Peter picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Emma.”
“Hey,” he said, unable to hide his surprise. “How’s the trip?”
“Okay so far,” she said, and beside her the dog tilted his head as if to make the obvious point that the trip was not, in fact, okay so far.
“Good,” he said. “Are you still in the city?”
“Not exactly.”
“Where are you then?”
“In Jersey,” she said, biting her lip. “Not far from Philly. You wouldn’t still want to come along, would you?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and Emma could almost hear Peter’s mind at work. He had a way about him that might seem a bit odd to other people, but she’d grown used to it over the years. They’d known each other since her family first moved here when she was eight. Like her, Peter didn’t have many friends at school. He seemed mostly to prefer his own company, though he’d always been different around Emma. She didn’t think this could be called a friendship exactly, but she didn’t necessarily mind having him around either. He spent nearly as much time at her house as she did, and it didn’t escape her notice that, in many ways, he fit into her family far better. He knew everything there was to know about the Civil War, and had a tendency of bringing any subject around to it in the same way the rest of her family couldn’t help letting their own specialties creep into everyday conversation. But he could also remain quiet for impressively long periods of time without feeling the need to say anything, and this suited Emma just fine.
“My car sort of died,” she admitted. “But I’m not quite ready to turn back yet.”
“Well, where are you planning on going?”
“North Carolina.”
Emma held her breath as she waited for Peter to ask all the logical questions— why? and where exactly? and for how long? —but was surprised when he asked her something entirely different.
“Could we make a detour?”
“Where to?”
“Gettysburg.”
“The battlefield?” She lifted her eyes to the sky, wondering if she’d made a mistake in calling Peter after all. Gettysburg? “That’s got to be at least a few hours out of the way.”
“I could always go on my own, then pick you up afterward,” he suggested, and Emma looked around at the trucks rumbling in off the highway, the men with tall hats and heavy boots, the families eating French fries by the handful.
“No,” she said a bit too quickly. She was already in enough trouble as it was, she thought. Might as well see some sights along the way. “Gettysburg sounds great.”
Once they’d made the arrangements—an exchange of directions and landmarks and information—Emma left the dog behind and wandered back inside. It would be hours before Peter made it down here, and so she set about passing the time, losing a few quarters at the arcade, observing the flood of people from a bench beside a gumball machine, and leafing through magazines at the gift shop. There were rows upon rows of New Jersey souvenirs, glass thimbles with the state flag and spoons stamped with the official flower. There were coins and mugs and snow globes with the boardwalk underneath, the sand whirling beneath the glass like a snowstorm.
Emma ran a finger across a dusty pack of cards—each with a picture of one of the state’s many so-called attractions—and wondered at the kind of people who collected these things. It was at moments like this one that she was grateful her family was so different. They might not watch stupid movies or care about who won the Super Bowl. They might not be able to get through dinner without bringing up a long-dead poet or famous mathematician, but they also didn’t collect pens from different states. What they collected was far more important than that: words and stories, causes and facts. And it occurred now to Emma that perhaps her role in all this was to catch what they didn’t, to find and preserve and hold on to the memories that had slipped from their grasp.
Before heading back outside, Emma stopped in the bathroom and stuffed her pockets with paper towels, then grabbed an empty soda cup and filled it with water. Out on the patio the dog was sprawled beneath the table she’d been sitting at earlier, and he scrambled out from under the bench to join her. He shied away at first when she tried to clean him up, gently untangling the burrs from his coat and dabbing at the dried mud, but soon enough he rested his head on her knee and let her continue. She picked the twigs from his fur, massaged the dirt from the pads of his paws, cleaned a small cut on his snout. Around them the parking lot continued to rearrange itself, the cars coming and going without pause, and the sun slipped lower in the sky, the shadows lengthening across the pavement. The dog let out a weary sigh, and Emma did too.
A few feet away a rectangular billboard advertised area events and attractions from behind a thick pane of yellowing plastic. The notices formed a border around a large map of Northern New Jersey, its colors muted by weather and time. Emma’s eyes kept returning to the center of it, where a red circle with a tiny arrow jutting down like a spike of lightning announced you are here, and she couldn’t help wishing it were always so easy to locate herself.
Chapter eight
What Peter hadn’t told Emma was that he was already on the road—shooting south toward Gettysburg as if he’d been summoned to battle there himself—and this alone should have struck him as a warning sign. If she knew that he’d already gone through the trouble of stealing a car and sneaking away from his dad, and not for her sake, not for any grand reason, but simply out of frustration at the latest in a long string of frustrations, then it wouldn’t seem like such a very big deal that he was now on his way to rescue her.
And much to his surprise Peter found himself hoping that Emma would think it was just that. A very big deal.
He checked his phone one more time—just to be entirely, completely, utterly certain that the call had actually taken place—and felt a strange sense of excitement that made his stomach wobble and his hands flutter on the steering wheel. A smarter person would have told her that he couldn’t come, would have stopped himself from getting off at the next exit, making a slight change in direction and heading east toward New Jersey. But although Peter was smart about a rather impressive range of things, dealing with girls was simply not one of them.
Up until Emma called, he’d been driving on sheer worry, propelled by a nervous fear of what Dad might do when he got off work later this evening to discover that both his son and the car were gone. Peter tried to distract himself by thinking of all the places he might now visit, the national parks and historical monuments he’d always wanted to see. But what if they weren’t what he imagined? What if the battlefields were overrun by tourists? What if the Smoky Mountains weren’t that much better than the hills of upstate New York? What if the World’s Largest Ball of Twine didn’t turn out to be very big at all?