“I was thinking …,” she said, and Peter sat up a bit straighter.
“That we’ll keep going?” he asked, looking relieved. “Tomorrow morning?”
Emma smiled. “I think so, yeah. How could we turn back now?”
“We couldn’t,” Peter said in a solemn voice, and they both nodded, each feeling the same sense of importance, as if they’d just solidified the terms of a business deal, a verbal contract ensuring the continuation of this riskiest of ventures, the unfinished endeavor they both felt compelled to see through to the end.
Chapter eighteen
They waited until Annie had left for work, until the coffee
had been poured and the cereal eaten, until Charles reappeared after forgetting his wallet. They waited until the bags had been packed and the good-byes had been said and the instructions for getting home had been written down for them. And then they walked outside, got into the car, and drove off in the exact opposite direction.
Emma changed her mind three different times about whether or not to leave a note, while Peter waited patiently by the door. “It’s not like she won’t guess where we’re headed,” he offered, but in the end Emma slid the envelope onto the coffee table anyway.
Even the dog was quiet as they pulled onto the highway, sweeping beneath the signs pointing toward Richmond, Virginia. There was an unmistakable feeling that the stakes had been raised, that despite all that had come before this, it was really only now that they’d crossed some sort of line. There are certain things in life that you’ll be forgiven for, no matter how thoughtless or stupid or reckless, but if you do that same thing twice, you’re on your own. And so now they both understood that there was no turning back.
This didn’t bother Peter nearly as much as it seemed to be bothering Emma. The top was down on the convertible, and she had both arms resting on her door, her whole body twisted away from him so that it looked like she was contemplating an escape. It was as if they’d swapped places; Peter felt almost frighteningly happy, completely unworried about the world outside the car, while Emma looked miserably unsettled, her mouth set in a straight line, her head resting on her arms so that the wind blew her hair back like the tail of a kite.
Every so often he glanced over and tried to catch her eye, but she seemed lost in thought and determined to stay that way. And so he did his best to look concerned too—about blatantly disobeying her parents, about continuing the trip without permission, about what might meet them in North Carolina—but it proved impossible to fix his face a certain way, like trying not to laugh at church.
“Don’t you sort of wish we could keep going?” he asked, when he couldn’t help himself any longer. “Just drive out west, see the country …”
Emma swung her head around and gave him an odd look, like she hadn’t quite heard him correctly, or was wishing that that were the case. She rocked back hard against the seat; behind her the dog opened one eye, then crawled over to curl up behind Peter instead.
“I can’t believe I never even noticed,” she said, tipping her head back to look at the open sky, an impossible shade of blue marked off only by the fading white trail from a distant plane, like the wake of a boat.
“Noticed what?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew.
“There must have been so many times when they were sad about it,” she said. “It’s easy to blame them for never telling me, but how could I have lived with them for nearly seventeen years and never noticed, either?”
“Sometimes it’s hardest to see the people closest to us,” Peter said, thinking of his dad sitting alone in his dirty tube socks with a bowl of peanuts in front of him, the tinny sounds of a baseball game drifting from a dusty television set. His throat felt suddenly tight, and whatever it was—guilt? regret? worry?—made his heart quicken.
He gripped the wheel a bit harder and tried to think of something else to say to Emma, something comforting or understanding, something impressively wise. But everything he could think of—every trite piece of advice or bit of canned wisdom—seemed to hit alarmingly close to home for him, too. After all, wasn’t he just as guilty as she was? Of running away and ignoring his family? Of spending so much time wishing things were otherwise that he sometimes failed to see them as they were?
But Emma had fallen silent again, and it seemed there was little for Peter to do now other than lower his foot on the gas and ease the car into the fast lane, putting more miles between himself and his father, between here and home, between who he wished to be and who he actually was. For the moment, at least, it seemed just that easy to fall farther off the map, and for once he was more than happy to do so.
Emma’s phone, which was resting in her lap, began to buzz again, a sound now as familiar as the odd musicality of the car itself, and she stared at it for a good long while before casually raising a hand and tossing it out the side of the car.
Peter opened his mouth, glancing up to the rearview to see the tiny piece of plastic go skittering off the road. He started to pull over, but Emma put a hand on his arm.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Keep going.”
“What’d you do that for?” he asked, incredulous, thinking what a stupid thing it had been to do, how completely and utterly Emma.
“Because,” she said calmly, “they’re just going to keep calling. But we made our decision. We’re going.”
“But what if there was an emergency?”
“Like what?” she said. “And anyway, you still have a phone.”
“Yeah, but what if we got separated?”
“Why would we?”
“But just, what if?”
“We won’t,” she said, her tone so final that Peter decided it was easier to just drop the conversation altogether and concentrate on the road instead.
Emma’s brother’s house—their final destination—was tucked in the far western corner of North Carolina, where the state tapers off until it runs headfirst into Tennessee. This meant they had to cut across all of Virginia, and he frowned as he did the calculations in his head, tallying up hours and miles, accounting for his newly acquired and slightly paranoid tendency of obeying the speed limit.
“Do you want to get there today or tomorrow?” he asked Emma, who turned around and fixed him with a look bordering on disdain.
“Why would I want to get there tomorrow if I could get there today?”