Emma wasn’t sure what to expect. Her family wasn’t accustomed to delving into anything too far outside the realm of academia, and now that she’d uncovered the one subject that had been kept the most quiet of all, now that the lid was—quite literally—off the box, Emma wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed.
But if what she’d expected was another lecture, another point-by-point explanation dictated by logic and reason, then she’d been wrong. Instead, without saying a word, Mom crossed the basement and sat down beside Emma on the couch, leaning over to plant a kiss on her forehead. She didn’t say she’d been wrong, and she didn’t tell Emma why it had been kept a secret. She didn’t apologize, and she didn’t explain. Instead she took the photo album gently from Emma’s hands and opened it up to the first page. And then she began to talk.
“This was just a few hours after you were both born,” she said, her voice soft and thick. “I was in labor for twelve hours. You two were worse than any of the others.”
Emma watched her mom’s face as she flipped the pages, the lines that gathered at the corners of her eyes like a map of their shared past.
“You came out first,” she said, tracing the edges of the picture with her thumb. “And then he …” She cleared her throat, then started again. “And then Thomas—Tommy—was next. His face was all pinched like he was already annoyed at being last.” She smiled and blinked hard. “He would’ve been a real handful. He was already stubborn as anything. It’s amazing how much you can tell, even in such a short time.”
Emma leaned in closer to look at the pictures, so close that their elbows were touching, and after a few minutes she rested her cheek on her mother’s shoulder, looking on as Mom colored in the pictures, filling in the missing pieces.
When she paused, Emma sat up to look at her.
“I study anthropology,” Mom said, her eyes focused across the room. “I lecture about grief, about burial rights and the way people mourn.” She turned to face Emma. “There’s no right way to do it. Some people need to talk, and others just can’t. Some need to remember, and others to forget. It’s different for everyone.”
Emma nodded, and Mom shook her head and smiled.
“And some need to steal a couple of cars and drive a few hundred miles.”
“Some do, I guess,” Emma said ruefully.
There was another soft thud from the top of the stairs, and they both looked over to see Dad’s loafers, and then a moment later his balding head, as he ducked to see who was below. And by the time he reached the bottom step—his face already changing as he realized what they were looking at—Patrick was pounding his way down as well, muttering all the while about how hungry he was before falling silent when he saw the scene on the couch. One by one they were joined by the rest of the family, until all of them were huddled together in the damp coolness of the basement. Nate nodded at Emma from where he sat on the arm of the couch, and she smiled at him gratefully. Upstairs the burgers were burning on the grill, and the salad was growing limp in its bowl. But no one seemed in a rush to leave as Mom began to speak again.
There were no asides about poetry or statistics, no interruptions or jokes. They were too busy listening and remembering, digging through the old collection of memories, the lost history that belonged to each and every one of them. It almost felt as if the story couldn’t have been told until now anyway, until they were all gathered here together like this.
And just like that, Emma knew what she wanted for her birthday.
chapter twenty-six
When Peter woke the following morning, it was to discover two state troopers leaning against the blue convertible and regarding him suspiciously. Their patrol car was parked just behind it, the squawking of the radio interrupting the otherwise quiet morning. Beside him the dog lifted his head and then—seeing nothing of any great interest—rolled back over in the soft grass with a contented sigh.
Peter ruffled the back of his hair and yawned, stumbling to his feet. His clothes were wet with dew, and when he glanced out over the battlefield, he found it hidden by a low-hanging fog.
“Morning,” Peter said with a nod, ambling past the officers. He fumbled for his keys, then opened the passenger-side door and reached in to grab his cell phone, which was making a series of faint beeps, its battery nearly dead. He rested an elbow on the roof of the car, scrolling through his missed calls, his heart picking up speed when he guessed it was Emma who had been trying to reach him.
One of the troopers cleared his throat a bit too forcefully, and Peter glanced up at them over the top of the car. He raised his eyebrows and tried his best to look polite, though all he felt was impatience. There suddenly seemed about a million places he should be, a thousand things he needed to say and do, and two people he wanted desperately to talk to. He didn’t have time to exchange pleasantries with two cops in pointy hats and overly tight pants.
“Everything okay?” the taller one asked from behind aviator glasses that made him look like a bug. Peter slipped his still-beeping phone into his pocket and nodded.
“Are you lost, son?” the other asked, and Peter couldn’t help laughing at this, shaking his head and grinning like an idiot, because for once in his life he was lost, yet somehow, as unlikely as it seemed, he’d never felt quite so sure of himself.
“I’m okay,” he told them, feeling a lot like Emma, bold and spontaneous and unafraid. “Just passing through.”
“Where to?”
Peter shrugged, still smiling. “I don’t know yet.”
“Right,” said one of the troopers, reaching for his walkie-talkie. He glanced at his partner, rolling his eyes in Peter’s direction with a remarkable lack of subtlety. “Your call, Joe.”
Joe was now working a sesame seed out of his front tooth with his pinky, having apparently lost interest. He shrugged. “Don’t let it happen again, kid. This is a historical site, not a hotel. If you can’t tell the difference, I suggest you get yourself a map next time.”
Peter nodded, just barely managing to keep a straight face. “Thank you, sir,” he said, appropriately solemn. “I’ll do that.”
The messages had been left only minutes apart, all of them late the night before. In the first she didn’t even bother with a greeting, instead launching right into a recitation of the names of important battlefields—in alphabetical order—until the phone cut her off. In the second one all she said was, “Those are all the places I promise to go with you on the way home if you’ll just do me one last favor.” Then there was the sound of yelling in the background, and a whistle, and then muffled laughter before the message came to an abrupt end.
Peter had pulled over to the side of the road once he was far enough away from the state troopers, and he now jabbed at the numbers on the keypad, impatient for the next message.
“Sorry about that,” it began, and Peter smiled almost reflexively when he heard her voice again. “I think my brothers have somehow reverted to whatever age they were when we last lived in this house. Anyway, this is my version of an apology. I know it’s not great, but I’ve messed up everything else so far, so why not this, too?”
There was a short silence, and then she cleared her throat. “So, look. I’ll go to all those old battlefields with you, and I’ll even listen to you talk about them, if you’ll come back here and pick me up first. There’s just one more thing I need to do before heading home. I understand if you’re already too far away, or if you just don’t want to come, but it would mean a lot if you did. So if you can, meet me back in the cemetery tomorrow morning at eleven, okay?”
Peter kept the phone pressed to his ear long after it had gone dead. And then, once he felt prepared to start the engine again, he swung into a U-turn and pointed the car east once more.
But there was one thing he needed to do first, and it wasn’t long before he found himself standing outside a gas station that straddled an intersection between two backcountry roads, a small cabin of a building that was now more yellow than white. There was a
phone booth to one side of it, looking out of place between an air pump and a display of feeble-looking purple flowers, and Peter heaved open the rusted door.
The glass was clouded with dirt, and the space inside smelled of cigarettes and stale beer. He dug in his pockets for change while reading the various inscriptions etched into the booth, proclamations of love and hate and revenge and loss, all tagged with initials in an effort to leave some kind of mark on the world.
Nearly out of money by now, he only managed to come up with two nickels and a penny, and so he picked up the phone and dialed the operator to make a collect call. He played with the cord as he listened to it ring, wondering what his dad had been doing, wondering if he’d even accept the call. But a moment later his voice came over the line, a gruff hello that gave nothing away.
“Hi, Dad,” Peter said, making an effort to keep his voice steady. “How are you?”
There was a brief pause. “How am I?”
“Yeah, sure. How are you?”
“What is this, a social call?” Dad practically spit into the phone. “How am I? Well, I’m fantastic. Really. Just wonderful.”
“That’s great,” Peter said, bobbing his head.
Dad snorted. “And where the hell are you? Or is it too much to ask to be kept up to speed on your whereabouts?”
“I’m in Tennessee. On my way back to North Carolina.”
“On your way back to North Carolina,” Dad muttered. “I guess there’s no point in asking why you’re not on your way back to New York?”
“I’ll get the car back to you, Dad,” Peter said. “I promise.”
“It’s not the car I’m worried about,” he said, and then coughed into the phone and made a few grumbling noises.
They seemed to run out of things to say then, caught between polite conversation and their usual dynamic, between anger and relief.
“So what the hell are you doing down there, anyway?” Dad asked eventually. “Looking at colleges or something?”
Peter pressed the phone harder against his ear. “Not really, no. I’ve got some time to decide all that.”
“I heard there are some good ones down there.”
“I know,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking it probably makes sense to apply to a whole bunch of different places. Just to see what happens.”
“What about … ?”
“Yeah,” Peter said, nodding into the phone. “There, too.”
“But I thought you hated this place,” Dad said with barely disguised shock. “I thought you’d rather be anywhere but home.”
“Maybe that was just because I’d never been anywhere else,” he said. “It’s hard to know what you’re looking for when you’ve only seen one thing.”
“And now what? You’re some big-time traveler, ready to come home?”
“Guess so,” Peter said, tracing a heart that had been carved into the glass door of the phone booth. He thought carefully about his next words. “People can change, you know, Dad,” he said hopefully, but when, after a few beats of silence, it didn’t appear that there would be a response to this, he sighed and leaned against the booth. “Anyway, I wanted you to know I’m not coming home just yet. I’ve got to go back and get Emma first.”
To Peter’s surprise Dad seemed to find this funny, the phone rattling with his laughter, a sharp and unfamiliar sound. “Is that what this is about?”
“What?”
“A girl?”
Peter hesitated. “Would that make it better?”
“Trust me, son. Nothing’s gonna make this better,” Dad said, but Peter could hear the amusement in his voice all the same, an overtone of relief that seemed to stretch across the conversation. It wasn’t coming easily, and it wasn’t yet natural for them. But it was there all the same.
“You know,” Dad said after a moment, “I once drove your mother up to the Canadian border. Only trip we ever really took. We didn’t tell our parents either, and by the time we got back, we were in a whole world of trouble.”
Peter found he was holding his breath. “Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“No, I mean why did you go?”
“She wanted to see Niagara Falls.” He fell quiet, and Peter let the silence swell between them. “She had a thing for waterfalls. Kind of the way you are with those damn battlefields, I guess.”
Peter smiled. “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”
There was a long pause, and for a moment Peter was afraid his dad wasn’t going to answer. But then his voice came over the line again, his words soft and measured.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I will.”
It seemed impossible that it had only been twenty-four hours since he and Emma last stood in this same cemetery before this same sleepy church. The sky was clear this morning, cloudless and breezy, and the place now had an almost springtime feel to it. A group of sparrows scattered when Peter pulled the car into the drive, taking a few hops before launching themselves skyward, and the sun made everything looked tinged in gold, as if lit up from the inside out.
There were several more cars in the lot today, so Peter had to park farther from the cemetery. He was so concentrated on scanning the churchyard, so distracted in searching to see if Emma was there yet, that it wasn’t until he got out of the car that he realized he’d parked next to a familiar light-blue convertible very much like the one he was driving.
He stood there staring at it, the keys dangling from his hand, before collecting himself enough to take a look at the license plates, which were—as he suspected—from New York. Behind him the dog let out a few sharp barks, hitching himself up from the seat, wobbly on his bandaged leg. Peter opened the back door and half lifted him from the car, the dog wriggling with excitement as he hobbled jerkily around the parking lot until he found a suitable patch of grass, where he promptly flipped onto his back and rolled around until his fur was streaked with mud. Peter was still watching him with amusement when Emma came barreling around the side of the church.
When she saw him, she stopped short, skidding a few inches on the pavement.
“You came,” she said, her eyes widening.
Peter grinned. “Happy birthday.”
It seemed to take a moment for it to register that he was actually there, but once it did, Emma’s face broke into a smile too, and she came bounding over to greet him. When she threw her arms around his neck, the two of them breathed matching sighs of relief, both thrilled to be reunited and surprised to find the other equally as happy. There no longer seemed any point in pretending otherwise.
And before he could overthink or overanalyze it—
before he could begin to worry or calculate or consider all the things that could possibly go wrong—Peter closed his eyes and leaned in and kissed her. And much to his surprise—without bumping heads or getting tripped up by any of the other thousand or so catastrophes that might have occurred—he found that she kissed him right back. Her hair smelled of pine needles, subtle and sweet, and for the first time in his life Peter understood what the opposite of lost was: that it had nothing to do with maps or directions or staying on course; that it was, in fact, nothing more than being found.
But sooner than he would have liked, Emma took a step backward. “I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him, and Peter felt his stomach drop.
“I guess I’m the one who should be apologizing then,” he muttered, shaking his head and trying not to feel disappointed. “ I kissed you.”
“No,” she said with a frown. “Not about that. That was okay.”
Peter grinned. “It was?”
She nodded impatiently. “I meant that I’m sorry about everything else. You came on this trip without asking any questions, and you were so great about everything, and I should’ve been a better friend to you.”
“It’s fine—”
“No,” she said. “It’s not. You’ve been so good to me. Not just this past week, but always. Nobody’s ever really taken the time
to …”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Get to know me, I guess.”
“I know you,” he said with a smile. “I’ve always known you.”
Emma blinked a few times, and Peter could see that her eyes were damp. He raised a hand to brush away a stray tear with his thumb—thinking this would be both incredibly considerate and exceedingly romantic—but somehow managed to step on her toe in the process, tripping forward and poking her in the eye instead.
Emma gave a little yelp, clapping a hand over the left side of her face, and Peter stared at her in horror. “I’m so sorry,” he said in a rush. “I was only trying to—”
“It’s okay,” she said, and he was relieved to see she was half laughing at him, sniffling a bit as she took her hand away from her face and blinked a few times.
“I guess I shouldn’t have pressed my luck.”
Emma shook her head. “It’s fine, really.”
The dog ambled over, stepping gingerly on his bad paw, and Emma kneeled down and took his face in her hands as he shoved his nose into her neck, slobbering and drooling and wiggling all over.
“He’s feeling better today.”
“I’m glad,” Emma said, beaming at the dog. “And I’m glad you both came.”
She stood up and walked over to the blue convertible, popping open the trunk and rummaging through until she found a box of candles. “You guys are the last to arrive, actually. My whole family showed up yesterday, every single one of them. And since they were all down here already, I thought this would be a nice place to celebrate my birthday.”
“It is,” Peter said. “I’m glad you invited me.”
“Yeah, well, I know what a sucker you are for birthday parties,” she teased, handing him the candles and slipping the keys back in her pocket.
He laughed as he reached over to close the trunk for her. “I guess I can make an exception for this one.”
“Good,” she said. “Because everyone’s waiting for us.”