The kitchen door creaked open, and they both looked up at Charles with red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, sorry,” he said, seeing them huddled on the floor. “I just thought … the popcorn … never mind.” He backpedaled out of the kitchen in a hurry, leaving them alone again.
Emma looked away. She didn’t know whether to be frustrated or upset by all this, whether to launch herself into her sister’s arms or stay pinned against the cabinets, keeping a safe distance between them. She felt simultaneously betrayed and abandoned and grateful and sad, her heart banging hard against her rib cage.
“What happened?” she said, in a voice so small she almost didn’t recognize it.
Annie looked as if she were about to cry. “We don’t know,” she said. “Nothing. Everything. It just happened. One night you were both fine, crying and laughing and wiggling your toes, and then the next morning, all of a sudden, he just … wasn’t.”
Emma wrapped her hand around a chunk of the dog’s soft white fur as if to steady herself, swallowing hard as she watched her sister fight back tears.
Annie’s voice was uncharacteristically gentle, low and gravelly and full of emotion. “You have no idea what it was like just afterward. We were all completely devastated, but Mom especially—she didn’t get out of bed for weeks. And Dad walked around like a robot, talking in this awful monotone voice, like his heart had just gotten up and walked away.” She paused and shook her head. “But you were still there, needing to be fed and changed, not knowing what happened. Patrick and I did the best we could, but I was your age at the time, you know? Nate was supposed to be spending the summer doing research in Maine, but he came home to help out. And after a while, Mom and Dad came back to us too.”
Emma had been staring at her lap, absently petting the dog, but she now ventured a look up, setting her trembling mouth into a straight line.
“It was because of you,” Annie said, her eyes bright. “Because you were there, needing them. Don’t you see? It’s never been about excluding you, or keeping you in the dark. We might be completely scattered and hopeless in the ways that count for most families, but we were there when it mattered. We needed you as much as you needed us. You brought us all back. You saved us.”
When enough time had passed, Charles ventured back into the kitchen to check on them, this time with Peter in tow. Annie and Emma were still seated on the floor, only now they sat side by side, their shoulders touching, their cheeks both wet with tears.
“If this is about who gets the top hat …,” Charles joked, looking from one to the other, and Emma laughed a wet little laugh, coughing and wiping her eyes as they got to their feet.
Annie had a hand wrapped loosely around Emma’s wrist, as if afraid to let go, and as Peter retrieved the blackened bag of popcorn from the microwave and Charles finished pouring the drinks and the dog danced around at their feet, Emma felt both lighter and heavier all at once. She felt like yelling as loud as she could until someone heard her, and she felt like her call had finally been answered. She felt like crying until there were no tears left, like running until there wasn’t another step in her.
She felt scared. She felt relieved. She felt ready to go.
And later that night, once Annie and Charles had gone to sleep and the lights had been turned off and the alarms set for the morning, she tiptoed back out of the guest room and into the living room. Peter was curled beneath a blanket on the leather sofa, the dog stretched out on the floor beside him, both of them already breathing steadily.
When Emma cleared her throat, Peter jerked upright and grabbed for his glasses, which were folded on the coffee table. The dog pricked an ear in her direction but otherwise remained still, his white coat bluish in the shadows from the long windows.
“You okay?” Peter asked, making room for her on the couch. She sank down beside him and pulled her knees to her chest.
“I think so,” she said. “We talked about it. About him.”
Peter nodded. “I figured.”
Though they’d been in the car together for days, just inches apart, she felt somehow closer to him now, his breathing soft and measured, his skin smelling of soap.
“You okay?” he asked again, but she was looking off toward the window, their blurred reflections in the glass.
“I was thinking …,” she said, and Peter sat up a bit straighter.
“That we’ll keep going?” he asked, looking relieved. “Tomorrow morning?”
Emma smiled. “I think so, yeah. How could we turn back now?”
“We couldn’t,” Peter said in a solemn voice, and they both nodded, each feeling the same sense of importance, as if they’d just solidified the terms of a business deal, a verbal contract ensuring the continuation of this riskiest of ventures, the unfinished endeavor they both felt compelled to see through to the end.
chapter eighteen
They waited until Annie had left for work, until the coffee
had been poured and the cereal eaten, until Charles reappeared after forgetting his wallet. They waited until the bags had been packed and the good-byes had been said and the instructions for getting home had been written down for them. And then they walked outside, got into the car, and drove off in the exact opposite direction.
Emma changed her mind three different times about whether or not to leave a note, while Peter waited patiently by the door. “It’s not like she won’t guess where we’re headed,” he offered, but in the end Emma slid the envelope onto the coffee table anyway.
Even the dog was quiet as they pulled onto the highway, sweeping beneath the signs pointing toward Richmond, Virginia. There was an unmistakable feeling that the stakes had been raised, that despite all that had come before this, it was really only now that they’d crossed some sort of line. There are certain things in life that you’ll be forgiven for, no matter how thoughtless or stupid or reckless, but if you do that same thing twice, you’re on your own. And so now they both understood that there was no turning back.
This didn’t bother Peter nearly as much as it seemed to be bothering Emma. The top was down on the convertible, and she had both arms resting on her door, her whole body twisted away from him so that it looked like she was contemplating an escape. It was as if they’d swapped places; Peter felt almost frighteningly happy, completely unworried about the world outside the car, while Emma looked miserably unsettled, her mouth set in a straight line, her head resting on her arms so that the wind blew her hair back like the tail of a kite.
Every so often he glanced over and tried to catch her eye, but she seemed lost in thought and determined to stay that way. And so he did his best to look concerned too—about blatantly disobeying her parents, about continuing the trip without permission, about what might meet them in North Carolina—but it proved impossible to fix his face a certain way, like trying not to laugh at church.
“Don’t you sort of wish we could keep going?” he asked, when he couldn’t help himself any longer. “Just drive out west, see the country …”
Emma swung her head around and gave him an odd look, like she hadn’t quite heard him correctly, or was wishing that that were the case. She rocked back hard against the seat; behind her the dog opened one eye, then crawled over to curl up behind Peter instead.
“I can’t believe I never even noticed,” she said, tipping her head back to look at the open sky, an impossible shade of blue marked off only by the fading white trail from a distant plane, like the wake of a boat.
“Noticed what?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew.
“There must have been so many times when they were sad about it,” she said. “It’s easy to blame them for never telling me, but how could I have lived with them for nearly seventeen years and never noticed, either?”
“Sometimes it’s hardest to see the people closest to us,” Peter said, thinking of his dad sitting alone in his dirty tube socks with a bowl of peanuts in front of him, the tinny sounds of a baseball game drifting from a dusty television set. His throa
t felt suddenly tight, and whatever it was—guilt? regret? worry?—made his heart quicken.
He gripped the wheel a bit harder and tried to think of something else to say to Emma, something comforting or understanding, something impressively wise. But everything he could think of—every trite piece of advice or bit of canned wisdom—seemed to hit alarmingly close to home for him, too. After all, wasn’t he just as guilty as she was? Of running away and ignoring his family? Of spending so much time wishing things were otherwise that he sometimes failed to see them as they were?
But Emma had fallen silent again, and it seemed there was little for Peter to do now other than lower his foot on the gas and ease the car into the fast lane, putting more miles between himself and his father, between here and home, between who he wished to be and who he actually was. For the moment, at least, it seemed just that easy to fall farther off the map, and for once he was more than happy to do so.
Emma’s phone, which was resting in her lap, began to buzz again, a sound now as familiar as the odd musicality of the car itself, and she stared at it for a good long while before casually raising a hand and tossing it out the side of the car.
Peter opened his mouth, glancing up to the rearview to see the tiny piece of plastic go skittering off the road. He started to pull over, but Emma put a hand on his arm.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Keep going.”
“What’d you do that for?” he asked, incredulous, thinking what a stupid thing it had been to do, how completely and utterly Emma.
“Because,” she said calmly, “they’re just going to keep calling. But we made our decision. We’re going.”
“But what if there was an emergency?”
“Like what?” she said. “And anyway, you still have a phone.”
“Yeah, but what if we got separated?”
“Why would we?”
“But just, what if?”
“We won’t,” she said, her tone so final that Peter decided it was easier to just drop the conversation altogether and concentrate on the road instead.
Emma’s brother’s house—their final destination—was tucked in the far western corner of North Carolina, where the state tapers off until it runs headfirst into Tennessee. This meant they had to cut across all of Virginia, and he frowned as he did the calculations in his head, tallying up hours and miles, accounting for his newly acquired and slightly paranoid tendency of obeying the speed limit.
“Do you want to get there today or tomorrow?” he asked Emma, who turned around and fixed him with a look bordering on disdain.
“Why would I want to get there tomorrow if I could get there today?”
Peter noticed that she’d dropped the “we” in this situation, and tried not to feel hurt. “Well, we’ve got about another eight hours to go,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d want to get there at night.” It seemed to him that there would be few things more creepy than visiting your dead brother’s gravesite in the dark, but who was he to argue?
Emma gave a noncommittal grunt. “Let’s see how it goes, I guess.”
But even once lunchtime came and went, the silence between them remained, and so Peter kept driving. They passed several fast-food restaurants, rest stops advertising ice-cream shops, and family diners that blended in with the gray blankness of the highway. But Emma hadn’t said a word in what seemed like hours, and asking whether she wanted to stop for food seemed like a fairly dangerous endeavor.
He could understand why she was upset, maybe even a little bit angry, but he wanted her to hurry up and realize that in the midst of this whole mess he was still there for her, the only one who really understood her. Even if this wasn’t entirely true. Even if he was still more than a little bit mystified by her.
Even if things weren’t exactly going according to plan.
Around three o’clock his stomach began to make an embarrassing amount of noise, and Peter decided it was time to step up and do something about the deteriorating state of this road trip. Plagued by worry and trailed by doubt, Emma needed to take her mind off things, to hit the pause button and forget about the grim purpose of this strange pilgrimage and have a little fun. And though Peter was well aware that he was not exactly Mr. Good Times, he was nevertheless determined to give it a shot.
According to the road signs they were thirty miles outside Roanoke, and that seemed as good a place as any. Peter cleared his throat.
“We could maybe stay around here tonight.”
“It’s only three.”
“So?” he said. “There’s tons of stuff we could do.”
Emma raised her eyebrows. “Really?” she said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “In Roanoke, Virginia? What exactly did you have planned?”
“They have a famous transportation museum.”
“I’m not even going to ask why you know that,” she said. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough fun with transportation to last us a while?”
Peter patted the wheel of the car as if to soothe its feelings. “There’s also the famous star,” he said. “It’s eighty-eight and a half feet tall and looks like a giant Christmas decoration.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
“It uses seventeen thousand five hundred watts of power,” he said, ignoring her. “It was built in 1949.”
She was looking at him now with genuine astonishment.
He took this as encouragement. “It’s the second largest one in the world. El Paso went and built a bigger one.”
“Bastards,” she said, grinning for the first time in a while.
“Yeah, well, theirs lies flat. This one is propped up, so you can see it from down below. And there’s supposedly a park with a scenic overlook at the top.”
“Seriously, how do you know all this stuff?”
“I just do,” he said, feeling his face go hot all the way to the tips of his ears. Around the highway, beyond the pine trees that stood straight as flagpoles, clusters of mountains had begun to hitch themselves up from the land, sloping toward the sky like great whales, gray and rounded and hazy in the distance.
“You know,” Peter said, “there’s a campground, too.”
Emma looked over at him.
“We could maybe spend the night up there.”
“We don’t have tents or anything.”
“Well, it’s not like we were planning on staying in a four-star hotel, anyway,” he said. “We could just wing it.”
“Don’t tell me you know how to camp, too.”
Peter grinned. “I’ve read a couple of books about it.”
When they came across the right exit on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Peter swung the car off onto the spur, following the signs for the campground. They stopped at a sagging mini-mart set a few hundred yards back on a gravel drive. Two of the three gas pumps were out of order, and there was a sign out front advertising a sale on both ice and ammo. Inside, a guy about their age with too-white teeth and too-blond hair was stacking cans of soda behind the counter, and he flashed them a too-bright smile as they walked in.
“Let me know if y’all need any help with anything,” he said, mostly to Emma, his eyes following her intently as she veered off toward the food aisle. Peter glared at him before hurrying to catch up with her.
“What a creep, huh?” he said as Emma thrust a bag of marshmallows at him. She scanned the rows of canned foods until she found the beans, then the packages of hot dogs and graham crackers, orange soda and dog biscuits, handing them over one by one until all of it was balanced in Peter’s scrawny arms. He glanced over to see that the guy was now leaning against the counter, his eyes still focused on Emma as he chewed a piece of gum with the slow rhythm of a cow, his jaw working in methodical circles.
“He keeps watching you,” Peter whispered, nearly bumping into Emma when she stopped before a rack of cheap-looking clothing. “It’s weird.”
She picked up a blue sweatshirt with a big red star on the front that read roanoke, virginia: star city. “M
aybe he likes me,” she joked, and Peter snorted, a feeble attempt to illustrate just how far this was from his own mind. Emma raised her eyebrows, and he felt the heat spread from his neck up into his face. He twisted the bag of marshmallows hard in his fist, feeling them lose their shape between his fingers.
She grabbed another sweatshirt from the rack and shoved it at him. “Here,” she said. “One for each of us.”
Peter could nearly picture the lone five-dollar bill still tucked in his wallet. “Don’t you think we should save our money for something we actually need?”
“It’s a present,” she said, marching up to the register where the attendant was waiting, his ridiculously white teeth bared in a leering grin. “For our birthdays.”
Peter dumped the pile of food onto the counter, adding a blue lighter to the pile, then slid his sweatshirt beside hers, surprised that she’d remembered. He watched the guy ring them up, half wishing—despite the sweatshirt’s scratchy material and shoddy lettering—that he could put it on right away, though he at least had the good sense to be embarrassed by the significance he knew he’d attach to it because Emma had picked it out.
“This’ll look nice on you,” the guy said to Emma, folding the sweatshirt into a plastic bag alongside the can of beans. “Real pretty.”
“It’s a birthday present,” she told him. “To myself.”
“Happy birthday,” said the guy. “A real pretty shirt for a real pretty girl.”
Once they’d paid, they walked out of the store together, both struggling not to laugh until they were a safe distance away. Emma held up the sweatshirt and twirled in a circle.
“Real pretty,” Peter said in an exaggerated drawl.
“Aw,” she said, tossing his sweatshirt to him. “You’ll look real pretty in it too.”
“I think this is the first time you’ve ever gotten me a birthday present.”
Emma smiled. “If it makes you feel any better, I forget everybody else’s, too,” she told him. “I’m terrible about that stuff. I must’ve gotten at least some of the absentminded professor genes.”
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