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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