Emma moved her chin just slightly. Beside a pile of garbage bags a few pigeons picked at someone’s leftover pizza, and Patrick took a seat on the top stair, stubbing the toe of his shoe against a crumpled cigarette on the ground.
“I guess I wasn’t around much when we lived here.”
“I know,” Emma said, and the way she said it—so quietly, as much an accusation as an affirmation—made Patrick glance over at her.
“Hey, I was all the way in California,” he said. “Just wait and see how often you race home once you go off to college.”
Emma sat down beside him on the stoop, her bare legs crossed in front of her. “Annie was closer, though,” she said, and it was a struggle to keep her voice light. “She was in DC all that time, and she only ever visited at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And Nate had a job then, with sick days and vacation days and no schoolwork, and he never came home either.”
“That’s what you get for being the baby,” Patrick said, leaning into her with his shoulder. But when she didn’t smile, his face fell too. “Come on, it wasn’t so bad.”
She shrugged. “You guys all had each other.”
“And you had Mom and Dad,” he said. “Still do, in fact.”
“Lucky me,” she said, and Patrick laughed.
“It’s your great misfortune to have gotten stuck with an entire flock of odd ducks,” he said with a grin. “But it could have been a lot worse.”
“How?”
“We could have all been boring.”
This time Emma couldn’t help laughing. “Or stupid.”
“Or average,” Patrick said, widening his eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “Don’t knock average. That’s my tribe.”
“Nah,” he said. “You’re one of us. You just don’t know it yet.”
Emma looked at him sideways. “Why do you think they moved so much?” she asked. “Those years when I was little?”
She realized she was holding her breath as she waited for an answer, but she couldn’t help it. Her parents had lived most of their lives in North Carolina, and had now spent the past eight years in upstate New York. They were the types who preferred to be settled for long periods of time, who liked to let their books accumulate a layer of dust. But just after Emma was born, they’d done short stints, first in Washington DC and then later in Manhattan, leaving each city after only a few years. The pattern had always struck her as odd, a restless spike of activity in an otherwise level existence. It was almost as if they’d been chased north somehow, and it had always seemed to Emma that there was something haunted in their flight. Only now she knew why. Now the ghost had a name. And a part of her suddenly wanted to hear Patrick say it.
“Don’t know,” he said, flicking his eyes away. “Change of scenery, I guess.”
“It just seems kind of strange, them moving around so often like that.”
He shrugged. “I suppose they had their reasons.”
“So then why’d they finally stop?”
“Stop moving?” he asked, then smiled. “Because you told them to.”
This, to Emma, didn’t seem like an awful lot to go on. “So?”
“You don’t remember?” Patrick said, looking off down the street, his eyes faraway. “You got first pick of rooms in the house upstate, since the rest of us were mostly gone at that point, and you walked straight up to the smallest one, the one with the twin beds …” His voice seemed to catch on the phrase, and he swallowed hard before continuing. “… And you pointed at it and said it was yours. That it felt like home. And when Mom and Dad asked you why, you said it was because you wouldn’t get lonely there.”
Emma tried hard not to let her face slip. “So?” she said again, though with less conviction this time.
Patrick turned to look at her, as if he only just now realized she was sitting beside him, and there was something in his eyes she hadn’t seen before, something more genuine than the guy with the mind like a calculator, something sadder than the good-natured brother she’d always known. And somehow this was comforting. Somehow it made her feel just a little bit less alone.
He shook his head and then stood abruptly. “Nothing,” he said, adopting his usual goofy grin, allowing the moment to be snuffed out as quickly as it had begun.
Overhead the sky had turned flat and gray, and the trees above them shuddered beneath the first curtain of rain. Emma held out her palm to catch the drops clinging to the fire escape above.
“We’ve already had forty inches of rain this year,” Patrick said, hopping down a few steps, as if determined to return to his usual self. “That puts us ahead of the average by over ten inches. Do you realize that the volume of rain in Manhattan just for the month of June would be enough to fill—”
“Patrick,” Emma said quietly, cutting him off.
“Sorry,” he said, tipping his head back to squint at the sky. There was something about the way he was standing—the sun failing above him and the rain coming down fast now, the smell of the puddles and the cars splashing past—that slipped the heavy bolt of her memory, and Emma looked up at him through narrowed eyes.
“Do you remember that day in the park?” she asked, still trolling her mind for the details. “It was pouring, and nobody would take me, so I cried until you finally agreed.”
Patrick looked at her from beneath wet eyelashes. “And we were the only people in the whole damn park.”
“And we played in the puddles by the duck pond.”
“And I tried to teach you about the ducks.”
“But I wouldn’t listen.”
“Which just shows how far you’ve come,” he teased, reaching out a hand to pull her up from the step. Her clothes were damp now, but there was something leisurely about the shower. A few people scurried past to duck into coffee shops or pubs, but neither of them seemed in much of a hurry to find shelter.
“See?” Patrick said, smiling at her as he started toward the corner. “I wasn’t the worst brother in the world.”
Emma hesitated for a moment before following him, thinking of her other brother, the one she’d never had the chance to know. She hadn’t, until this moment, realized that she wouldn’t tell Patrick about what she’d discovered in the attic. There was still too much she didn’t understand, and it seemed as good a plan as any to act now and think later, to start moving in the right direction and save the questions for when she got there. She wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but suddenly the quest to uncover a secret had begun to feel like something secretive too.
Down the street a man with a trumpet began to play a bluesy song, and Emma closed her eyes to listen, the notes trembling out over the dampened block. When she opened them again, the sun was already beginning to split the clouds, and the world had gone from gray to silver.
“Ready to go?” Patrick asked, and Emma thought of the car parked uptown, of all the miles ahead of her, the many states and roads and possibilities, and she nodded.
She was ready.
chapter four
Cutting through the broad state of Pennsylvania, Peter couldn’t help noticing the many green signs pointing off toward various colleges and universities. Some were bigger than others, some with fancy reputations, some he’d read about and some he hadn’t. Growing up just down the street from a college, it was sometimes easy to forget there were so many others out there. He rarely managed to get much farther than the hilltop campus, where each autumn students from across the country filtered into the stately buildings, books in hand and ready to learn.
Peter had been waiting for years to join their ranks. Not there, of course, but somewhere like it, a place with an impressive name and a reputation to match. He felt he’d been ready to go off to school since at least the fifth grade, when he first saw an article about Harvard in the New York Times and swore to himself that he, too, would one day stroll across an unfamiliar campus, passing beneath ivy-covered arches in the company of thousands of other kids, all of them just as smart, just as odd, just a
s full of potential as Peter himself.
But he’d also known from a fairly young age that if he were to leave things up to his father, he’d probably end up at the community college a few towns over, getting lifts to class from the town’s police force and clipping coupons for the rest of his life. Money had always been an issue for the Finnegans, a problem so constant that it had almost stopped seeming like a problem at all. It was just the way things were. But Peter was smart, and he knew it. And it was this—his ability to recite the first fifty digits of pi, to list all the countries of the world in alphabetical order, to calculate the square root of any number almost instantly— all this, he knew, was his ticket out of here.
But one night recently, when he’d first brought up the subject of applications over dinner, the sounds of the chapel bell ringing out from the campus just up the hill, he’d been shocked to discover that Dad actually hoped he’d choose to go there, of all places. It was true that the school had plenty to offer: history and philosophy, football games on October weekends, weathered stone buildings, and a national ranking high enough to suit Peter’s lofty standards. But more important—and a fact not specifically mentioned in the glossy brochures—was that it was right down the street.
“It’s just as good as the Ivy Leagues,” Dad told him that night, arranging the pasta on his plate into a stringy volcano. It was one of those rare evenings when both his uniform and the TV were off, and he’d managed to assemble a dinner that didn’t require the microwave. “And they offer a lot of scholarships for kids like you.”
Peter narrowed his eyes at him across the table, but Dad seemed to be focused on his plate, pouring an additional helping of red sauce straight from the jar into the heart of the pasta volcano and then staring at it as if he expected an eruption. Peter couldn’t help wondering if this was a punishment of some sort—this unforeseen effort to keep him close to home—or a cruel form of torture. Was Dad trying to put him in his place? Remind him of his roots? Be sure he knew that the socially challenged and motherless kid of a small town cop didn’t belong at a place like Harvard or Princeton or Yale?
Because if he could get a scholarship here, couldn’t he get one at any number of other schools? Places scattered across the country, in towns he’d never seen, states he’d never visited. It was no secret that he and his father barely understood each other, but it seemed hard to believe Dad actually thought that—given the choice—Peter would want to stay home for college.
The only thing harder to believe was that Dad even wanted him there in the first place.
Peter tried to imagine being the only one in the freshman dorms whose father was not an investment banker from Manhattan, or a doctor from LA, or a lawyer from Chicago, but the town sheriff, the one who might very well be responsible for arresting his new friends when they got drunk and went streaking into the mucky pond at the foot of the hill.
No, Peter had other plans, bigger plans. And they certainly didn’t include ending up down the street from his dad and their dingy little house with its fading palette of greens and its smell of stale beer. He hadn’t read every single book by Charles Dickens or memorized the map coordinates of every state capital for nothing.
His dad, however, didn’t seem to understand this, which is why Peter often preferred spending time with the Healys. Even though they both taught at the college, they’d also been professors at a handful of other universities, had moved around and seen the world before figuring out where they wanted to be. In fact sometimes he felt they understood him better than anyone—better than his father, and certainly better than Emma.
The first time he’d met the Healy family was just after they’d moved in, the summer that he and Emma both turned eight. Peter had fallen off his bike in front of their house, and Mr. Healy—who was perched on a stepladder in the openmouthed garage—rushed out to help him up. He led him in through the front door, a reassuring hand on the back of his neck, then disappeared to find the first-aid kit. Left alone in the coolness of the entryway, Peter bent to examine his knee. A moment later the professor returned with a Band-Aid, humming to himself.
“‘Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, straight and swift to my wounded I go,’” he sang out, dabbing at the cut.
Peter recognized the words from a book about the songs and poems of the Civil War, a narrow volume he’d recently checked out from the library.
“Walt Whitman,” he announced with a quiet authority, and the professor paused to look up at him, amused.
“Ah,” he said with a grin. “A prodigy, huh?”
“No, sir,” Peter said, shaking his head solemnly. “Just above average.”
Mr. Healy seemed to find this funny, the entire barrel of his chest shaking with a raspy, well-used sort of laughter, and once he’d smoothed the bandage into place, he stood and wiped tears from the corners of his eyes.
“Above average,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that, don’t you think?” This last part he directed over his shoulder, and Peter glanced up to see a girl sitting poised on the staircase, looking at him through the banister like a monkey at the zoo. She had long brown hair and the palest eyes he’d ever seen, a nearly colorless gray that settled on him lightly, and there was something in her manner—a casual lack of interest, a complete failure to be impressed by his knowledge—that made him wish he hadn’t spoken in the first place.
Sometimes Peter felt like he’d spent the past eight years trying to dig himself out of that first moment they’d met, when he’d announced himself as someone intelligent to a girl who seemed to look upon this particular trait with great ambivalence.
But Emma wasn’t like most kids who hated school or found homework boring; she wasn’t indifferent and she wasn’t stupid. It was as if somewhere along the way, she’d simply decided to take a different route than the rest of her family, a conscious decision that seemed to inform everything else in her life. Still, whatever it was that drove her to act this way—brilliant parents and intelligent siblings and a home that sometimes felt more like an old-fashioned literary salon than anything else—Peter couldn’t help being jealous of the simple fact that these things drove her nonetheless.
Just the other day, on the Fourth of July, Peter had run into her as she made her annual escape from her family’s cookout, this almost as much of a tradition as the party itself. He hadn’t exactly been looking for her, but they had an uncanny habit of stumbling across each other nonetheless. Not that this was unwelcome. It was, in fact, the highlight of his days, when all the planning and mapping and waiting and hoping had been cast aside, and all he was left with was a town no bigger than a postage stamp, a father who barely noticed he was around, and a school he considered both too slow academically and too fast socially for someone of his nature. Emma’s tolerance of him—he didn’t fool himself into believing it was something it clearly wasn’t—was the one bright spot in an otherwise dreadfully monotonous existence.
He’d fallen into step beside her as she headed up toward the campus, the collection of pale stone buildings and dorms set high above town. The sun had slipped to the other side of the valley, the day was cooling off already and Peter pushed at his glasses as he tried to think of something to say.
“How long’s your brother in town?” he asked finally, and Emma looked over like she hadn’t quite realized he was there until just that moment.
“Not long,” she said. “I’m going back to New York with him tomorrow.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Emma said, then grinned. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Peter ducked his head and kicked at the tall grasses as they crossed the lawn. “Can I come too?”
She laughed, though he hadn’t really been joking. “You don’t even know how long I’ll be away.”
“I don’t mind staying awhile.”
Emma frowned and shook her head. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’m probably going somewhere else after New York.”
“Where?” Peter asked
, quickening his pace to keep up with her, but she didn’t seem to have an answer to this, or at least not one worth mentioning to him. “If there’s no room, I could always take a car from the lot,” he said, thinking of the small patch of asphalt behind their house that served as a makeshift lot for impounded or abandoned cars. “We could caravan.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“I might,” he said. “I know how to jump-start them.”
Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter thought he could detect the faintest trace of interest even so. “Maybe another time,” she said absently, already striding out ahead of him, her shadow long across the grass, leaving him there to watch her go.
The next morning, though he suspected she was already gone, he found himself standing in front of her house, wondering if it was okay to bother her parents so early on a Saturday. Much to his relief, the barbershop where he occupied himself five to six mornings a week for minimum wage was closed for the holiday weekend. It was a job he found nearly unbearable, pushing the broom in figure eights around the old-fashioned chairs, holding his breath against the fruity smell of the shampoo, and worst of all, disposing of the hair clippings, the flakes of dandruff still clinging to them determinedly.
Other summers, his jobs had been somewhat better. In fact, in his sixteen years in this town, Peter figured he’d done odd bits of work for at least three-quarters of the shops, everything from bussing tables and washing dishes to serving slices of pizza and bagging groceries. He’d once even worked as a janitorial assistant up at the college, which was just another reason he felt he could never go to school there: How could you attend classes at a place where you’d picked sludgy cigarette butts out of the fake plants in nearly every building on campus?
The lights appeared to be on in the Healys’ kitchen, and so after a moment, he found himself following the flower-lined path up to their blue front door.
“This is a nice surprise,” Professor Healy said, and his wife appeared in the doorway beside him, the two of them both dressed in khaki pants and navy sweaters, unwittingly matching in the way of long-married couples. “We’re just about to have breakfast. You brave enough to try Katherine’s eggs?”