You Are Here

by Jennifer E. Smith

  And it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, he’d been using them for the exact same reason they’d been using him.

  When they finished eating and filed back outside, they were pleased to find that the dog was still there to greet them, apparently having nowhere better to go either. He wiggled from head to toe when Emma spilled the contents of a napkin—half her apple strudel and the crust of Peter’s pie—onto the ground for him. The air was thick with fireflies making lazy circles, dipping in and out of the pools of light from the diner, which transformed them from floating lights back into winged, black insects.

  Emma hoisted herself up onto the trunk with an expectant look in his direction, but Peter had noticed a phone booth just outside the diner and was already walking back over. It took him a few tries to jimmy open the door, which was rusted along the top, and the inside smelled like a litter box. Aware that Emma was watching from just outside, he dug in his pocket for a few coins and then dialed his number at home.

  He let the phone ring twice, his heart skipping around, but before his dad could pick up, Peter slammed the receiver into its cradle and walked back outside.

  Emma raised her eyebrows at him, but he only shrugged.

  “So what now?” she asked, letting her legs dangle against the bumper of the car. Maybe it was the darkness, or the heaviness of the food in their stomachs, or the chill that had crept into the air without them noticing. But the trip now had a fragile feel to it, gone from sunglasses and milk shakes and the wind on their faces to this: the two of them staring at each other in the back lot of an old diner, unsure of their next move and uneasy about all the ones that had come before this.

  “Are you gonna want to see more of this stuff in the morning?” Emma asked, and Peter tightened his jaw, trying to ignore the tiniest bubble of irritation that had risen up in his throat. Just an hour ago she’d been interested and engaged, asking questions about the history of the place, genuinely fascinated by his knowledge of it. But now she’d once again grown tired of it all, and Peter was mad at himself more than anything for feeling wrong-footed and surprised, when he should have known better by now.

  He wondered if there was a rule that you had to love all of someone, or whether you could pick out only the best parts, like piling your plate full of desserts at a buffet table and leaving the vegetables to go cold in their little metal bins.

  He frowned at her. “This stuff?”

  “Gettysburg,” Emma said, waving a hand in the general direction from which they’d come. “Have you seen enough, or are we doing round two in the morning?”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing the reenactments tomorrow,” he said. “But we wouldn’t have to stay long.”

  “What should we do about tonight, then?” she asked, sliding down off the trunk. The dog was rolling in the grass at the edge of the parking lot, and as they stood there, the bell on the door of the diner rang out, and the two men emerged. They passed by the blue convertible with a nod, then drove off in the pickup truck, the tires spraying gravel at their feet. A moment later the waitress followed, locking up the door without acknowledging them and then taking off down the shadowy road on foot.

  Peter and Emma exchanged a look.

  “We could stay here,” he said.

  “In the car?”

  He shrugged. “Got any better ideas?”

  Emma regarded the convertible with some degree of doubt, but she climbed in anyway, and Peter followed, starting the engine and pulling it around to the back of the barn, where he eased the top up, the stars above disappearing bit by bit until there was only canvas left overhead. They didn’t bother with pajamas or toothbrushes, instead eating the mints they’d taken on the way out of the diner and rummaging through the trunk for articles of clothing that might double as pillows. Neither said much as Peter wedged himself uncomfortably between the steering wheel and the gearshift up front and Emma curled up in the backseat with a map of Florida for a blanket.

  Outside on the grass the dog snuffled and dreamed, his three good legs giving chase to some imaginary foe, but it took Peter a long time to fall asleep. He knew that he talked in his sleep, that he had a habit —according to his dad—of reciting coordinates at night, pinpointing random spots on the globe with a sort of dreamy accuracy. And so now he blinked at the worn roof of the car and watched the stars grow brighter on the other side of the windshield, listening to Emma’s breathing even out, waiting for her to be the first to give in to sleep.

  They woke in the morning to the sun peering intently through the windows, both of them stiff and sore and cranky. Peter’s cheek was stuck to the white leather seat, and he banged his knee on the steering wheel when he tried to sit up, rubbing his sore neck.

  “Morning,” he said, glancing at Emma through the rearview mirror, and she gazed back at him with puffy eyes, her hair mussed and her eyes still caked with sleep.

  He stepped outside to grab a clean T-shirt, sidestepping the enthusiastic greeting of the oversized dog, who pushed a wet nose into Peter’s hand, looking for food. Somewhat reluctantly, Peter left Emma with the car to herself so she could change, and headed back over to the pay phone. He let the phone ring three times this time, hung up just as he thought he heard an answer, and headed back into the diner.

  There was a rack of tourist brochures just inside—pamphlets advertising everything from haunted battlefield tours to historic B&Bs—and Peter stood counting what money he still had, thumbing through the bills and pushing the change around in his palm as if the coins might be convinced to pair up and multiply. He was fairly certain he’d be facing a cash-flow problem within the next couple of days, but there was nothing to be done about it now, and so he bought three blueberry muffins from the same waitress as last night, then walked back outside and handed one to Emma and the other to the dog, who finished the whole thing in one go.

  Emma had put the top down on the car, and she was now perched on the back of it, her feet planted on the seat where she’d slept. She’d never been one of those girls who worried much about her appearance—she spent most of her summers in flip-flops and a jean skirt, alternating among an assortment of faded T-shirts—but there was something even more rumpled about her this morning, her long hair uncombed and tangled, her cheek still bearing the lines from where it had been pressed against the seat last night.

  “What?” she asked through a mouthful of muffin, and Peter blushed and ducked his head, realizing he’d been staring at her.

  “Nothing,” he muttered, reaching for a few of the maps, then folding them into neat squares, just for something to do. “Almost ready?”

  “Sure,” she said with a grin. “Wouldn’t want to miss Halloween at Gettysburg.”

  “It’s not like they’re playing dress-up,” Peter pointed out. “It’s a reenactment. They recreate all the famous battles from the war.”

  “O-kay,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

  “That came from the Civil War, actually,” he said, though he knew that now would have probably been a good time to come up with something less obviously nerdy as a follow-up.

  “What did?” Emma asked, looking at him blankly.

  “The word ‘okay,’” Peter said with a sigh. It was hopeless; if his conversation starters tended to stray toward unsolicited Civil War trivia while at home in upstate New York, he figured he was pretty much a lost cause in Gettysburg. “When the troops returned from battle and there were no casualties, they would post a sign that said, ‘Zero Killed.’” He traced out the letters in the dirt at his feet. “Get it?” he asked, glancing up at her. “Zero, K. OK. Okay.”

  “Right,” Emma said, swinging her legs around the side of the car and climbing into the front seat. “I guess we should probably get going, then.”

  Peter slid into the driver’s seat beside her and turned over the engine with the key, the blue rabbit’s foot still dangling from the chain. They drove past the field where they’d stood the night before and toward the visitors’ center, where they left
the convertible in a lot with cars from a dozen different states, a rainbow of license plates and people with accents to match, all of them fanning out across the park with their cameras ready. Emma tried to coax the dog out of the car, but he was dozing comfortably in back, so they left the top down in case he changed his mind.

  Everything looked different in the daylight. Without the early moon and the pale fog, the battlefields seemed to have shed their mystery, and something of last night’s magic had been lost. But still, as he led Emma over the wedges of grass that ran alongside the road, Peter felt elated at being here. He grabbed her hand—just for a moment—as they were shunted through a gated entrance, then let go again once they made it to the other side. If it bothered her, she didn’t say anything, and this was enough to make Peter feel like skipping the rest of the way.

  Around them the stubbled land was marked off by plaques and signs that explained to visitors what had happened here on a long ago July day not unlike this one. But Peter already knew all they said and more. He looked around at the people with their noses tucked in brochures and guidebooks, and those trailing, sheeplike, after tour guides and park employees. He was used to feeling somewhat out of place most everywhere he went—at school or the barbershop, even at home—but here, where he knew everything, all the names and dates and facts, he somehow seemed to fit, and the knowledge of this welled up inside of him. It was like he’d been born a blue flower in a field full of red ones and had only now been plunked down in a meadow so blue it might as well have been the ocean.

  “I used to have all these little army figurines when I was little,” he told Emma as they wound past a group of European tourists who seemed deeply unimpressed by the empty orchards and fields. “The carpet in my room always had a thousand little footprints in it, which drove my dad nuts.”

  “What’d you do?” she asked absently, as they followed the signs toward where the reenactment would take place. “Play war?”

  “Sort of,” he said, trying not to notice as she checked her watch. “I had all these books about the battles, and I’d line them up in all the famous formations, and have them hold down all the hills and sites.”

  By the time they arrived at the Wheatfield, the reenactment had already started, and there were cannons going off like fireworks, setting shapeless clouds of smoke drifting through the burnt air. Emma rose onto her tiptoes and scanned the field.

  “Blue’s on the left; gray’s on the right,” she said, and then tripped along after him as Peter headed left toward the Union side.

  “So, do people actually do this for a living?” she asked, squinting to catch a glimpse of the angled muskets and improvised movements of the actors, who were dressed in what looked like the uniforms of the day, careworn and muddy.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “Don’t you think it’s kind of a weird job? For grown men to be playing war for a living?”

  Peter didn’t bother answering. Around him there were kids cheering at the sharp crack of the guns, adults grimacing at the reminders of an ugly past, and Emma, shifting from one foot to the other, her interest clearly waning. The day was sticky and humid, and those who’d come here with the best of intentions now looked as if they’d much prefer a swimming pool to the unshaded remains of a former battlefield.

  But as he stood and watched the lines shifting on the distant hills, the troops folding in and then back out of formations he knew by heart, it felt to Peter like remembering something he’d never really known in the first place. It was a part of each of them, this battle that had taken place for the soul of the country. The world was built upon fallen soldiers and ill-conceived wars, and this was one that had defined them all.

  Unlike most people Peter didn’t look to the future for reassurance; he understood that the only thing certain in life is the past. History repeats itself again and again, and every story has been told before. It seemed to him that life could be terribly unoriginal in that way, and the only manner of certainty—the only way to know what might be ahead—was to look back on what had already happened. You could always count on someone else having lived through worse than you, and this particular story—the Civil War, the best and worst of a whole country—gave him a firm sense of hope that anything and everything could be repaired. Even the worst struggles could end in reunion.

  Now he couldn’t help smiling as he watched the space between the two regiments on the battlefield, the tall blades of wheat leaning sideways, tickled by the wind.

  “When they fought here,” he said, “the whirlpools from the breezes made it hard for the soldiers to see, because of all the tides and eddies in the fields.”

  Emma was standing just beside him, and she lifted her chin in the first half of a nod. On the field the soldiers were now charging, barreling toward one another, brandishing guns and blades and flags, the horses of the higher ranking officers leaving clouds of dust in their wake.

  “This was a huge turning point,” Peter said. “All these battles.”

  “Hmm,” Emma murmured absently, glancing up here and there when a mock explosion rippled through the crowd in gasps of surprise and delight.

  “It rained on the last day,” Peter said, pressing on with a sort of pathetic determination, a faltering resolve to try one more time. “There was a huge storm that evening, after three full days of the bloodiest battle the country has ever seen.” He paused and looked reverently out over the land. “That’s something, don’t you think? How it kind of washed everything away?”

  Emma peered up at the sky, which was turning a deepening shade of gray. “If we don’t get going soon, we might have a storm of our own.”

  Peter sighed, and he took a few steps in the direction of the parking lot before Emma jogged over to catch up with him, appearing at his elbow with a look of confusion.

  “I didn’t mean right now,” she said, falling into step beside him, and he shrugged, hoping his face didn’t look as injured as he felt by her lack of interest. She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to make you—”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You did.”

  She didn’t seem to have much to say to this, tucking her hands in the back pockets of her jean skirt, her elbows jutting out like wings from her sides.

  Peter shook his head. “How come you’re always in such a rush?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, then changed her mind. “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  She opened her mouth to dispute this, then closed it again. They walked the rest of the way to the car in silence, and it wasn’t until he’d started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot that Peter finally spoke again.

  “Well, thanks, I guess.”

  “For what?”

  “For putting up with that. I’ve always wanted to see it.”

  Emma looked up in surprise. “You’d never been?”

  He shook his head.

  “But I thought—”

  “Nope.”

  “You knew where everything was,” she said. “I mean, I just assumed …”

  “I’ve read a lot of books,” he said shortly. “I find it interesting.”

  At the entrance to the highway, he turned toward the signs for Philadelphia. The dog stuck his head between the seats, looking from one to the other like a kid whose parents have been arguing. Ahead of them the sky had begun to lighten again.

  “It’s pretty cool, the way you know so much about all that stuff,” Emma said eventually, and Peter looked over, aware that this was her way of apologizing. “I’d never have the patience for it.”

  “For what?”

  “Learning all the facts and dates and details,” she said. “Caring enough about the past to bring it to life like that.”

  Peter smiled in spite of himself. “I thought that’s what you were doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With your own family.”

  “Not really. It’s not exactly like I’m—”

  �
�But you are,” he told her. “Like it or not, you’re kind of a historian too.”

  chapter thirteen

  The day she turned seven, an entire conference room of world-renowned anthropologists sang “Happy Birthday” to her in a hotel in San Diego. The foremost expert on Native American culture gave her an arrowhead, and the keynote speaker—a man so old the whole podium shook beneath his hands—asked whether she wanted to come up and help him with his speech.

  She didn’t.

  For her tenth birthday Emma’s parents threw her a small dinner party at home, where she—the guest of honor—was the youngest one by at least thirty years. The dean of the college spilled wine on her party dress, and the conversation quickly turned to the role of birthday wishes in traditional fairy tales. After she blew the candles out from atop an organic carrot cake, a biology professor leaned over and asked Emma what she’d wished for.

  She pretended not to hear him.

  All she’d ever wanted was a normal birthday, with a swimming pool or a magic show, a big-nosed clown twisting balloons into dogs, cupcakes with sugary frosting, and ice cream melting on plastic plates. But most years the big day was instead colored by gifts like maps and bug boxes, puzzles and history books, things she was told she’d come to appreciate someday, though as the years ticked by and the pile of unused presents in her closet multiplied, Emma began to seriously doubt that that day would ever come.

  But now her seventeenth birthday was just four days away, and here she was hurtling toward North Carolina, carried south along I-270 by Peter Finnegan and his stolen blue convertible. And in a rare display of all those things that had so far eluded her in life—determination and persistence and dogged curiosity—she was secretly hoping to spend her birthday on her own terms, at the resting place of the person who’d once shared it with her.