by Alex George
“But couldn’t you have talked to me first before throwing them all away? Couldn’t you have asked me what I thought?”
“Talking to you is a tall order these days, Mary.”
“A tall order?” My mother sounded surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know you anymore,” said my father. “I don’t know where you went.”
“I’m still here, Sam.”
“But how can you be so calm?”
My mother was silent for a moment. “Do you remember what you said to me last Christmas? About whether Liam’s life was too short?”
“Mary—”
“You said that age was just a number. Do you remember? I’ve never forgotten it. I hated you for saying it. I wanted to wring your neck. I wanted you to stop being so accepting of this awful thing that was happening to us. I wanted you to shout and scream and yell.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I was wrong, Sam. People mourn differently; I see that now. Just because you weren’t behaving like me didn’t mean you weren’t sad. You were just coping in your own way. That’s all I’m doing now.” My mother paused. “If you want to know why I’m so calm, it’s because I’ve been praying.”
“Praying? Do you really—”
“You told me before that it was useless. Well, it isn’t now. I know that Liam is in heaven, and that helps.”
“I don’t want Liam to be in heaven. I want him in his bedroom, playing those lousy records.”
“Yes, and you told me all the wanting in the world won’t change a thing. You told me we have to accept things as they are. But throwing away those letters feels like you’re hiding from the truth.”
“I was trying to help us move on, that’s all.”
“Liam’s only been dead a few months!”
“But don’t you want the pain to stop?”
“You can’t hurry grief, Sam. It’ll leave when it’s ready.”
“Well, I don’t need to go out looking for it. I certainly didn’t need to see those letters every damn day.” I heard the scraping of a kitchen chair. “I see Liam everywhere I turn, Mary. I see him in your face. I see him in Robert’s eyes. I can’t escape.”
“Oh, there’s no escape. Why would you ever think that?”
“Is it really so terrible to want to forget?” asked my father. “I want to wake up in the morning without this sadness pressing the life out of me. I’d love to feel nothing, just for a little while. Wouldn’t you?”
I thought of Moira, then, and her quiet wish for just five minutes of love. I didn’t want to listen to my parents anymore. I stepped back outside and closed the front door behind me. There was an old Adirondack chair on the front porch. Years ago, before the wheelchair, my mother would sit in it and watch as Liam and I played together in the front yard. I remembered that chair as smooth and beautiful, but now the paint had cracked with age and the wood was mottled with tiny, dark fissures. I sat down. There was no movement in front of me, except for an orange tabby cat strolling languidly across the street. I slid into the chair until my spine was pressing up against the slats. I put my hands palm-down on the wide wooden armrests, and suddenly I was Captain Kirk on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, in command and ready for adventure. I closed my eyes and imagined melting into that old chair until we were one and the same. Then I marshaled my crew, barked orders, and whoosh! Warp factor nine! I made my escape.
—
THE FOLLOWING DAY I arrived home in good spirits. That afternoon after school Nathan and I had bicycled over to see Lewis. He had baked us cupcakes, which we had devoured as we listened first to the Sex Pistols, then to Lester Young. Nathan and I had made plans for a trip to the paper mill over the weekend. It would be our first visit there since the fall, and I was looking forward to losing myself again in the dusty adventures we created within those walls.
I had managed not to think too much about the conversation between my parents that I had overheard the previous afternoon. But my mother was right. In the end, there was no escape.
I leaned my bike up against the side of the house and went inside, cheerfully whistling “Pretty Vacant.” The kitchen was empty. Usually by then my mother would have been cooking supper, but the stove was cold.
“Mom?” I called.
There was no reply. I went upstairs to my bedroom. My mother was sitting on my bed.
“There you are,” I said.
“Here I am,” she agreed.
“Is everything all right?”
“Not really, no.” She patted the covers next to her. “Sit down.”
I sat. She turned to me and without another word wrapped her arms around me and held me tight.
“Mom? What is it? What’s happened?”
“Your father’s gone, Robert.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
She let go of me. “It doesn’t matter where.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Dad says he can’t live here anymore.”
“Not ever?”
She shrugged.
“But what about us?”
“We’re going to be fine.” She sighed. “Dad will always love you, Robert. But for now he’s too sad to be here.”
I thought back to their conversation the day before. My father, wanting to escape. I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I hadn’t realized he wanted to escape from me.
“Where is he?”
My mother looked at me for a long minute. “At the park,” she said finally.
“I want to go and see him,” I said.
She shook her head. “You need to leave him be, Robert.”
“The least he could do is tell me that he’s leaving to my face.”
My mother suddenly looked very tired. “Let me drive you there,” she said.
“I’d rather go on my own.” I didn’t want her to see me cry.
“All right. But, Robert? Don’t expect your father to change his mind. He needs time to think things through.”
“What about what I need?”
My mother looked pained. “I’m just warning you.”
I turned and ran down the stairs. The seat of my bike was still warm. I set off, pumping my legs as fast as I could. I bent down low over the handlebars and leaned into corners, clicking through the gears. Before long my calf muscles were burning, but still I rose off the seat and worked the pedals with everything I had, determined not to slow down. There was nothing but me, the bike, and the road. I left everything else behind. I would have kept going forever.
As I turned down the last stretch of road toward the park, I caught an acrid stench on the early-evening breeze and looked up. Half a mile in the distance a tower of black smoke was rising into the sky. It looked as if it was coming from the park grounds. At once a sour flood of terror rose in my throat. Not a fire, I thought. Not now. Then I was off again, flying toward the blaze.
From a distance the smoke had seemed eerily motionless, but as I got closer I could see dark ash eddying upward in restless, billowing clouds. At the front gates of the park I realized that there were no fire engines screaming down the road, no flashing lights or sirens. There was no crowd of curious onlookers. This disaster was a purely private affair. I raced into the parking lot.
My father was standing with his back to me, his hands on his hips, quite still. By his feet were three red plastic canisters. In front of him was a blazing pyre. Flames roared and spat, a roiling, hellish sheath of fire. Even from where I stood, the heat was ferocious. Then I realized what was burning.
It was the old carousel horses.
My father had hauled the ancient steeds out from the corner of his workshop and had piled them high in the middle of the parking lot, and then he had set the fire. Now the tangled pyramid of equine body parts burned fi
ercely. Each time a charred limb disintegrated, a brilliant typhoon of sparks flew into the evening air. The bodies of the horses were blackened by the fire, the paint long since burned away. In the middle of the inferno I saw a beautiful carved head, caught in stark silhouette against the flames. The horse’s lips were pulled back, its teeth bared. For many summers it had been an expression of prancing joy and pride, but now it looked like a silent scream of agony.
“Dad!” I called out.
My father turned toward me. His face and arms were covered in grime and soot. He looked at me and then turned back to watch the fire without a word. I left my bike on the ground and walked toward him. The heat was searing.
“I called the fire department,” he said. “I told them not to come.”
We stood in silence and watched.
Finally my father spoke again. “I started carving horses for the carousel the year before Liam was born,” he said, staring into the fire. “But I realized today that I had no idea why I was keeping the old ones.” He paused. “I’m a sentimental fool, Robert. Always trying to hold on to what’s already gone. But what’s the point? We can’t turn back time.” He gestured toward the burning horses. “These old beauties were relics. They were just old memories.”
“What’s wrong with old memories?” I asked.
“Sometimes they stop you from moving forward.”
“Forward? To where?”
“Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
“But sometimes memories are all we have!”
“Maybe. But I just want to feel nothing for a while.”
I wrapped my arms around his torso, burying my head in his shirt. His clothes reeked of gasoline. His body was hot from the fire. “Please come home,” I whispered.
“Oh, Robert. Sometimes things are so broken that there’s just no way in the world you can ever put them back together.”
After that, there was no more talking. We stood and watched the horses burn until there was just a pile of gray ashes on the ground.
—
THREE WEEKS LATER, Fun-A-Lot opened for the season.
TWENTY-ONE
Memorial Day weekend was unseasonably warm that year.
On the park’s opening day I stood at the bottom of the Ferris wheel, shepherding guests onto the ride. Now that I was to be interacting with the public all day, I qualified for a different costume, although it wasn’t much of an improvement on last year’s outfit. My father told me I was some kind of monk, although he was vague with the details. Like Friar Tuck, he’d said, but that would have put me several centuries adrift from the rest of my colleagues. I had been issued a long brown tunic, complete with matching cowl and plastic crucifix. The outfit appeared to have been sewn together out of heavy burlap sacks.
Despite my discomfort, I was happy to be there. All the sights and sounds and smells of the park were just as they had always been. After all that had happened since last summer, after everything that had been lost, the place was reassuringly familiar in a world that had changed beyond all recognition. Liam was dead. My father had not come home. But as I looked out across the park drenched in early-summer sunshine, I found myself wondering whether everything might be okay. I was learning what my father already knew—that coming to work every day was precisely the kind of balm that my put-upon heart required.
—
THERE WERE TWENTY METAL PODS dotted around the Ferris wheel’s circumference. Each time one of the cabins came in to dock at the bottom of the wheel, it was my job to usher one set of passengers out and get the next group settled in with the door securely fastened. This needed to be done quickly. I had to hurry to the control console and crank the wheel back to life for another fractional rotation until the next pod came in to land. There was never time for a break—any interruption would have left scores of people stranded in the air. I learned to go for hours without needing the restroom.
My job was an education in other ways, too. There was no end to what people thought they could get away with in those pods, high up in the sky and out of sight of the rest of the world. It was not uncommon to find beer cans and cigarette butts on the floor. I watched a lot of young couples climb into the pods wearing self-conscious grins. I stared at the bottoms of the cabins as they passed overhead and wondered what was going on above me.
Misbehavior was not limited to consenting adults, however. I also had to watch for families with small children who had misjudged their bathroom stops. I lost count of the puddles of pee that I mopped up. Once I even discovered a small turd steaming in the corner of a pod. The family who had left this behind had smiled at me as they disembarked, as if nothing in the world were amiss.
Lewis was right; the Ferris wheel was a signature attraction. There was always a long line, which meant that Nathan was often there in the dragon suit, cavorting in front of the waiting crowds. After just a few days he seemed to inhabit the costume like a second skin. He lived the role absolutely and without compromise. Once he had pulled on the dragon’s fiberglass head, he always remained in character. He threw himself into each performance with everything he had. He learned to convey the entire spectrum of dragon emotion—from joy to sorrow, from ferocity to gentleness—all without the benefit of words (because dragons do not talk) or a changing facial expression (the dragon’s friendly grin was as fixed as the bared teeth of the carousel horses). Nathan’s performance was pure physicality. He leapt about, he performed little dance routines, and, when the occasion called for it, he would shake his ass to make the dragon’s tail wiggle and bounce. The guests loved it.
Every so often Nathan would stop for a cigarette and blow smoke out of the dragon’s nose. The outfit was roomy enough that he could extricate one arm from the suit and hold his cigarette between puffs, although this left one of the dragon’s wings drooping and motionless, as if it had suffered a small stroke. I did see some parents wrinkle their noses when they smelled the tobacco, but overall people appreciated the effect.
Nathan was supposed to wander through the whole park, but when he wasn’t at the Ferris wheel, he spent most of his time in front of the concession stand. It was, he explained, where the longest lines were, but we both knew the real reason. Everything he did was designed to attract Faye’s attention. I would sometimes walk past the food area on my breaks to watch him in action. He barged ahead of people in the line, pretended to steal French fries, and generally goofed around. I was probably the only person who noticed how, after each joke, the dragon turned its head toward the concession stand window.
We met up by the gates each evening when the park closed. Nathan changed into fresh clothes after he had finished work—it was so hot inside the dragon suit that by the end of the day he was drenched in sweat. Just like last year, Nathan would tell me about Faye’s inexhaustible charms. And, just like last year, we would watch as the older boys tried to impress her.
One night Hollis Calhoun was hitting on her pretty hard. Nathan watched him, a forgotten cigarette smoldering between his fingers.
“That guy,” he muttered.
“Hollis is a piece of work,” I agreed.
“He’s working the mini golf this season,” said Nathan. I knew this, of course. I had slipped into my father’s office one afternoon and looked at the employee roster to see where Hollis would be working. He had left me alone for the entire school year, but I was taking nothing for granted. I still wanted to avoid him if I could. “He sits in that wooden shack all day and hands out putters and golf balls,” continued Nathan. “And he checks out every female who comes within twenty feet of him.”
I pictured Hollis surrounded by the fake cacti and cowboy paraphernalia, eyeing the passing girls and making artless overtures to the pretty ones. “I bet that’s a bust,” I chuckled.
“That’s the weird thing,” said Nathan. “A lot of the girls ignore him, but some actually seem to like it.” He shook his head in bewilderm
ent. “I don’t understand it.” His gaze drifted across to where Hollis was whispering something in Faye’s ear. “And then he comes here and does that.”
I understood. For Hollis, Faye was just another girl, one more potential conquest. That was what offended Nathan the most.
Just then Faye burst out laughing and placed a hand on Hollis’s arm. Nathan looked at his shoes and said nothing.
—
WORKING THE FERRIS WHEEL meant that I was rooted to one spot, and I envied both Nathan and Lewis, who spent their days roaming the park. I always kept an eye out for Lewis as he stomped from one job to the next. Sometimes he was whistling a bebop solo, but more often than not he was muttering under his breath. There was a slump to his shoulders that hadn’t been there last year. He walked a little more slowly, stood a little less tall. I told myself that it was because he was missing me. I was certainly missing him. I began hoping that something would go wrong with the Ferris wheel, just so Lewis could come by and fix it. I missed his little hut, the tinny radio, even the briny stink of those awful sardine sandwiches. My visits to his house with Nathan were fun, but they weren’t the same. I missed having Lewis to myself.
Maybe he could tell. He stopped by my booth every day, ostensibly to check that everything was running smoothly, but really just because he wanted to see that I was all right. I could never talk for long—those cabins never stopped arriving and departing, and the line never got any shorter—but I was always happy to see him.
In contrast, I hardly saw my father at all. Occasionally I spotted him hurrying by, but he never glanced in my direction. Those sightings were difficult for me. My father had not come home. He bought his breakfast, lunch, and dinner from the concession stand. I imagined him washing in the men’s restrooms early in the mornings and sleeping on the sofa in his office beneath a haphazard collection of too-small blankets. He presented his best face to the world while the park was open for business, but there were small clues that hinted at a slow unraveling within. Not many noticed the absence of military creases down the front of his slacks, but I did. Not many spotted the occasional shadow of silver bristles on his chin, but I did. And not many looked behind his mask of brisk efficiency and saw the absence of hope in his eyes. But I did.