“Wow,” I said as he stepped past me and started making his way down to where I could still hear Robin Hood talking to Luke. “It really is a weird night.”
“The weirdest,” Mark said. I kept standing there until I could hear his voice along with the other two, then I headed up to my room.
“We’ll have to be pretty quiet,” Luke says, squeezing my fingers before releasing my hand. “When I was here earlier, I dropped the keys, and it sounded like the whole castle exploded. Something about the acoustics in here.” He’s right. Even whispering several feet away from me, Luke sounds like he’s talking normally, maybe even loudly, right in my ear.
“Wait, what do you mean, when you were here earlier?”
“I had something to drop off,” he says, climbing the stairs to the balcony, but instead of taking a right out to where I usually greet my wedding guests, he veers left and climbs another short flight of stairs to a door marked PRIVATE. I stand on the step just below him and place my hand on the small of his back. He looks over his shoulder briefly, smiling at me and then back at the ring of keys in his hand. “Here it is,” he says, freeing a key with the number 17 printed on it in black marker. He presses the key into the lock, turning it once to the right. “It sticks a bit,” he says, pulling the handle toward himself.
“How do you know?”
“I told you, I was here earlier. I didn’t want to get here and have the key not work.”
“How did you know I’d pick the castle?” Luke pushes down again on the handle, and the door pops free from its jamb with a sharp snap, which echoes down the stairs.
“Shhh,” I say, pressing my face into the center of his back to keep from laughing.
“Shhh, yourself,” he says. “Come on. I didn’t go all the way in before. I didn’t want to see it without you.”
“How will we be able to see anything?” I ask, stepping up and through the doorway after him.
“You’ll find I’m full of surprises.” Luke reaches down and feels around on the floor before standing. “Here, you hold this,” he says, handing me our surprise box. “Voilà.” Suddenly, the whole area we are standing in is bathed in a pale pink light. I look at the flashlight in his hand.
“Disney Princess. Nice touch.”
“I was going to go with the Cruella De Vil one, but it was a red light. Somehow that didn’t really seem like the atmosphere I was going for.”
“Luke?” I shift the box into one hand and put my other on his arm. “In case I forget to tell you later, I had a great time tonight.”
“Me, too,” he says, smiling. “You want to go in?”
“Do chipmunks dance?”
He laughs softly and takes my hand again, leading me into the darkness.
This whole night with Luke feels like one of those pictures that they have at the mall, the ones on the cart across from the pretzel place or Orange Julius or in front of Lids or Hot Topic. They’re made up of repeating squares or interlocking circles or quadrafoils turned on end. They look like bad cubist paintings. Too much symmetry, not enough dissonance. Sometimes there’s a card beside them, telling you what you’re supposed to be looking for. Telling you to try and see two people kissing or a dolphin in the ocean or the image of Elvis—the young one, not the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich one. More often than not, there isn’t a sign. You just have to stand there and look, trying to see past the patterns to the picture hidden within them, You can’t take your eyes off it. You let your focus soften. Let yourself fall into it. If you blink or if you look away for even a second, you have to start all over again, resetting yourself. Sometimes you can look and look and not see anything. You hear people around you. “Do you see it? Right there. There’s the nose. There’s the guitar. Do you see it?” And you think about giving up. You think that no matter how long you keep looking, nothing will happen. That all the people around you are just telling everyone they can see it so they won’t look stupid. But then you do see it. And once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. Now, instead of seeing the blue squares marching off into infinity, replicating themselves like microscopic organisms, you see the lion’s face or Lincoln or the unicorn. And once you see it, you turn to the strangers around you. “Do you see it?” you ask. Because once you see it, you want everyone to know. You want everyone else to see it, too.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask, following Luke through the archway and into the main room. I bump against something hard with my hip.
“Yes,” Luke says, stopping and turning to look at me.
“Okay, not really the answer I was hoping for,” I say, smiling at him. His face is glowing pink from the Princess flashlight.
“Well, I don’t believe in sheet-over-the-head, rattling-chains, creaking-stairs-in-the-middle-of-the-night ghosts.” Luke turns and looks toward one of the windows at the far side of the room. One of the thin ones you can see from the outside. Diamonds of metal crisscross the glass, making it look quilted. “It’s more subtle. It’s like all of us are haunted all the time, but we usually never know it.” Luke walks over to a large shape near the wall that looks in the darkness like a snowman with a huge hat on his head. “I don’t think they’ll be able to see this with the spotlights on the castle.” He clicks something near the top of the snowman, just under the hat, and the lamp lights up.
“Wow. It’s like Retroland,” I say, looking around the room. “This stuff is amazing.” I run my palm over the top of the couch, feeling its nubby texture beneath my hand. An orange and turquoise light that resembles an exotic tropical flower towers over a leather chair in the corner. Most of the side wall is taken up by a clock with huge metal rays shooting off in every direction. Steel and wood and molded plastic share space with hooked rugs and silk pillows. “It’s like The Brady Bunch meets The Jetsons,” I say, touching a vase that seems made up entirely of plastic bubbles in shades of orange and green.
“Bernard told me some of the Disney elite built this so they could stay here.” I walk around the end of the couch and toward the windows looking out on Main Street. “This place looks like a really tasteful Goodwill,” he says. I smile over at Luke, who’s looking at a chess set, only three pieces out of their opening positions.
“Want to see what’s in the box?” I ask, pointing to the taped shoe box I set down on the couch.
“Well, yeah.” Luke says, grinning at me. He picks up the box and walks toward me. “Want to do the honors?” he asks.
“No, you.”
He runs his thumb along the tape line, pulling the top free. “Ready?” he asks. I nod and watch as he flips the top off the shoe box, reaches into the folded tissue paper, and extracts a bundle. “Now you,” he says, handing it to me. I peel back the layers of paper, revealing a snow globe. One of the windup ones that makes the figures dance through the snow. “Wind it up,” he says. The opening chimes of “When You Wish Upon a Star” tinkle out as a tiny Cinderella and Prince Charming begin their slow waltz around the castle.
“Look at the front,” I say, turning it to face him.
“Dreams can come true,” he reads. He stops smiling and turns to look out the other window facing Main Street.
“Tell me more about your ghosts,” I say, watching him for a moment before turning to look back out the window. The one right over the crest with Walt’s name in it. “Tell me what you meant about our lives being haunted.”
“I don’t know, Ella. It’s not like I have this all figured out.”
“I think you do. I think you have a lot more figured out than you let on,” I say, still looking out the window. From this angle I can see the wire Tinker Bell flies on stretching toward Tomorrowland.
“I think it isn’t so much that we are haunted by something on the outside,” he says. “It’s more like we make our own ghosts out of our hopes and disappointments, and then dress them up with the wishes that other people have for us.”
“Like costumes,” I say, turning to look at him.
“Exactly. It’s like
we have these hopes for ourselves. These fairy tales for our lives. We think we know how to live happily ever after, but we let other people take over and put shackles on our dreams, so that even if we wanted them to, they can hardly move.”
I nod and look down at my feet. Luke walks over to where I’m standing and puts his fingertips under my chin, lifting my face until I’m looking at him. “Here’s the secret I’ve figured out. You ready?” I nod again, feeling my chest tightening as I try not to breathe. “The trick is, we have the keys. Whenever we want to, we can unlock the chains.”
“Do you really think that’s true?” I ask. He is standing close enough for me to see the shimmery flecks of gold in his eyes.
“Ella, you asked me a question a long time ago, and I didn’t really know how to answer it.” He keeps looking at me while he’s talking. Really looking at me, like he can see way inside me. “You asked me if I believed in magic. Do you remember?”
“Do you?” I whisper.
“I wasn’t sure before tonight. I wasn’t sure yesterday. But with you here and even this,” he says, pointing to the snow globe resting on the windowsill. He looks back at me and traces my jawline with his fingers, so lightly that they’re just a whisper against my skin. “Only magic could explain all of this,” he says, leaning forward. I close my eyes as I feel his breath against my lips. “Ella?” he whispers. I open my eyes again to see him smiling.
“Yes?”
“Kiss me you will,” he whispers. And then we do.
I keep thinking the sky is going to start turning pink at any minute. The sun is going to come up, but it doesn’t. We have to walk back across the park to the dorm. It takes a long time because we have to duck behind trees and into doorways as morning maintenance people filter through the park, getting everything ready. “Listen,” Luke says, tugging at my hand when we draw even with the trees bordering the dorm courtyard. I stop and face him. “I have some things to take care of when I wake up.”
“Things . . .” I say, smiling.
“Well, I have to return the keys to Bernard and then . . . well, there’s Cassie.”
“There is Cassie,” I say, tilting my head and watching his face.
“Hey,” he says, sliding his hand around my waist and pulling me to him. “Who did I just spend the last four hours kissing?”
“Anyone I know?”
He bends down and kisses me again, and again I feel it all the way through me, so that instead of just kissing my mouth, it feels like he’s kissing all of my cells at the same time. And again when he stops, it feels like I’ve been spinning around and around in the teacups with my eyes closed because I have to hold on to him to keep from falling over.
“So, listen,” he says. “I’ll meet you. Breakfast. Okay?” I just nod and lean against him. “And don’t be late,” he tells me. “No sleeping in. I almost missed out on you completely. I don’t want to miss another minute.”
“No,” I say. “Neither do I.”
16
Luke
My head is so blurry with no sleep that a shower doesn’t even help much. When Robin Hood has had another long, bad night, he wakes himself up by dunking three tea bags into a cup of black coffee and gulping it down. But I’m not hungover, I’m drunk. Drunk on Ella, on the night, on her kisses and touches. It’s all I can think about as I walk across the park, the way I fell into kissing her, in a way I never have. I mean, sure, I have always liked kissing—who doesn’t? But this was different. Like usually, even with Cassie, it feels like I’m kissing her and she’s kissing me, and there’s that sense of the two of us, separate. Not with Ella. With her it was like there was one kiss, made by one mouth, and the kiss was a space we both fell into, falling and falling into each other, and the air she breathed out was the same air I breathed in. I didn’t ever want it to end, and even when we left this morning, as we moved away from each other my fingers held hers, letting go by degrees until my little finger was holding her little finger, and even in that smallest of touches, we were one. And nothing in my life ever felt so right.
I guess I should feel worse about Cassie, but after the double date it’s hard to. I mean, maybe she was just jealous, but I didn’t like that, being treated like that. Along the midway I see these guys at the ringtoss game or tossing softballs into bushel baskets, and they’re determined to win the giant Goofy for their kids. So determined that they get pissed, red-faced, plunking down another twenty bucks on a stuffed toy that’s worth about two bucks, slapping the money down and saying, Give me the damn things, and their kid is crying and doesn’t’ even want the giant Goofy anymore. That’s how it felt with Cassie the last few days, like she doesn’t even really want me, doesn’t even like me all that much, but she’s determined to have me, to have our night together at the Old Key West, to win.
I’m thinking this while I move through the park before it opens, watching all the maintenance people in their pastel T-shirts, some of them having snow cones for breakfast, some just coffee and cigarettes. There are a few families straggling around even though we aren’t open yet, probably people there on some kind of special pass, or maybe just friends of someone. They look a little lost without a crowd to blend into, and sometimes it’s easy to make fun of them with their matching mouse ears and cartoon maps and their desperate attention to character autograph lists. But this morning I’m in the mood to just let them be, even inside my head, because mornings in Florida are the best the place can be, before the day heats up, and because I can still feel Ella’s fingers in my hair or cupping my face, and because there is every chance in the world that I’m in love with her.
I duck into the stand of scrub pines just past the end of the trolley track, on my way to Bernard’s trailer. His keys are heavy, jingling in my hand as I walk, and I wonder how he did it, how he managed to steal or copy keys for thirty years without ever getting caught. Early this morning Ella and I curled up under a blanket together and looked at the list of keys, shaking our heads over and over. He had keys to Pleasure Island nightclub; to the planetarium controls in Epcot; to every store along Main Street, including ones that didn’t exist anymore; to the Atlanta Braves lockers in Disney’s Sports Complex; to the engine of the steamboat on the River Cruise. He could hijack the whole park if he wanted to.
“Maybe he will someday,” I said. “Just take over, rename it Bernard Laurant World.”
Ella smiled, then used one of the keys to lightly poke my thigh. “Nah,” she said. “He would have made his move years ago. And obviously he’s not a thief, the way he lives.”
“Then why?” I said.
She thought a minute, twisting her pretty mouth. “I think he likes possibility.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, he can go anywhere. Nothing is closed to him. He doesn’t have to go into those places, but he can. He can do anything he wants.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything. We sat in the quiet, the keys flashing a little in the light.
Ella poked me again. “Nothing is closed to you, either,” she said. I looked at her, wanting nothing more in the world than to believe that. I looked into her green eyes, at the way a faint blush rose across her cheeks, and I touched her mouth, and just then it felt like everything that had held me boxed in just fell away. If I could have her, if this perfect, oddball girl could find a way to love me, then anything seemed possible, and each moment would be a fistful of keys in a world of doors.
“Cinderella and Dale,” I whispered. “That’s going to be a pretty weird movie.”
She nodded. “Weird in the best way. The story’s full of surprises, so you have to stick around and see how it turns out.”
“Will you?” I said. “Stick around?”
And even now—as I walk in the early light in the shadow of the castle, as the park slowly stirs itself to life—I can see her nodding, smiling as she leaned forward to kiss me again, whispering yes against my mouth.
There are two police cars parked outside Bernard’s trailer,
and a line of police tape runs from the stand of pines to the clothesline in his side yard to his front door. And it’s not the tape they use inside the park if a bench breaks or someone throws up on a ride, the kind with the pink and blue Mickeys running across it. No, this is the real thing, yellow with black stripes, and all I can think is what Mark told us, that the security guys are actually real police. And then I think, It’s the keys. I move closer to the trailer, to the female cop who stands against her squad car talking into the mike on her shoulder, and all that’s running in my head is that somehow they know that Ella and me were in Walt’s apartment last night, and that somehow it’s Bernard’s fault for giving us thirty years’ worth of keys. I grip them in my hand, then reach down and slip them into the side pocket on my cargo shorts—carefully, so they don’t jingle. And I have the impulse to just keep walking, but if he’s in trouble because of us, I need to go in and narc on myself and get Bernard out of trouble, if I can.
I walk up to the woman officer, who ignores me while she looks over a clipboard, then talks to her shoulder in code. Like all the cops in the park, she’s wearing the friendly looking white uniform with shorts. They always look like some obscure scout troop.
“May I help you?” she says.
“Well, yeah. Listen,” I say. “I mean, what’s going on?”
She looks up at me finally, her face sunburned, her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. “Your name?”
“Luke,” I tell her. “Luke Krause.”
“And Luke, are you related to the deceased?”
I blink, look at her while something hardens deep in my stomach. “Deceased?”
She consults her clipboard. “One Bernard F. Laurant, park employee, white male, age fifty-seven.”
“What do you mean?” I say as a blackness slowly closes around my vision.
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