Back home in upstate New York, Peter’s bedroom was much the same. It looked a lot like the last outpost to some unexplored region of the world, or else the situation room of a government agency, strewn with maps and notes and thumbtacks as if something—either a great war or a great discovery—were imminent. Some of the maps were fairly basic, with states the color of bubble gum peering up at him from opened books on the floor beside his bed, the kind of sunshiny atlases where the lakes and rivers are so blue you nearly expect a fish to poke his head out and wave a fin in greeting. Most of these were left over from Peter’s younger days, when he’d made a game out of memorizing the state capitals, inventing characters out of the names: Ms. Helena Montana, the old woman who sat rocking herself to sleep on a porch overlooking the mountains, or Mr. Montgomery Alabama, the slow-talking Southern gentleman who could always be counted on to wear his finest suit.
But there were other maps too. Road maps, with their unruly lines, and topographical ones with rings upon rings circling the sunken paper mountains like the inside of an ancient tree. Some showed the climate, and others marked off national treasures or parks. A few focused in on specific towns, while others panned out to include the entire country, welcoming the pale oceans that crept into the frame on either side. There were a few yellowing military maps from various time periods, and even one dating back to the Civil War, unearthed last summer at the local farmers’ market.
The shelves that lined the rest of the room featured a combination of required reading for school— The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath —and an astonishing assortment of books about cartography, geography, and of course the Civil War, another peculiar fascination of Peter’s. It was sometimes hard to know which had come first, the maps or the soldiers, but somewhere along the way they’d come to coexist, and now along the edges of the shelves there were lines of little metal soldiers dressed in blue and gray, who had to be nudged aside each time you needed a book, running the risk of a domino effect, the possibility of an entire fallen unit.
Peter was not unaware of how all this looked. Not only could it pass for the room of the nerdiest kid in school—an observation not wholly inaccurate—but it might very well be mistaken for the home of some delusional nutcase who appeared to be making preparations for a march back through time, as if hoping to follow the carefully outlined maps straight back into the Battle of Antietam.
Peter, however, had no such plans.
Though this is not to say he didn’t have other ones. In fact Peter Finnegan had more plans than anyone he knew. And not the normal kind, the see you after school or what are you doing Saturday night? or meet me in the cafeteria kind.
Instead Peter planned to go to Australia and Africa and Alaska and Antarctica, and that was just the A s. The list grew from there, ballooning to include Bali and Bangladesh, China and California and Chicago. He had marked carefully on the map the place where you might catch a ferry from Ireland to Scotland, had researched mountain climbing in Switzerland and cage diving with sharks off the coast of South Africa. He’d included places like Boston, too, Maine and Canada and even Boise, where he would sample potatoes dipped in butter or ketchup, potatoes fried, peeled, boiled, mashed, and baked. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a fan of the potatoes Dad cooked back in upstate New York. They’d be different in Boise. That’s what happened when you clawed away the drab details of your real life and shed them for something different, something more exciting and altogether more real. That’s when life really started. In some faraway place, exotic or rustic, foreign or familiar—but somewhere, elsewhere, anywhere but here.
“What’s the point?” Dad would say whenever Peter slid a travel magazine across the dinner table, or showed him some advertisement for a sale on airline tickets or a kids-stay-free deal at a roadside motel. “You want to pay for a crappy room with a broken mattress and a moldy showerhead, when you can stay in the comfort of your own home for free?”
He’d sweep an arm across the kitchen to demonstrate those very comforts, highlighting the rusty faucet and partially unhinged cabinets with all the enthusiasm of a game-show host. The whole house—which they’d moved into just after Peter was born and his mother died, events separated only by minutes, a double feature of joy and tragedy that had forever confused that day—was decorated in various shades of green, which had faded over the years to give the place an algae-like feeling, gauzy and faded, like they were living in a long-forgotten shipwreck under the sea.
Peter was hard-pressed to pick out the so-called comforts of the place, and thought a change of scenery—a seaside cottage in Cape Cod, or a tourist trap near the Grand Canyon—might do them both a great deal of good. But Dad seemed just as content to flop down on the couch each night after work, still decked out in his police uniform, so that he looked like an extra in one of those TV shows, an officer thrown aside as the criminal makes his break. For him the comforts of home included a can of beer, a bowl of peanuts, and a baseball game with the volume turned low enough that he might dip in and out of sleep.
And so, until today, the only place checked off Peter’s list—which took up half a spiral notebook, including addendums and footnotes—was New York City, which he’d once visited with his class on the biannual school field trip. He’d been just nine, and had fallen asleep on the bus ride down—something that later seemed horribly unfair, like he’d been swindled by his heavy eyelids—and had missed the scenery, though he could have quite easily directed the bus driver from Route 12 to I-87 and straight on into the city without thinking twice.
But it was the outside world he’d most wanted to see, the river gorges and hillsides that marked a transition from one place to another. When he woke up, enormous buildings had sprouted on either side of the bus as if by magic, and he’d spent the day trailing after the rest of his class in an unblinking daze. On the way home he’d somehow fallen asleep again, lulled by the rocking motion of the bus, and Hank Green had put a straw up his nose, and Liza and Maggie Kessler—evil twins if there ever were—had drawn a handlebar mustache on his face with red marker that took three days to rub out completely.
His class had gone back three times since then, but that was Peter’s only trip. The second time he’d had chicken pox, and he’d come down with a bad case of strep throat on the third. Last year he’d been excluded as a punishment for “smart-mouthing” his teacher, though he’d only been trying to correct her after she repeatedly mispronounced “fallback plan,” describing the Union’s second-day battle strategy at Gettysburg as a “fall- black plan.” Afterward, when she’d sent him to the principal’s office, Peter had refused to admit to the “heckling” he was accused of and therefore sat in mute silence until his dad arrived, his badge prominently displayed, looking vaguely pleased at the idea of his son’s first foray into troublemaking. Peter had always suspected his father would have known better how to raise a kid who threw eggs at people’s windshields or set off stink bombs in the school bathroom. As it was, the man had no clue how to deal with a too-skinny, bespectacled boy who somehow preferred maps and battlefields to baseball and video games.