appeared, pausing on the bottom step with a look on her face that was impossible to read.
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