He was standing before the grave of a woman who’d died in 1924 at the age of thirty, the same age his mom had been when she’d died giving birth to him, and because it was autumn and the leaves were falling all around them, because the world was a blur of red and brown and orange, because he had no one to talk to—had never had anyone to talk to—and because Emma was here and his dad wasn’t (was never really there, even when he was), because of all this Peter turned to tell Emma about his mother, about the hole that had been torn in the map of his life, like a town he’d never had the chance to visit, like all the towns in the world he’d never seen and maybe never would.
But when he looked over, Emma had her head tipped back against the tree, and was humming as she watched the clouds move through the branches. Peter realized then how alone they each were. It was just that now they were alone together.
As he drove away from Nate’s house, Peter gave the steering wheel a good solid pound with his fist. When the car jerked to the left with an enthusiastic little surge, he twisted to apologize to the dog, who opened one eye and yawned.
Peter couldn’t believe he’d driven all this way only to end up alone again.
It was hard to believe that after all these days with Emma he hadn’t picked up even a shred of her self-confidence, her reckless spontaneity and unchecked impulsiveness. He was still just as awkward and hesitant and hopeless as he’d always been, and the more he tried to overcome it, the worse it seemed to get. Just now he’d stood outside the car, and he’d waved good-bye, and he’d watched her march up to the door on her own. And then he’d driven away like a coward.
Now he considered heading south, but he’d come too far in that direction with Emma to continue on without her. East was the ocean, and Peter could already imagine a more forlorn version of himself gazing out at the open sea, angrily tossing rocks, tracing pathetic little hearts into the sand. It would all be very melodramatic, and so he thought it best to head west instead, a nod to the time-honored tradition of starting over.
There were several battlefields in the eastern part of Tennessee, strewn across the crooked edge of the state like minefields in its history. For the most part these were not like ones in the North. These were different types of memorials entirely, many of them home to crushing defeats and demoralizing losses by the South, and it seemed somehow fitting that Peter had come all the way down here to witness this.
He felt a small degree of comfort knowing he was not the first person to raise a white flag and slink away in a miserable retreat across this very land.
It wasn’t long before he crossed the state line and came upon a sign for the first in a string of minor battlefields. He pulled the car off onto a gravel shoulder a few hundred yards short of the paved lot and the improvised tourist center, a small yellow trailer with an awning that flapped noisily in the wind.
It was almost evening now, and the sky was nearly colorless, a sharp wind raking the dirt along the ground. Unlike Gettysburg with its crowds of people, its maps and plaques and monuments, this was nothing more than a sprawling field, interrupted only by the occasional cluster of boulders and a couple of quivering jackrabbits lying low in the grass. There were only a few scattered cars in the parking lot, and a small group of men loitering near the visitors’ center, the brims of their caps pulled low. Other than that, the world was perfectly still. Everything felt muffled and hushed and empty.
Peter left the dog asleep in the car and walked over to lean against the fence that bordered the old battlefield, the grass and the rocks and the history, the great sad nothingness of it all. He wrapped his hands around the knotted wood and rocked back on it, his head bent. He knew the story of what had happened here. He knew about the North’s victory, a triumph he’d read about in stories and poems and journals. He knew that nearly three hundred men had died here, that dozens of horses had stumbled for the last time, all of it hidden by a thick cloak of fog. He knew about the muskets and the gunpowder; he knew about the cannons and the cries.
But he’d never known about it like this.
He’d never seen it from this side.
The men near the visitors’ center were walking back to their trucks now, and Peter noticed that one of them had a Confederate flag on his hat. More than one hundred years later and he still bore the scars of that loss. Peter couldn’t help marveling at the way these things rippled outward, changing everyone, not just those they actually touched. Even with all the years between, all the generations later, these men still chewed on their toothpicks and gazed out at this field with damp eyes, still scraped the toes of their boots against this hallowed ground. The past still had a hold on them, no matter how thin or fragile, no matter how many ghosts had moved on or how many years had piled up since.
All his life Peter had been fascinated by history. Yet his own history remained largely unexamined. He’d never managed to find the right combination of courage and insistence to pry it away from his dad, who carried the story of Peter’s mother with him as if it were his alone. And it had always seemed to Peter that there was nothing to be done about this.
But then he’d seen Emma standing in the cemetery like that—looking down at her brother’s grave like she’d waited her whole life for that moment, without ever knowing it—and he suddenly wished he could say good-bye to his mother, too. Because if Emma could go to such great lengths for someone she’d never met—if she could drive hundreds of miles through so many states—then why couldn’t he drive at least that far in the other direction to give his dad another chance to talk about his mom?
Emma had invented a history for her brother because he hadn’t lived long enough to have a story of his own. But Peter’s mother had, and he suddenly felt determined to know it, not just the big and important things, but the smaller ones too. Like what kind of candy she liked to eat at the movies, what her favorite animal was, whether she liked mittens and flannel sheets and secretly didn’t mind the early darkness that muffled their town in the winters. He wondered whether she was good or bad with directions, whether she knew how to read a map, or if she said the numbers aloud when doing a math problem. He thought about all the years of homemade cookies and woolen socks he’d missed out on, all the good-night kisses and comforting words, and he felt an aching in his chest like a knot that refused to come undone.
The sun had fallen below the horizon now, leaving in its wake just a few strands of pink clouds, which hung low in the sky like ribbons. Peter climbed up onto the fence, his heels braced against the lower rung, and watched the shadows shift across the battlefield. He dug at a rusted nail with his thumb and kicked his heels against the fence. He tried to think of his place on a map, to pin down his exact location, to work out the coordinates, but he couldn’t seem to concentrate on the precise geography of the moment, and so there was nothing for him to do but stare out across the field instead, his mind strangely quiet, unaccustomed to feeling lost.