You Are Here

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “So, I guess that’s sort of the reason for the trip.”

  “Your birthday?” Peter asked, but even as he did, and even as she looked away, he suspected there were many reasons—not just a restlessness that he, too, could understand, but also a search for something bigger, something that maybe not even Emma yet understood—and for now, the rest didn’t need to be put into words.

  chapter eleven

  The moment they stepped out of the car, the dog began turning in small, pitiful circles, flattening his ears and pausing every now and then to cast a doleful glance in their direction. Peter didn’t seem to notice; he stood with his back to the car, the keys in one hand as he stared out over the ink-black patchwork of fields. But when the dog let out a low whine, Emma thought that maybe she understood: There was something about this place, an eerie stillness, an almost tangible feeling that something irreversible had been stitched across the land, and it made her shiver too.

  “Ready?” Peter asked, turning to her with a faint smile, and Emma nodded, not entirely sure what she was agreeing to. There was nobody else around. All the tourists had returned to their hotels. The employees who spent their days going through the motions of those blood-soaked skirmishes had long since hung up their uniforms and retreated to the bars in town, and the local kids had surrendered their playground to the muffled hour just before dusk.

  But Peter was already half trotting down a steep hill and toward the fields that broke off from the road, and even the dog—who’d been hanging back uncertainly—now went streaking out ahead of him with that uneven three-legged gait of his, a white blur in the darkness.

  “You can’t see much,” Emma ventured, her voice made thin by the wind. She skidded down the damp grass in her flip-flops, narrowly avoiding a rabbit hole. “Sure you wouldn’t rather just come back in the morning?”

  Peter was waiting at the bottom of the hill. “We can do that, too.”

  “Super,” Emma managed. From what she could make out, they were standing in a valley bordered by shadowy ridges that looked like great sleeping monsters in the dark. For a moment she was calmed by the thought that this could be anywhere—any old meadow in any old town, the kind of place where dogs run in circles and kids fly kites and flowers grow each spring—but then a face seemed to materialize out of the fog, a metal statue of a soldier gazing impassively over the site of his own death, his horse frozen beneath him, his gun forever at the ready.

  “Are you sure we should be here?” Emma asked, and when her words were met with only a heavy silence, she turned to see that Peter had paused before the statue. His head was bent over the plaque, and it struck her as somehow impolite to bother him now, like interrupting someone at a funeral, so solemn was the look on his face, reverent and humbled at once. The dog had circled back and now sat rigidly at her side, his mismatched eyes darting between the pale stone monuments and the rows of cannons that formed an uneven line across the field.

  Emma watched Peter’s back, the rise and fall of his shoulders, wondering and worrying, trying to guess how much of these desolate grounds he’d want to see tonight, how far into the past he’d be tempted to wander. There were other things too: She wondered where they would sleep later on, and how far it was to Washington. She wondered if her parents were still calling the phone she’d left in the car, whether Patrick would ever speak to her again, what they would do with the dog when they got to Annie’s. All these worries seemed to expand in the darkness, until Emma felt nearly short of breath, and she tried not to fidget as she waited for Peter to finish whatever it was he was doing.

  After a moment he turned around, his face pale in the dark. “Isn’t it …,” he began, then trailed off, apparently unable to find the right word. Emma could think of several that might fit the bill—“creepy,” “depressing,” “morbid”—but she didn’t say any of them.

  “This part’s called East Cemetery Hill,” he said quietly, waving his hand in a circle. “And over there was Culp’s Hill, where the Union formed their fish-hook line.”

  Emma raised her eyebrows. “Fish hook?”

  “It was named for the shape of their defense,” he told her, then whistled for the dog as they began walking again. Through the trees she could see splintered headlights as they neared the road and whatever lay beyond, and their feet made loud crunching noises in the dirt. Peter held a tree branch for her as she ducked beneath it, her foot getting snagged on a twisted root. There was a wooden fence strung out along the length of the two-lane road, and Emma squinted to make out a run-down farmhouse and a few crooked trees on the other side of it.

  “Lincoln made his address just up there,” Peter said, already looking awestruck as they waited for a truck to lumber past, then jogged across together. “It’s one of the most famous speeches—”

  Emma snorted, and Peter glanced back at her, his eyebrows raised.

  “Give me a little credit,” she said indignantly. “I might not know a lot, but I do know about the Gettysburg Address.”

  He grinned. “Okay, then.”

  As they walked deeper into the woods, he told her about battle formations and casualties, unexpected victories and retreats; he brought the whole messy past lurching into the present with newfound significance. And much to her surprise Emma found herself listening as he spoke, as he took a field like any other and turned it into a story, tracing for her a history that had happened on the very spot they were standing.

  “So why do you care so much about this stuff?” she asked, the question settling heavily between them. It was clear she’d interrupted Peter in some sort of reverie; he shook his head as if remembering himself and his whereabouts, then turned to her and blinked. Emma cleared her throat. “I guess it just seems sort of random,” she said. “I mean, why the Civil War?”

  “It’s not really about the war,” he said softly. They were at the edge of another field now. The moon had slipped behind a bank of clouds, and though he was standing just feet away from her, it was hard to make out his face. “It’s not even about any of the issues really, slavery or the Union or any of the other stuff that kept it going for so long.”

  “So what, then?”

  He shrugged. “It’s about seeing something get put back together again, I guess. Especially after coming so close to falling apart. I mean, if a whole country can bounce back from something like that, then it sort of seems like anything’s possible.”

  Emma breathed in, tilting her head back to look up at the sky, where the stars were punching holes in the endless darkness. Beside her the dog turned circles in the grass, and the wind died so suddenly it was as if the world had stopped breathing.

  “Peter,” she said quietly, so quietly it took a moment for him to face her, with an expectant look that nearly made her change her mind. But his words were still rattling through her head, and the night had grown still, and she could almost feel the secret she’d been carrying struggling to work its way out of her. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  He grinned at her. “You’re secretly a Civil War enthusiast?”

  “No,” she said. “I once had a twin brother.”

  His face changed, slipping just slightly, but his eyes remained steady on hers. “Once?”

  “I found a birth certificate in our attic,” she said. “Just last week. But there was a death certificate, too. From a couple days later.”

  Peter lowered his chin, and Emma watched him carefully, trying to make out what he was thinking. His brow was furrowed, and he was staring at the ground so intensely that he might have been calculating the number of blades of grass in the field.

  It struck her then, as it had so many times before, that his way of seeing the world must make life fairly difficult. When he looked at a house, it was like he could only ever see a network of pipes and beams, as if the rest of it—all the little details that made it what it was, the furniture and family photos, the chipping paint and sagging ceiling—were hardly there at all. It was like he saw deeper into
things than most people, an explorer winding his way into the tiniest corners of a cave, while Emma, on the other hand, seemed to always see her way around things, skirting the edges of whatever lay in front of her, the interesting and the extraordinary as much as the mundane and the dull.

  She’d always had a worrying ability to see right past everything.

  “I’m really sorry,” Peter said finally, his jaw set as he turned away, keeping to the dirt path that wound toward a distant grove of trees. Emma hurried to catch up to him.

  “That’s it?”

  “What else is there?”

  She frowned. “You could at least say it like you mean it.”

  “I do mean it,” he said without pausing. “It’s a terrible thing.”

  “Well, aren’t you curious about why they never told me?” she asked, stopping abruptly in the middle of the path. It took him a moment to notice she’d fallen behind, and when he did, he spun around with his eyebrows raised high above the rim of his glasses. They remained there like that for a few beats too long, squared off and uncertain, each nearly lost to the darkness.

  “I’m sure they had their reasons,” he said eventually.

  “Well, I want to know what they were,” she said. “I mean, maybe something really bad happened. Maybe there was an accident or something, or someone wasn’t watching him carefully enough, and—”

  “Emma,” Peter said, cutting her off, a look on his face that fell halfway between sympathy and impatience. “This isn’t a movie. Bad things just happen sometimes.”

  She was struck by the sound of his voice, so full of reproach. After a moment he turned to start walking again, his head bowed and his arms held stiffly at his sides.

  “That’s it?” she called after him. “ That’s your answer? Bad things just happen sometimes?” She shook her head, then pushed past him, plunging farther down the path on her own. “That’s not good enough. At least not for me.”

  She could hear his footsteps on the dry ground, the snap of twigs as he followed her. She wasn’t sure whether he had an answer for that, whether he’d planned to respond, because before either could say anything more, they broke through the band of trees and stumbled out into a clearing. Emma stared at the sight before her, rings of gravestones like crop formations rising from the wine-colored shadows. There were rows upon rows of unmarked headstones fanning out in half-moon shapes, tiling the manicured lawn.

  “What is this?” she whispered, following Peter between the lines of pale stones, which spiraled outward like veins across the bruised and broken land. The whole ghostly formation centered around a looming monument, the white marble bright in the dark, and it was here that Peter paused. After a moment Emma realized that he was speaking, his voice low and his head bent, murmuring almost unconsciously.

  She moved closer, standing just beside him, so that their shoulders were nearly touching as they tilted their heads to look up at the monument.

  “Peter?” she asked, but he didn’t look at her.

  “Lincoln’s address,” he said, without any trace of embarrassment. “This is about where he made it.”

  Emma nodded, falling quiet again to let him continue, listening as he chanted the words as if in prayer. And when he finished, she closed her eyes.

  “‘The world will little note,’” she said softly. “I like that line.”

  Peter nodded. “‘The world will little note,’” he repeated, “‘nor long remember what we say here.’”

  “They thought it would be just a footnote,” she said, thinking how they couldn’t have possibly known, those soldiers buried beneath this very ground. They couldn’t have realized that this speech, this battle, this particular moment would live on so powerfully. It had refused to stay a footnote. It had refused to be forgotten.

  Peter swept an arm across the cemetery. “Some people say it’s haunted.”

  “You believe in that sort of thing?”

  “Not really,” he said with a little shrug. He seemed about to say something more, then changed his mind, turning to start the walk back. But Emma stood where she was, suddenly reminded of another cemetery—the ending point to this trip—and of her brother, who had been buried there after only two short days in the world. Emma rubbed her hands together, suddenly cold. She closed her eyes, and it was almost as if he were there beside her, not a ghost or a memory, but just a feeling of great comfort, like she suddenly had at her side the one person in the world who would ever understand her.

  She smiled, letting her eyelids flutter open again, but when she turned to look, it was not her brother—neither real nor imagined—but Peter who was standing just inches away from her, lost in thought and smiling, too.

  chapter twelve

  When he pulled into the parking lot of the diner, Peter turned off the engine and reached for the door handle without looking at Emma, since he already felt certain he could guess the look on her face. There was a blinking neon sign that read sid’s diner in orange letters and below that declared that what appeared to be the hollowed-out shell of an old barn was the scrumptious civil war sensation.

  It didn’t look like much of a sensation from the outside, where only one other car was parked in the gravel lot, a faded blue pickup truck with a rusted shovel in the back. But Peter could see inside the windows to where the walls were plastered with old wartime flags and posters and a few old muskets hung above the counter. It was like the worst of all theme restaurants. Like Medieval Times, he thought, only without the jousting. And probably not quite as cool, if such things could ever really be considered cool in the first place.

  But Emma—who had been uncharacteristically quiet during the walk back from the cemetery—didn’t seem to mind. They left the dog to poke at the garbage bins outside and then walked in to find themselves set adrift somewhere between 1860 and 1960, the room alternating between actual antiques from the Civil War and outdated furniture from when the diner must have first opened. There were only two other customers, a pair of men hunched low over their steaming mugs of coffee as they scraped the crusted dirt from their boots onto the metal legs of the stools.

  Peter and Emma slid into an orange vinyl booth and sat examining the menu and the ketchup bottle and the dirty silverware, making fans and tubes and tiny squares out of their napkins rather than speaking to each other. Peter’s eyes roamed the walls, the framed declarations and tattered flags, the Union caps and Confederate slogans, and he thought of explaining their significance to Emma, but he wasn’t sure this was the best way to break the silence.

  Once they’d ordered from a bored-looking waitress—Custer’s Custard Pie for Peter and Abolitionist Apple Strudel for Emma—they resumed their own separate investigations of the cutlery, playing with forks and spoons, inspecting the edges of the table and the tears in the seat where the yellow stuffing bloomed. Peter could very nearly feel it, the way the space had suddenly expanded between them. He didn’t have much practice with this kind of thing, but the trip ahead—four more states and five hundred more miles—was beginning to seem far longer than it had at first.

  “So,” Emma said finally, more like a sigh than a word. It was the first time either of them had spoken since they’d ordered, and they both seemed slightly unhinged by the sound of it.

  “So,” Peter said back. He was aware this was perhaps not the world’s most brilliant response, but he wasn’t sure exactly what the moment called for; it wasn’t like Emma to look this way, weary and overwhelmed and just a little bit sad, sitting in the orange light of the diner in front of her half-eaten plate of dessert.

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide and serious. “Do you think this was a mistake?”

  “The apple strudel?”

  “No,” she said, but he was pleased to see a hint of a smile. “The trip.”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re not ready to turn back then?”

  “Not unless you are.”

  “Okay, then,” she said with a nod, though she still looked
a bit uncertain, and Peter could understand why: After all, they had nowhere to sleep tonight and were no doubt in a world of trouble with their parents. They were somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, and in many ways it had all stopped seeming like a game.

  It had all started in the cemetery, of course, when she’d turned to him as if expecting someone else, her eyes widening just slightly, her face going abruptly pale. Gettysburg was supposedly one of the most haunted places in the world, with frequent sightings of ghosts in the trees, cameras inexplicably jamming when people tried to take photographs, glimpses of women in white and all manner of wandering spirits. But Peter knew that not all ghosts wore white sheets and roamed through cemeteries; there were other ways of being surprised by the past, and he suspected Emma had been thinking about the brother she’d never had the chance to know, and this was something he could understand too.

  But she wasn’t the only one who was unsettled by the evening. Peter also found himself troubled by the thought of the dead brother they were chasing down the coast, though he knew his reasons were somewhat more selfish.

  All these years he’d taken such pride in his acceptance by the Healys, who seemed to find him endlessly interesting, engaging in a way his own father never recognized. But now he was wondering whether there’d been more to it than that. He couldn’t help thinking that maybe he reminded them of the son they’d never had the chance to know, that maybe that was the only reason they ever asked him over, or set an extra place for him at the dinner table. And this gave him a funny feeling, a wobbling in his stomach, like a joke that had gone over his head.

  He glanced up at Emma, who was still intent on her food, and he thought of her family, of the way Mr. Healy collected certain books for when he knew Peter was coming over, and how Mrs. Healy always made him a mug of hot chocolate to sip while they discussed the famine ships or the Boer War or the Indian removal. He thought of the way he felt so at home there, the way he seemed to belong, as welcome as if he’d been a part of the family himself.