You Are Here(2)
“Patrick.”
He paused, his mouth still half open. “Yeah?”
“Can we not calculate it just now?”
He nodded, his face slipping into the kind of distant smile her whole family used when regarding Emma, like she was a foreign object that had somehow fallen in their midst.
“Must be tough being the baby, huh?” he said eventually, and Emma shrugged.
“It’s a lot tougher being the only normal one.”
Later, once Mom and Dad finally dragged Patrick off to the backyard to regale their colleagues with stories of his program at Columbia, Emma wandered off on her own. She was fairly certain nobody would notice her absence. It was surprisingly easy to get lost in her family, and not just today; their home was constantly filled with other professors and neighbors, visiting writers, and students with questions about their essays. There was always a fire going or a kettle of tea on the stove or a book available for borrowing. Theirs was a house where independence was encouraged, where coming in past curfew didn’t result in any punishment other than the possibility of getting roped into a late-night discussion about the origin of a certain plant.
Emma had learned early on how to make herself scarce. It wasn’t terribly difficult; her parents were often lost in the library for days at a time, and all three of her older siblings had moved out when she was little. She’d never known them in the way other kids know their brothers and sisters; there was no fighting for seats in the car or playing tag in the backyard until it was too dark to see. Her oldest brother, Nate, had left for college soon after she was born, and the others followed shortly afterward.
Emma saw them now only on occasional visits or major holidays, and she felt as undone in their company as she sometimes did with her parents. Nate, the ecologist, was always lecturing her on a range of impressive but boring subjects, and Annie—her only sister, who should have been the one she called for advice about boys, but who instead made her so worried about saying something stupid that Emma could barely talk around her—was a government engineer in Washington. And then, of course, there was Patrick, who collected degrees like baseball cards and had an exasperating habit of calculating everything out loud.
Her mom and dad had spent much of their academic careers moving from one university to the next, and their children ended up settling in the various places they’d once lived, landing in North Carolina, Washington DC, and New York City like passengers stepping off a northbound train. Emma was grateful her parents had managed to get tenure here—at this small liberal arts school just a stone’s throw away from absolutely nothing at all—or else it was just as likely they’d have continued moving north until they hit a tundra somewhere in Newfoundland.
But even when she was very young, Emma could recognize the differences between herself and the rest of her family. They’d lived an entire life without her, countless birthdays and family squabbles and summer vacations—but it wasn’t just that. When she first started school, instead of getting notes with smiley faces in her lunch box, Emma used to find slips of paper with quotes from famous philosophers. Instead of a new sweater for Christmas, she’d get a heavy volume of poetry or a rock-polishing kit. At the dinner table her parents talked about Proust or pi rather than anything normal, like baseball games or plans for the weekend. They couldn’t comment on the weather without remarking on the low air pressure or the worsening state of the ozone layer, and when Emma once broke her arm on the swing set, her dad had recited the poetry of W. H. Auden on the way to the hospital in an attempt to calm her down.
All her life Emma had felt alone in her family. She’d perfected a look of detached but polite interest, had developed a basic vocabulary to survive dinners when her siblings were home, and had resigned herself to her role as the youngest and least bright of a slightly odd but inarguably brilliant family. And though this was all a bit exhausting, it had never occurred to her to question it. Until last week.
Just six days earlier Dad had asked her to go up to the attic to find his early editions of W. B. Yeats for an article he was working on. Even after eight years in this house it seemed that very few of her parents’ books had actually made it to the shelves where they belonged. There were books in the attic, the basement, the garage; books stacked to create tables and footstools and doorstops all over the house. Each time a quote was needed, a vaguely remembered reference or a line from a novel, Emma was sent off in search of its source, a task not unlike a scavenger hunt.
And so, at her dad’s request, she’d climbed the ladder to the attic, then set about rummaging through the assortment of cardboard boxes, crouching on the wooden planks of the crawl space and trying not to sneeze. There were bags full of old stuffed animals and shoes, a faded globe and a tiny rocking horse. The afternoon light filtered in through the lone window, and though she could see the boxes of books tucked way in the back, Emma soon got sidetracked picking through the ones with photo albums and scrapbooks.
She sat cross-legged on the floor of the attic, paging through pictures of her siblings when they lived in North Carolina, the three of them nearly unrecognizable as kids, running through sprinklers in saggy bathing suits, playing in the backyard of the house where Emma had once lived as a baby. After a while, Dad seemed to give up on her—his footsteps receding back down the stairs—and so she reached in and fished around for something more, rare glimpses of a past that didn’t include her.