“I don’t think so.” Babette shook her tiny head and seemed to be walking too hard in order to keep up.
Jane slowed her gait. “I think I saw them kissing.”
“Well, either they were or they weren’t.”
“I couldn’t be sure.”
Babette’s voice was small, like the wind had snatched her up and carried her far away, when she said, “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”
But Jane knew that wasn’t true.
Everything meant something.
CHAPTER two
IT WASN’T EASY TO SNEAK OUT of Preemie’s house. Floorboards creaked. Doors whined. The staircase practically whistled “Dixie” when walked down. But Jane tiptoed and stepped on the stairs at their wall edge and opened the doors in slow motion and finally managed to get out undetected. The street was dark, abandoned, so she took off running to meet Leo outside the Anchor.
It was 2:00 a.m. and the bar was still open, still loud. But they weren’t staying. No one even noticed as they moved away and sat on a bench to make a plan. Leo had a backpack hooked on one shoulder, and Jane suddenly regretted not coming more prepared, though she had no idea what she would have brought apart from the keys, which were in her jeans pocket.
“So.” She took them out. “I’m guessing this one has to do with the Parachute Jump. And this one the Thunderbolt. The other two, I have no idea. Bath, no clue. And I guess this one’s either the Wonder Wheel or Wonderland.”
Leo nodded and said, “I say we start with Thunder.”
“But I thought you said it was gone.” She had already accepted that that key might be useless, that they all might be. But she wanted to be sure.
“It’s gone,” Leo said, and they took off down the boardwalk. “But we can still go there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Some stuff is never really gone.” He led Jane down along the side of an abandoned lot that faced the boardwalk and a side street she’d walked down countless times before, right to a padlock on an old chain-link fence and said, “Okay. Try it.”
Jane got the keys out, then took the lock in her hand and inserted the key. Sure enough, the lock turned.
“Unbelievable,” she said, and Leo said, “Well, this may be the only key that does anything. This lot hasn’t changed hands in like thirty years.”
In they went, stomping over tall weeds and cracked bottle glass, eventually taking cover behind a small trailer that looked abandoned. Not that Jane got the impression anyone was there to see them or that anyone who saw them would care, but it felt like taking cover anyway, their backs leaning up against the metal wall.
“There’s nothing here,” Jane said.
“Nothing but ghosts,” Leo said. “This land is owned by a fried chicken mogul. The same chicken mogul that wanted to try to rebuild Steeplechase Park in the eighties.”
“For real?” Jane said. Clearly, this chicken mogul would have to be found, so that her father could pitch his coaster to him, too. She desperately wanted to tell Leo about it all, but she simply couldn’t break her father’s trust.
“Yup.” Leo nodded.
“Why didn’t it happen?”
“Same reason most things here don’t happen. Money. Greed. Ego. Lack of follow-through. But this is where the Thunderbolt used to be.” He unzipped his backpack, pulled out a photo album and a flashlight and then a small blanket. “I was there when they knocked it down. Want to see?”
“Of course.”
He opened the blanket up and they sat. He handed her the album and moved closer, shining the flashlight on the first photo. There was Leo, as a boy, standing on the boardwalk with the Thunderbolt—a long series of track hills and valleys—behind him. The coaster’s support beams had been overgrown by shrubs and weeds and climbing vines, and Jane had to push away an image of Venus’s viney arms around Leo. He said, “That was the day before we heard the mayor was having it ripped down. It was two thousand, so I was like five or six.”
Jane turned the page and saw Leo again, next to what looked like a shack beneath the coaster. “People lived there,” he said.
Uh-oh, I think I hear a train coming. Jane’s hands formed fists, as if bracing for some kind of impact.
My mom is shaking the pot on the stove and saying, “Oh, no. Better hold on or we’ll lose our dinner.”
My brother and I are jumping around and he’s making a rumbling noise. We’re playing that we live under a roller coaster and every few minutes all hell breaks loose.
He stops rumbling and my mom stops shaking the pot, and she wipes her brow and says, “Whew! That was a close one!” She puts an empty pan in the oven and says, “I better get this in before the next coaster comes by.”
“I’ll help,” I say. “I’ll set the table.”
My brother says, “You can’t set the table, you idiot. It’s all going to slide off.”
“Marcus,” my mother says. “Be nice.”
I feel confused and left out and then my mother says, “Uh-oh. I think I hear another one. Everybody hold on!” She runs and grabs me and picks me up and spins me around and the rumbling—my mom and brother making deep rumbling sounds—starts again. . . .
Leo was still talking. “And before that, it was a hotel. They actually built the coaster around the hotel—like put steel support beams through the hotel—to save the building. People don’t do stuff like that anymore.” He shook his head. “They just knock shit down.”
She wanted to tell him right then about the Coney games of her childhood, about her mother. But it felt like maybe it was too soon and too, well, heavy.
Together they looked through pages and pages of photos of the Thunderbolt after it had been turned into a pile of metal and wood and wire. There were lone coaster cars sitting in the middle of the field days later, and then the book ended with another shot of Leo, on the same spot on the boardwalk as in the first shot, but with nothing but sky behind him.
“This is amazing.” Jane handed the album back. “Thanks.”
“It’s weird.” Leo thumbed the pages. “I find myself looking at it a lot. I’m not sure why. Maybe to remind myself of what’s possible. What’s likely, even. I got this tattoo”—he pointed to a T struck through by a bolt of lightning on his calf—“because of the way my father always talked about the Thunderbolt and about Coney in general. I think I wanted something permanent, you know?”
“Was that your first one?”
“Nah, this was my first one.” He pointed to an anchor on his arm.
“Why’d you get that one?”
“Things were weird.” He shook his head. “Bad weird. My parents had just separated.”
“Oh,” Jane said. “I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, they’re like this Coney Island power couple with their two bars. And with my mother doing all her Coney Islanders for Coney stuff. Only they’re not.” He nodded. “I think I wanted to prove to myself I could do something just for me. I wasn’t allowed. I couldn’t afford it. But I did it anyway. I can’t explain, but it was like tricking myself into thinking things would get better, and that I was in control.”
“Did they? Get better?”
“Yeah, actually. They did. In my head anyway. I guess that’s why I haven’t stopped yet.”
Jane looked at his neck, saw his Adam’s apple travel down his throat, and felt like she was struggling for air. He was too cute. Too easy. And way too close. She wanted, more than anything, to touch him. Just his hand, or his arm. Anything. Just to do it. To help her feel real and safe. Because something about the Thunderbolt all over-grown—strangled by nature and abandonment—gave her the creeps. And then she started thinking about the books in the attic, the fires on Coney, the millions of people crammed onto the beach, and the electrocution of Topsy and she felt, possibly for the first time, sort of scared of things.
Of Coney.
Of Leo.
Of herself.
She said, “Why’d you get the seahorse?”
“Oh, that one
I just thought was kind of creepy and cool.”
Jane took a moment then said, “I remembered where I knew it from when I got home the other night. It’s in the book of mermaid pictures that my mother gave me when I was little. I dream about it sometimes.”
“Cool.” Leo sat back on his elbows, and his T-shirt—for some rock band Jane didn’t know, best she could tell—stretched tighter across his stomach. “What’s the dream like?”
She spotted a lightning bug hovering over some tall weeds and tried to keep her gaze fuzzy so she could see it again the next time it glowed. “I’m suffocating and I see it and I grab onto it, thinking it’s going to swim up to the surface with me, but then I realize it’s fake and that it’s not going to help me and only I can save myself.”
“Pretty deep,” Leo said with a smile.
“Yeah.” She smiled back and saw the lightning bug again. “Doesn’t take a genius to analyze that one.”
They sat quietly for a while, and Jane felt like a spell had been put on them. She didn’t want to break it, but then Leo did when he dug into his bag and said, “I brought these.”
It was a pack of cigarettes.
“Do you smoke?” she asked, and he said, “On occasion. But in the spirit of the evening, I thought you might want one.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t been expecting this. “I don’t know.”
“Okay.” He put them down on top of the backpack. “I just figured the idea was sort of to, I don’t know, retrace her footsteps?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the idea.” Though she’d thought about it very little, had really just sprung into action. “At least I think that’s the idea. But I don’t think I want to smoke. I sort of can’t believe she ever did.”
“We’ll pretend!” Leo took two cigarettes from the box and handed her one and then said, “Okay, imagine we’ve climbed up to the highest peak of the Thunderbolt.”
“Okay,” Jane said, then they both took fake drags and started laughing. Jane faked a cough and almost right away a beam of light fell on their feet.
A guard.
Or the police?
“We gotta go,” Leo said, standing up and pulling Jane up and then shoving the blanket into his backpack as they ran for the gate. They were back on the boardwalk before the guard—the light—could catch up with them, and they just tore off into the night until they were breathless.
They slowed to a drag. A man in a black hoodie fell into step beside them, seemed to be eyeing them, and Leo said to Jane, “Hey,” and stopped walking. He looked at her pointedly and said, very slowly, “Your shoelace is untied.”
“Oh.” Jane looked down to find both shoes in order. Then she understood Leo’s hard gaze and bent to tie her shoe with a series of fake hand motions. When she stood back up Leo said, “Sorry. That guy.”
“Is he gone?”
Leo nodded. “We should probably call it a night.”
Jane nodded, and they walked quickly down off the boardwalk toward Preemie’s. Leo stopped out front and said, “Which key next?”
Jane said, “Parachute. Since I have no idea what the other two are for.”
“Well then, I would say that’s an excellent choice.” He adjusted the strap of his backpack on his shoulder with his thumb and left his hand there, long fingers resting on the front of his own shoulder. “When?”
Jane could barely talk she was so winded—in her head, if not in her lungs—from their escape from the guard, the shoelace ruse, the sight of those lean fingers. “Tomorrow night?”
“I’m in.”
She had the keys in her hand and looked at them. “What do you think ‘Bath’ means?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe just a bathroom they used to use?”
Jane smiled and shook her head. “Just doesn’t seem right.”
He shrugged and said, “We could ask my mom, but then she’d be onto us and no more sneaking out for me.”
“Let’s wait,” Jane said. “I bet I can figure it out.”
CHAPTER three
ARE YOU SICK?” her father asked, poking his head into her room around dinnertime. He’d already dragged her out of bed once that day for lunch—Chinese food—but then she’d gone up to study and had started daydreaming about Leo, about being with him again, about maybe kissing him—about trailing a finger across that seahorse, that anchor, that lightning bolt—and had fallen asleep again.
“No.” Jane sat up in bed. “Just didn’t sleep well last night.”
Again, not a lie.
“Well, we’re going down to Brighton Beach for dinner. If you want to come, be downstairs in ten minutes. And get a little gussied.”
They set out on foot down the boardwalk toward Brighton, which was the next beach down the boardwalk, where Russian sidewalk cafés with checkered tablecloths faced the ocean. Their table at a restaurant called Tatiana sat at the edge of a canopy that hung over the outdoor tables. All three of them sat facing out toward the stream of people passing on the boardwalk and, beyond them, the Atlantic—bright blue and calm.
The menu was almost entirely in Russian and Jane was having a hard time concentrating, but then her father asked the waiter a bunch of questions and ordered fish and sausages and stuffed pastries and cheese pies and pickled things and caviar and then he knocked back a few vodkas on the rocks. The clear liquid made him loose, chatty.
“So I reached out to some old colleagues,” he said, after he’d stuffed himself. “One in particular. A big fan of my work. And a big fan of your mother’s, too, for what it’s worth. I think he had a crush on her.”
Jane could barely find anything edible, had been washing down unchewed food with water.
Marcus said, “That’s great, Dad. Good for you.”
“But it gets better,” their father said. “He was so interested in the idea of the Tsunami that he got on the phone over the weekend and got me a meeting with someone at Loki Equities. Apparently they’re still in the market for their sort of flagship attraction.”
The word—Loki—caught like something pickled in Jane’s throat. “I thought you were showing the Tsunami to the city,” she said. “Not Loki.”
“Well, Loki seems to be where the action is, according to everyone I’ve talked to.”
Jane said, “But I get the distinct impression that Loki isn’t very popular around here. Their plan, I mean. The mall and all.” She spoke with urgency. “You have to at least try the city. And there are other people you can try, too. Like the guy who owns the old Thunderbolt lot.”
“Well, it sounds like you know more about it all than I do,” her father said jovially. “But Loki is the biggest and seemingly really the only game in town for a project of this scale.”
Jane stared at the clean white bread plate in front of her, watched the way it reflected shadows of the movements of the waitstaff. There were an uncountable number of light scratches on the plate’s surface, and Jane felt like her heart probably looked that way up close, too. Because she wanted more than anything for her father to get the Tsunami built, and wanted equally badly for him not to.
Her father clinked the ice in his empty glass. “You said it yourself, honey, when we first got here, and it stuck with me. And then when you showed me that film.”
“Said what?” She shook her head and studied the cherry in her drink, its sickeningly fake red color and crinkly skin.
“We got here and you said, ‘That’s it?’”
She didn’t remember saying exactly that, or least not meaning it that way.
Marcus said, “The whole place really is a dump.”
“I need to use the restroom,” Jane said—though she really didn’t, not urgently anyway—and she went inside and heard loud music and singing and saw, in a sort of banquet hall inside, lights and a standing-room-only crowd. She peeked through the door and then stepped into the darkened room and saw, onstage, a full-on cabarettype show going on. Women in sparkly costumes were perched on trapeze-like swings, singing some pop so
ng Jane didn’t know—a big electronic, anthemic song about love and survival and hurt. The woman in the center was being lowered to the stage by her swing, and then huge wings came out of her back—made of a shimmery white material—and then she was being lifted back up into the air, swingless, her arms spread wide as if she was being crucified. In the audience, the women wore silky dresses and dangling earrings, had their hair professionally done in updos. It was a big night out for them, and it made Jane wonder, for the first time, whether she’d ever go to a prom, whether she cared.
When the song ended to applause and whistles from the crowd, Jane ducked out and used the restroom and returned to the table, where the conversation hadn’t changed much.
“Well anyway,” her father said, “it’s just a meeting.” His mind seemed to drift then, and when he said these next words, he seemed to be talking to someone who wasn’t actually there. “I’ve got a good feeling, though. I really do.”
Jane retreated to Birdie’s Bavarian Bar when they got home—there were still many hours until two, until the Parachute Jump key—and started playing old records on the Victrola while she sorted through more stuff. In the bottom of a drawer of old papers she found a folder containing old newspaper clippings about the preemies of Dreamland. INCUBATOR BABIES IN PERIL! shouted one headline, and she studied the photo next to it, trying to deduce whether any of the babies pictured was Preemie. There was just no way to tell. Not when they were that small. That barely human, barely anybody.
The whole time, she was on the lookout for two things—a key that might open the padlock to the Claverack horse and a journal that might have belonged to her mother. When she saw the leather book hidden in the bottom of the Victrola cabinet, she could feel her heart beating. But she opened it and read a few lines and realized it wasn’t her mother’s journal, but Birdie’s. Which was cool, sure, but also disappointing. It had been hidden, though, and Jane thought again about the Rite Aid mermaid costume and the underwater hiding game of her childhood. She would have to be on the lookout for a shipwreck or a submarine or . . . what else was there?
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