“I guess this whole trip was kind of an unforeseen expenditure, huh?” she said, and he nodded, looking somewhat embarrassed. “Look, I have enough to cover this, so don’t worry about it, okay?”
“I’m as much responsible for him as you are,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to—”
“Peter, it’s fine. Really,” she told him. “And if it turns out to be really expensive, I’ve got my parents’ credit card. Which is technically only for emergencies. But I think this counts.”
“I think so too,” he said, his eyes wandering around the waiting room before landing on Emma. “Thank you.”
The swinging door that separated the waiting room from the clinic opened with enough of a clatter to startle both the parakeet and the beagle into another song. The technician crooked a finger at Peter and Emma.
“You’re up.”
The vet—a middle-aged woman in scrubs—was leaning against a counter on the other side of the door, chewing on the end of a pen as she studied a clipboard.
“That’s a beautiful dog you guys have,” she said, looking up as they approached. “I’ve got him sedated at the moment, and he’ll need a few stitches in that paw of his, but I wanted to first get some information from you about how it happened.”
Emma nodded, eager to help.
“I guess the first order of business would be a name.”
“Peter Finnegan,” said Peter.
“Emma Healy.”
The vet looked at them over the top of the clipboard. “I meant the dog.”
“Oh,” Emma said, looking helplessly at Peter. “Um, we don’t …”
“Yeah,” said Peter. “We never …”
“He’s actually not technically ours—”
“Though he sort of acts like he is—”
“But we picked him up at a rest stop in New Jersey—”
“More like he picked us up—”
“But it wasn’t like we stole him or anything—”
“No, he was just a stray.”
The vet looked from one to the other with a little frown. “Right,” she said, jotting down a note on the chart. “No name then. What I was really hoping to find out was how he got the cut. Before I get in there, it would be good to know whether it was from glass or metal, maybe a rusty fence or can, a broken bottle …”
“We don’t actually know,” Emma said, feeling like the world’s worst non-owner. “He ran off this morning, and he was like that when we found him.”
“So I assume you don’t know anything about the original injury to the other leg?”
They shook their heads.
“Okay, then,” the vet said, tucking the clipboard under her arm. “We’ll go ahead and get him all fixed up. He’ll have to go easy on that paw for a little while, but he should be just fine. You did a good thing, bringing him in here. Not everyone would take care of a stray like that.”
“Well, he’s sort of been taking care of us, too,” Emma said.
The vet smiled. “Someone will let you know when we’re finished back here,” she said. “And in the meantime there are some brochures for different rescue groups and animal shelters in the waiting room, all of which help find good homes for strays.”
Emma stared at her. “What?”
“I just assumed, since you found him, that you’d be giving him up …”
“No,” Emma said firmly, surprising even herself. She hadn’t, until this moment, actually thought about what they’d do with the dog when they got to North Carolina. There was a strange feeling to this trip, a sense of perpetual motion that made an end point seem somehow very far away. But now that they’d come this far, now that he’d been lost and found, injured and saved, it seemed impossible to think they might leave him behind. He was as much a part of this trip as they were.
“No,” she said again, shaking her head. “He’s with us.”
The vet nodded, looking pleasantly surprised, then walked off toward the examination rooms. And when Emma turned back to Peter, it was to find him watching her with such unmistakable pride, such open admiration, that the memory of last night’s fight—the failed kiss and all that had come after it—went crashing over her again with renewed regret.
They watched the vet disappear into one of the rooms, closing the door behind her, and then they stood there together and waited for news like so many families in hospital waiting rooms: grateful for the support, relieved for the company, yet somehow feeling terribly alone just the same.
chapter twenty-two
The dog was drugged and drowsy, worn out and bandaged up, but his tail still swiped lazily at the air as they set him in the backseat of the car. The veterinary technician slid him off the gurney like he was serving a pancake, then left him dangling there, the last third of him drooping toward the balding tire of the convertible. Emma tried gently nudging him forward so that they might close the door, but the dog was too doped up to be anything more than dead weight, and it was clear that more drastic measures needed to be taken, so Peter jogged around to the other side and wiggled him into position.
Back inside they’d filled out all the necessary paperwork, and then Peter had watched as Emma paid the bill, sliding her parents’ credit card across the counter while he looked the other way, trying to act casual but coming off as quite the opposite.
“Better get some tags for that dog,” the vet told them as they walked out the door, and he saw something skip across Emma’s face, something like guilt, and he knew she must be thinking about the invented story she’d given the cop back in Maryland. What had been a sham of an excuse to get out of a ticket—an injured dog and a visit to a vet—had actually returned to haunt them. And wasn’t that just like this trip, Peter thought. Wasn’t it just so typical that all the things you never really meant to say were the very ones that came back around to you in the end?
Emma made herself a little wedge of space in the backseat between the dog’s hind legs and the door, and she sat pressed up against the side like that as he quivered in his sleep, the faintest hint of a doggy smile on his face, like a drowsy but contented drunk.
It was still early in the day, the sun sitting snugly in a bed of clouds, and Peter avoided the highways, feeling a bit like a chauffeur now that he was alone up front, responsible for the delicate cargo in back. They passed a cemetery, the kind that seems to go on forever, with neat lines of pink and gray stones like crops sprouting up from the ground. He glanced in the rearview to see that Emma was looking out too, her lips pursed and her eyes still and focused, like she was holding her breath in that way children do, exhaling only once they’re safely past.
When Peter thought of his mother’s grave now, it was no longer a reflex or a reaction, but a conscious decision, like reciting a poem or following a recipe, something done with thought and planning. Over the years he’d trained himself in this way, corralling those parts of him that missed her, the pieces of him that still knew how to wonder. It was a luxury he didn’t often allow himself, thinking of her.
But cemeteries are like mousetraps for memories, catching grief by the tail before it knows what’s what. And Peter felt the yank of it now, the part of him that had been scooped out before he was even fully part of the world, so that he would always remain achingly hollow.
Once, when he was little, Peter had asked what the word “amputate” meant, and without realizing it Dad had brought a hand to his chest, thumping a closed fist softly against the dark pocket of his uniform, right near his heart.
“Cut off,” he’d said, so gruffly that it had sounded to Peter an awful lot like “gutted.” After that, whenever they went fishing, whenever he watched his dad slide the knife along the soft belly of a fish, Peter couldn’t help thinking of the invisible damage that must have been done when his heart had been cut off, stopped short on the day Peter’s mother died.
They only went to the cemetery once a year. It was just outside of town, only a couple of minutes and a few left turns in the squad car, but even
so, that one awful day each July seemed like plenty to Peter. Because as much as he wished to hear stories of his mother, to crack open his father’s stubborn memory, there was nothing worse than standing there on his birthday, staring down at the grave marked with the date he knew so well.
Dad would always get down on one knee and then stay there like that, still as a statue, staring at the gravestone like it had just rejected his proposal. The tree that hung over her plot dropped chestnuts like little bombshells, and the wind carried the stale scents of dried flowers and death. There never seemed to be anything for Peter to do except stand there, stiffly and awkwardly, like the only person who didn’t know anyone at a party, and he wished that he hadn’t arrived so late, or that she hadn’t left so early, so that they might have been introduced—even if only briefly, in passing at the door—and he would then be able to greet her like an old friend.
This year Peter would be away on his birthday, still in North Carolina, or else driving back home, or perhaps somewhere else entirely. He wondered if Dad would even care. The day had always so clearly belonged to his mother, and it often seemed there was no room for anyone else.
He glanced up in the rearview mirror to see that Emma was halfway to falling asleep, her chin bobbing and then jerking upward again, her elbow slung over the dog’s soft belly. He realized that neither of them had spoken since they left the animal hospital, and partly this made the car seem cozy and comfortable, and partly it just seemed inevitable, the natural petering out of whatever it was that had fueled them along the way. There was always a great dramatic flourish before a finale, the climactic upswing before the big fall. And he felt it now, the way it all seemed to be ending, like they were no longer driving so much as coasting to a halt.
It was probably stupid of him to have thought the trip would change anything. After all, leaving home behind didn’t necessarily mean leaving behind the sort of person you were. And now here he was—the guy with all the maps, the one with the directions to anywhere and anything—still feeling completely and utterly lost.
It was the opposite with Emma. Peter could see that something about her had changed. Not just today—though he couldn’t help being impressed by the way she’d sprung to action with the dog, so steady-handed and capable, like she’d been born to do exactly that—but this whole trip. It was like she was being put back together again, one sibling at a time, one memory at a time, and he wondered what would happen when they arrived, whether she’d finally be whole again. He envied her this, the way her story was being spun, her mysteries solved, her secrets revealed, while all of his were just waiting for him back home, nothing about them romantic or exciting or adventurous, just more of the same: a messy tangle of explanations and a very angry dad.
Peter ran his hands along the steering wheel as they crossed the state line into North Carolina. It was clear to him what his next move would have to be. He’d tried his hardest to make this work, had flattered himself into thinking that his role on this trip might be bigger than just the driver, the navigator, the polite chauffeur. If he was being honest with himself, he’d wanted to be something more. He’d wanted to be her sidekick, her partner, her friend.
And if he was being really honest with himself, he’d wanted even more than that.
He’d certainly tried. He’d spoken up. He’d put in his two cents and said his piece. And though he was sorry for a lot of things on this trip, trying to kiss Emma was not one of them. For once in his life, he’d failed at something. But at least he’d done it by trying, rather than standing off to the side like a coward.
Even so, he realized—several days too late—that he probably should have never answered her call in the first place, should have done this trip his own way, zigzagging from battlefield to battlefield, following the lines of history and the paths of ghosts less close to home.
And he knew now what he needed to do.
“Are we close?” Emma asked from the backseat, startling Peter, who hadn’t realized she was awake. Her voice sounded very small; it was the first time either of them had spoken in hours.
“Yeah,” he said. “Almost there.”
“Can we go straight to the cemetery?”
Peter nodded, flicking his eyes to the left and changing lanes, heading toward the cemetery that Emma had chosen earlier in the trip, waving her finger in a little circle like a pendulum above the map. He turned in that direction now, getting off the highway onto a two-lane road that wound its way between sloping, tree-covered hills, past farmhouses and cottages and fields occupied by slow-moving horses.
The dog was awake now in the backseat, his eyes still glassy from the anesthesia, his bandaged foot tucked gingerly beneath him. Emma scratched his ears and leaned in to him, looking nervous as they got closer. At a bend in the road they came upon a small church with a raised steeple, a weather vane at the very top. Peter slowed the car, and Emma sat up to look.
It was nearly perfectly square, made of white clapboard, with a few modest stained-glass windows cut into the sides. There was a circular drive and a few overgrown bushes, and beyond that a small cemetery. Somehow, without really knowing at all, Peter was sure they’d found the right place.
The little parking lot was empty, and so Peter pulled into one of the spaces just beside the church and turned off the ignition. The dog swiveled his head in the direction of the door, as if contemplating jumping up and out, but then rolled over again with a little grunt. Emma, however, didn’t move. She just sat there, her eyes as glazed as the dog’s, blinking out the window. Peter couldn’t tell whether he should say something or not, so he sat very still and looked out at the rows of headstones, their inscriptions worn by years of wind and rain, their edges smoothed over time.
Finally, Emma moved a hand to the door, then stayed like that, caught between moments, waiting—though for what he couldn’t be sure.
“I’m sorry,” she said eventually, still not looking at him. “About last night.”
She didn’t wait for a response, only turned the handle and stepped out of the car, and Peter watched her walk purposefully across the lawn, weaving through the headstones as if she’d always known the way. She paused before an old crab apple tree, and inside the car Peter sighed.
“Me too,” he said.
chapter twenty-three
Of all the things Emma had been expecting to feel when she finally arrived at her dead brother’s grave, this—this sudden urge to laugh—certainly hadn’t been one of them.
After spending so many days first brooding, then stewing, she’d walked up here as if playing a part, solemn and reverent and grief-stricken, her back straight and her head held high as she crisscrossed between the scattered headstones. She’d spent days thinking about her brother, imagining what she would say when she arrived here, contemplating this recent addition to her life, who had been subtracted before she could ever come to count on him.
But now that she was here, standing before a headstone marked with a name so similar to hers—thomas quinn healy, born july 11, died july 13—she found she had nothing to say to him. Most unexpectedly, all those things she did have to say, the ones she’d kept quiet about and the ones she didn’t have the words for yet, all these things and more now seemed to belong instead to Peter Finnegan.
And for some reason this seemed wildly comical, like some sort of joke the world had played on her, the kind of fated, cosmic comeuppance her father might write about in one of his poems.
But when the humor of it all began to fade, Emma was left staring down at the moss-covered stone, feeling very small beneath the cottony sky. The air smelled of rain, cool and sweet, and she closed her hands one finger at a time, knuckle by knuckle, until they were tight little balls at her sides. Though she had plenty of practice at being wrong, she’d never quite become accustomed to all that came along with it, the prickle of guilt that worked its way through her like a foul-tasting medicine.
But she knew now she’d been wrong about Peter.
It was okay to find his obsession with maps a little odd, and it was fine to think he was weird because he preferred a good documentary about the Civil War to a night out at the movies. But it had been more than that. Emma felt suddenly wide awake, here among the rotting crab apples and the twisting grass. She could see now, for the first time, why she’d been so awful to him. It was one thing to count on someone who was dead and gone, to rely on an idea or a memory, a person with no real influence over her life outside of her imagination. But it was another thing entirely to have someone actually want to be there for you, unfailingly and unquestioningly, someone who listened carefully and told you the truth and waited patiently until you were ready to be there for them, too.
And something about that scared her.
So what she unexpectedly found herself thinking about now—as the blossoms from the trees twirled down all around her, as the wind picked up and the birds hung suspended in the sky like misshapen kites—was Peter’s mother.
Because how many hours had she spent with him in uncomplicated silence, ignoring or humoring him, thinking herself generous for enduring his company? And not once had she asked about his mom. Not once had she even thought about it.
Emma had known about her brother for less than a week, and Peter had been so quick to rush to her side when she needed him. In so many ways his loss was far greater than hers, a lifelong absence. He’d been carrying the weight of it the whole time she’d known him, and somehow Emma was only just now realizing how selfish she’d been.
She’d asked so much of him, and he’d been generous even when he didn’t have to be, even when she didn’t deserve it. He’d forced her to slow down and taught her to think before opening her mouth. He’d seen her impatience for uncertainty, all her bluster for lack of balance, and he’d helped her right herself again. He’d stolen a car and driven all this way; he’d pointed them in the right direction, true and unwavering as a compass, and now here they were.
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