You Are Here (7 page)

“What a proud moment.”

Peter ignored them and looked over at Dad, whose mouth was set in a thin line.

“It’s not like I was taking it anywhere,” he began, but Dad’s left eye had started to twitch, which usually only happened when someone stole a stop sign or smashed the neighborhood pumpkins on Halloween. He grabbed a deck of cards and slammed them hard on the kitchen table.

“You boys set up,” he said, his eyes still on Peter. “I’ll be right back.”

He stalked off toward the stairs, and the other three men looked at Peter sheepishly, averting their eyes and busying themselves with the poker chips as if suddenly embarrassed for him. Nobody liked to see someone stumble into the path of Sheriff Finnegan when his twitchy eye was acting up. Peter took a deep breath, then followed the heavy sound of Dad’s footsteps.

He was in Peter’s bedroom, of all places, his back to the door. He seemed to be deep in thought, contemplating the maps still spread out across much of the floor.

“Sometimes I just like to sit out there,” Peter said to his dad’s broad back, and he saw the muscles in his shoulders tense and then slacken again. “It’s not like I was going anywhere. I didn’t even have the keys.”

“Exactly,” Dad said, spinning around, fixing him with a hard look. “So answer me this: How does someone get into a locked car without keys?”

Peter pushed at his glasses and looked away. This was a famous tactic of Dad’s, the pseudorhetorical question. It was far more effective than a simple accusation, in that it required an answer. And he had no problem waiting around until he got one.

“I was just
sitting
,” Peter said, surprised to hear the resentment in his voice. “Is there a law against sitting these days?”

“In stolen property, yes.”

Peter snorted. “It was hardly
stolen
.”

“Whether or not you had intent to steal it is beside the point,” Dad said, pacing a little circle around the room, the maps fluttering in his wake. “You were trespassing.”

“Dad, come on,” Peter said, suddenly weary. “Can’t we just talk normally?”

His father raised an eyebrow. “Normally?”

“Without the cop jargon,” he sighed. “You’re off duty.”

“Sure doesn’t feel like it,” Dad said. “Not when I come home and find that my kid’s broken into an impounded car.”

“I wasn’t—”

Dad cut him off. “I don’t care,” he said, his eyes flinty. He spread his palm over the globe on Peter’s desk and then spun it hard. “If you want to run as far away as you can next year, then that’s fine with me. But for now you’re still living in
my
house.”

Peter lifted his chin. There was hardly any point in arguing with Dad even when he was in the right—which was definitely not the case now that Peter’s frequent break-ins had been discovered—but still, something in his throat felt tight, and the backs of his eyes were burning, and he couldn’t explain the anger that gripped him except to wonder whether it had always been there and he just hadn’t realized.

He knew, even before he said it, that it was a stupid thing to do. But he cleared his throat anyway. “It’s my house too.”

“Really?” Dad said, looking almost amused by this. “Because you sure as hell don’t act like it. You can’t wait to get out of here, turning your nose up at a good paying job and spending all your time over at the Healys, talking about books or whatever it is you do.” His face was nearly white as he took a few steps closer, and for a brief and unreal moment Peter wondered if he might hit him. But then his voice grew quiet, and he straightened his shoulders. “Like this family isn’t good enough for you.”

Peter had always known this is what his father thought of him, but hearing him say it out loud was like being stopped short, like running up against a brick wall. It struck him for the first time ever that maybe his dad was actually
jealous
of the Healys, of what they meant to Peter, of what they represented. But instead of feeling sorry or sad, Peter only found himself getting angrier. Because what right did Dad have to be so resentful of the Healys’ time with Peter, when he never showed the slightest bit of interest himself?

“I grew up in this town,” Dad was saying now. “Your
mother
grew up in this town. She
loved
this place. And it’s not good enough for
you
?”

He flicked a hand through the air as if to swat at a fly, but Peter just stood there, stunned and reeling. It felt like a betrayal of some kind, bringing up his mother in the midst of an argument like this, and it caught him completely off balance.

For as long as Peter could remember, Dad had held onto his grief with a silent and stoic determination, retaining a sorrowful monopoly on all those things that mattered, stories and memories and pictures. Because of this, Peter knew astonishingly little about his mother.

When he was younger, he used to make an effort, a kind of pitiful doggedness to his attempts. At dinner Dad would pass him a casserole dish of green beans, and Peter would immediately demand to know whether his mother had liked them.

“No,” Dad would answer shortly, grabbing for the salt. The same held true for carrots and potatoes, chicken and steak, apples and bananas, until Peter began to wonder if his mom had eaten anything at all. If he were to believe his father, she didn’t like sprinkles on her ice cream or dressing on her salad. She didn’t like mittens or porches, Christmas trees or the ballet, teddy bears or fresh snow. Each of his questions was always punctuated by a short “no,” and once he was old enough to understand that his mother probably
had
liked things like soap and flowers and socks—that his father’s answers had simply become a habit, a reflex as rote as saying “bless you” after someone sneezes—he stopped asking altogether.

He couldn’t help feeling sometimes like he wasn’t entitled to the same kind of sadness as Dad, who had known her and loved her and laughed with her, who must have seen her make a sandwich and fly a kite and bite her fingernails and cry at the movies. He’d been witness to all those things that made her who she was, and he seemed to have decided somewhere along the way that all this was his alone to bear.

And so now all Peter could do was stare at him, angry that he’d invoked her name like that, sharply and carelessly, throwing it at Peter like a weapon he’d been storing away. It took him a moment to collect himself enough to respond.

“Then why do you even want me here?” he said eventually, before good sense could step in and give him a chance to turn around, to walk away, to keep his mouth shut. “If you really think that’s how I am, then why do you try so hard to keep me here? Why do you make me feel so guilty about wanting to leave?”

Dad leaned against the desk and gave Peter a wounded look, causing him to falter and fall silent. When he spoke again, his words were quieter, more restrained.

“I’m here now, and we mostly just ignore each other anyway,” Peter said, his face hot with guilt or regret or maybe both. “So what’s the point?”

They stared at each other—each looking surprised to have stumbled into such foreign territory and found the other there too—and Peter thought to say more. But he wasn’t sure what was left, and before he had a chance to do anything else, Dad lowered his head and scratched at the back of his neck and grunted. It was hard to tell if he was hurt or angry or upset, and Peter thought it was probably all of these things and more.

From downstairs they could hear Dad’s buddies laughing loudly over something in the kitchen. Peter took a small step sideways, leaving the doorway clear, and without another word—without even looking at him—Dad walked straight past him and out of the room, moving heavily down the stairs.

As soon as he was gone, Peter sank down on his bed and rubbed his eyes. His back and shoulders ached as if they’d been throwing actual punches, not just verbal ones. He felt drained and exhausted, but also strangely relieved, like he’d been holding his breath for years and could now finally exhale.

Near his foot was a map of Gettysburg, and he looked down at the ridges and grooves running across the land. It wasn’t just the nation that the war had divided; it was families, as well. Everyone had been fighting for what they thought was right, no matter who was on the opposite side of the line, whether it was your father or your brother or your son. It was about issues and causes and ideas, and what more could you ask of a person, Peter thought, than to risk all that they were for all they believed they could be?

Later that night, after the sounds of the poker game had grown quiet in the kitchen—the clinking of chips and shuffling of cards, the rowdy laughter and softer groans of failure when luck started to run out—Peter tiptoed down the stairs. He paused at the bottom and peeked around the corner to see all four men on the couches in the family room, their socked feet propped on the coffee table, an impressive display of empty beer cans arranged before them. From where he stood, Peter could only see the back of Dad’s head, but despite the volume of the baseball game on TV, the others looked to be in various stages of sleep: one snoring, one with his eyes half closed, and the other with his mouth stretched open in an enormous yawn.

Peter slipped past the doorway and through the kitchen, moving silently around the table littered with stray cards and peanut shells and into the small hallway that bridged the kitchen and the garage, where he nudged open the door to his dad’s office.

He could count the number of times he’d been in here: once when he’d been stung by a bee and rushed in without thinking; once when Dad forgot to bring some paperwork into the station and called to ask Peter to find it for him. Another time a rainstorm had caused the window to leak, and the two of them had worked to plug the hole together, keeping the water from ruining the many plaques and certificates that checkered the walls, tokens of appreciation from a town grateful for his dad’s service.

Peter knew that one of the cabinets along the side of the room held two narrow shoeboxes filled with pictures of his mom. When he was little, he used to ask to look at them from time to time, and Dad would walk stiffly into the office while Peter hung back, clinging to the doorframe. He was always amazed at how gingerly Dad cradled the boxes, handling them with utmost care, as if they were important evidence in a criminal case rather than faded old snapshots.

Standing in the office now without permission, Peter felt nearly dizzy, and he moved quickly to the large oak desk in the middle of the room and pulled open the bottom drawer. There was a brown envelope that he’d seen before, the one where Dad dropped the keys each time a new car took up residence in the lot out back. He fished through until he found the set he remembered coming in months ago along with the blue convertible—an ugly blue rabbit’s foot that had been dangling from the ignition that day like something that had curled up and died in the car—and he pulled them out and closed his hand around them.

It wasn’t that he was necessarily going anywhere.

But it was nice to know he could.

chapter seven

Emma’s life before this—first in North Carolina, then Washington, then New York City—was difficult to bring into focus. There were still the lingering outlines of houses and apartments, vague reminders of wallpaper patterns, a garage with a basketball hoop, a backyard with a swing set. But it was hard to separate what she knew from what she had seen in home videos and photo albums, from stories pried from unwilling memories.

Nobody in her family parted easily with information about the past. There were few tales of birthday parties or summer vacations unless they happened to coincide with a historical event, a book signing, or an academic conference. Her parents always teased Emma for her impatience—that skittish streak that kept her always on edge—but it was they who were hard to pin down. They had minds only for certain intellectual pursuits, and as she grew older, Emma saw that it was just getting worse. In a way it was not unlike a disease. Her dad was being slowly ravaged by poetry. Her mom had very nearly succumbed to the study of burial rites worldwide.

Somewhere along the way her family seemed to have come unglued; when, Emma wasn’t exactly sure. But she was beginning to wonder whether it had more to do with her forgotten brother than the natural forces of distance and time.