“Son, maybe you should move along. The ambulance will be here any second.”
“Ambulance . . .” For half a second I let myself think that ambulance must mean he’s just sick, just needs to go to the hospital, and then I think how Bernard told me about the utilidors the first time we talked and how I would never actually see an ambulance in the park, and for half a strange second I have the impulse to wait around and see it just so I can tell him that I did.
I look again at her. “Bernard is dead?” I say.
She nods. “Coroner says natural causes. A little unusual given his age, so we’re running it, anyway. Just routine.”
Routine in the real world, I think, but I’m not really thinking it, because I find myself moving, just moving. Away is all my brain can say, over and over, and I run out along the rest of the trolley track, where it’s just broken pieces of rail and rusting pieces cut off with a torch, and then around the back side of the lagoon, breaking through the trees and brush, and all I can hear is the sound of the pumps and the sound of my breathing, all ragged and choked and mingled together like it’s not my breathing at all, and my hand keeps automatically slipping down to the keys in my side pocket, keeping them quiet as if they will still get us in trouble. And only one clear thought repeats in my brain—He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.
The first person to find me is Cassie, and she’s not even looking. For half an hour I’ve been sitting under a tree at the back of the lagoon, trying to get my head around all of it, trying to remember the last time I saw Bernard when he was in costume, trying to remember the last thing he said to me. And then I wonder why it’s so important to remember that way, and while I’m thinking about that I remember that he was going to teach me how to eat lunch without taking off my character head, a skill he said I would thank him for later, though I doubted it, wondering if that was the last thing he said to me. And then I keep circling around to thinking that this is silly, sitting here feeling so upset, and that I will just go over to Bernard’s trailer and ask him, and then I remember all over again, like my brain keeps forgetting in three-minute cycles. My hands are shaking, and as I wipe my face with my T-shirt I hear a snap in the branches of the trees and look up, and there is Cassie.
“Hey,” I say.
“This so much sucks,” she says, and I nod.
“It does,” I tell her. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I mean, Mark can’t find a stupid garden hose?” She gathers up her hair for a moment and fans herself with her hand. “We’re in Florida, and there are, like, a million plants around this idiot place, and he can’t find one hose?”
“Oh, yeah. Well . . .” I say, and let the sentence trail off.
Finally she notices me. “What’s your problem?”
“Bernard. He’s dead . . . he died.”
She twists up her mouth. “Is that that guy on TV?”
I take a breath. “No, it’s that guy who was my friend? I visited him at his trailer? Ate lunch with him? Foulfellow?”
“Oh, yeah . . . him.” She moves toward me and sits on the pine needles beside me, where I’m slumped against the tree. “Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “I know how close you were to him.”
“I just don’t get it. I never understood ‘natural causes,’ anyway. You don’t just stop.”
“Yes,” she says, “you do. My granddad died at sixty, same thing. And then my grammy eight months after that. People do just stop, Luke.” I look over at her, surprised to see actual tears in her eyes. Maybe the first real emotion from her.
I shake my head. “It sucks. I mean . . . it just sucks.”
“And it’s so pathetic, too,” she says, wiping her eyes with her thumb. “The way he died. Alone in that little box, and you said he liked to drink. You said he was a nice guy; he deserved better.” She keeps watching the side of my face.
“Maybe he died the way he lived, you know? Doing his own thing.” I shrug, knowing as I say it how hollow it sounds.
“You think it was his thing to die like that? He just fell through the cracks, Luke.” She leans toward me, and I try to pull away from her. I don’t want this, and if I’m having any talk with Cassie, it should be about last night, about Ella, but right now everything just seems too big, too huge. Or maybe it’s the opposite of that, maybe all my stuff seems too small compared to what happened to Bernard.
“Cassie, listen,” I say, and draw a deep breath.
“No, you listen. I don’t want that to happen to you. I don’t want you to end up like that.”
I look at her, surprised. “Me?”
“Yes, you. All this stuff about how you don’t want that great job with your dad, how you want to just bum around for a while. Life is too short for that, Luke.”
“Nice cliché. But I’d rather live by something a little more real.”
“It’s a cliché because it’s true.” She takes my hand, just holding it in her palm and looking at it as she talks. “Bernard ended up like that because he never made any other plans. He was just blown into the corner like a scrap of paper. It can happen.”
“He chose it.”
“You really believe that?” She looks at me.
I think about Bernard, really think about him, how in some ways his proudest accomplishment was eating nachos without taking off his character head, about his trailer full of the yellowed past and used coffee filters. Maybe Ella was wrong about the keys, I think as I feel them pressing into my thigh. Maybe they weren’t possibility to him, the chance to do anything he wanted, but more like keys to the prison—if he accumulated enough, or found the right one, he might find his way out. And of course, he never did, and never would.
“No,” I say to Cassie, “I guess not.”
She squeezes my hand, and without thinking, I squeeze back. “I know how people see me, as Miss Ambitious, or whatever. But you know what? I just want my life to be big, to be full. I want to really live it.”
“Well, I do, too,” I say.
“I know you do,” she says, watching me. “But you don’t do it by sitting back and letting life bring itself on. It might just bring a dinky trailer and a dead-end job. If you want a full life, you have to go get it.”
I nod, thinking about this, wanting to argue with her, but not really finding a reason to. And the thought that letting life just happen might mean sitting around a crappy trailer forever waiting for something to come along . . . I feel my stomach pull into a hard knot. For a minute I can’t breathe, and part of me just wants to jump up and run to wherever Ella is. But how can it be that my parents, Cassie, and the whole world are wrong, and only Ella and I have figured it out?
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell Cassie.
She turns my face to her and kisses me. “Yeah, I’m right. I can help you make your life big, Luke. I know how.”
“Can we just talk more later?” I say to her.
She kisses me again, and I don’t stop her. “Yes,” she whispers. “We have a lot to talk about. And we have to work soon—are you coming with me?”
“I’m just going to sit here for a bit, okay? I don’t want to face everyone just yet.”
By the time I make it back to the dorm, the word is everywhere, and so are the rumors. Bernard was murdered. Bernard was murdered by the guy who plays Pinocchio. Bernard was a heroin addict. Bernard had a million dollars stashed in his trailer. It seems like any death is always accompanied by stories like that. Maybe the stories are just another set of keys—if people try enough, one will fit and somehow it will make sense. But it never does, not to me. Everyone wants to talk to me, and I see Amy leaning into Jesse, crying, but I don’t have anything to say about any of it, and I just head to my room and lie on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. I have to get out of here. The words keep repeating inside me, crowding on top of each other like water filling my lungs, not letting me breathe. All I can think is that I have to get away, to get home . . . someplace safe where people aren’t dying and I’m falling for a girl who
lives a thousand miles away and my future slides out for miles ahead of me like a deep and bottomless hole, full of nothing. Cassie’s right, I think, and then I say it out loud, to the ceiling.
“Yeah? What’s she right about?” Ella says, just as I notice her walking into the room.
“Nothing,” I say, wanting to pull her to me, but somehow there’s a wall already between us, something off and awkward.
“Well, I think I agree with you there,” she says, then pauses, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m so sorry about Bernard,” she whispers. She sits on the edge of my bed, still wearing her Cinderella earrings, her hair up.
“Me, too,” I say.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she says.
“No,” I tell her, “it changes everything.”
Her head snaps up like I’ve slapped her. She starts to say something and then doesn’t, her eyes just searching my face.
I look away from her. “Ella, I like you, so much. I can’t even say how much. But maybe we’re just fooling ourselves. I mean, they settle the strike, and then what? What about us? We’re seventeen years old. What are we supposed to do?”
She shakes her head. “Just be together. We should just be together.”
“Just poof, like that? I mean, I fight the idea, but the truth is when I’m out of here, I have a really good job waiting for me, working right beside my dad and Ben instead of some idiot boss, and I’d be crazy not to—”
“Okay, am I talking to Luke or Cassie right now?” Her face flushes deep red.
“You don’t have to like her, but Cassie’s smart. Like I said, we leave here, and you go to Maine, or Cameroon maybe, and I’m a thousand miles away from you.”
She nods, not saying anything, not looking at me, then stands and moves toward the door. She stops and turns back to me. “So,” she says, “your answer is no.”
I look at her. “No what? What do you mean?”
“No,” she says, “you don’t believe in magic.”
By late that night my duffel bag and suitcase are both half-packed, sitting in the middle of the bed. Mark walks in looking exhausted and flops on his bed.
“You must be close to winning,” I tell him.
“Yeah, another bloodletting or two and we’ll have it.”
I laugh. “Well, what’s the hold up? I thought you would have won a week ago.”
He nods. “Yeah, we almost did. We can’t find a garden hose, we can’t find a shovel, and we can’t find PVC pipe. I don’t even know what PVC pipe is.”
“Yeah, you do. I told you.”
He looks at me.
“You were drunk, and you asked me about the pipe, and I told you what it is. What I didn’t tell you is where it is. And Mark, the deal is it’s underground. Go into any of those doors next to the restrooms that are marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. That’s us. Go in, and you’ll be in a tunnel underground, and you will find PVC pipe, and you will find a garden hose.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He sits up on the side of the bed and gives a little laugh. “Man. This means we win.”
“That it does,” I say, rolling up another pair of socks.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He watches me for half a minute. “I don’t know what happened, but if you just go, you will break Ella’s heart.”
My own heart wobbles when he says her name. I shake my head. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, when I don’t know what to do, I talk to my dad.”
I almost laugh. I swear, Mark is so genuinely earnest that it’s impossible to hate him for it. “Yeah,” I say, “but your dad is a king. He’s used to dispensing wise advice to his subjects. My dad, not so much.”
“Actually, he is a king. He has this store THE TIRE KING. He bought it after he finished his career at Disney. He does these local commercials wearing a crown and shouting about prices on all-season radials.”
“You’re kidding me.” I look at his face. “No, you aren’t,” I say.
After Mark leaves to tell Cassie the good news, I sit on my bed, my duffel bag full but only half-zipped, and an announcement comes over the PA to tell us that flags in the park will be at half-staff tomorrow and that Thursday will be declared Bernard Laurant Day. I think about Bernard, wishing that he could come back long enough to tell me one thing, to tell me if it was worth it, if he would do it again. Then I think about what Mark said, and I think, What the hell, and a minute later I’m at the end of the hall dialing the number for my dad’s office. And even though it’s eight o’clock at night, he picks up on the first ring.
“Hey, Sport,” he says. “How’s the chipmunk business these days?”
“Totally nuts,” I say.
He laughs. “Wow, that is really bad. I see your joke-telling skills haven’t changed.”
There is an awkward pause, and I realize how long it’s been since I talked to him, probably a month at least. And the last time I called him at work? I can’t even remember.
“Dad?” I say. “I’m thinking of coming home. You know, so I can get started on my job and everything.”
“Okay,” he says, “let me talk to the kidnappers.”
“What are you talking about?” I lean against the wall looking at all the old numbers scratched into the side of the pay phone.
“I’ve been expecting this phone call, Luke. But not this phone call. I mean the one where you tell me you don’t want the job, aren’t coming home. I have eyes, son. I see your face when your brother and I are talking work.”
“And what would you have said in that phone call?”
“I would have said you have to do what you have to do. My father told me the same thing.”
“That’s something you say when you’re mad. Or disappointed.” I move my fingertip over the scratches, tracing the numbers.
“Luke, I got married by a man in a tunic who tapped us on the shoulder with a plastic light saber when he finished. I haven’t exactly always followed the narrow path.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Okay, sure I’m disappointed. I would like to have you here every day. I would like having my two boys with me all the time. But your life is not about me.”
“Dad? What happened with all of that? The Star Wars stuff? I mean, are you just ashamed of it now?”
“Well, I was first in line for Episode Three, I can tell you that. Think of it this way . . . remember that stuffed dog you used to carry, Mr. Bones? With the bow tie?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you never carry him anymore. Are you ashamed of him?”
I nod. “I get it. Dad, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Oh, and Luke?” I can hear the smile in his voice. “Just use the Force, Luke.”
I say my good-byes, hang up the phone, and walk back to my room to unpack. Just as I’m stuffing socks into the drawers, Mr. Tubbs comes on the intercom again to say there will be a special meeting of all temporary park employees at seven thirty the next morning. Then he tells us to have a Disney night. I look out the window at the castle, at our empty bench beneath the tree, wishing, wishing that I could make her just appear there. But she is gone, and the bench stays empty because I sent her away. And that’s the thing about magic—once you stop believing, it goes away for good.
17
Ella
I keep thinking about the snow globe, wishing I hadn’t given it to Luke to keep. Thinking about the tiny figures dancing inside. I keep turning it over in my head, watching as the snow collects on the top, then flipping it again so it swirls around the figures. It’s funny how sometimes when things are turned upside down when you least expect it, everything gets so much more beautiful. And yet that’s how it is with snow globes, why people buy them, or some people collect hundreds of them, lining them up on shelves in their houses, so that the insides of their houses are filled with hundreds of worlds. All ready to be turned over. All rea
dy to be shaken up and then righted so that the snow swirls around inside, masking the scene for a few moments before it keeps swirling past, and instead of a blizzard, it’s barely a sprinkling, then nothing. And it’s in that final moment, as the snow settles back down to the bottom of the globe and the last few flakes drift lazily down, that you can really see everything clearly. Can see what has become of the figures inside. The ones locked in their dance, unable to change anything. It’s then that you realize that’s all there is, just the flip and the shake and the settle. And there’s nothing beautiful in that at all.
“It’s official,” Amy says, walking back into our room. I don’t answer her, haven’t answered her all day. I actually haven’t spoken to anyone since I talked to Luke. Well, except for Estrogen this morning when I told her I had food poisoning and I couldn’t make it to the Princess Lunch. “Ella,” Amy says. I feel the bed bump as she sits down and then the soft touch of her hand on my shoulder. “You can’t do this,” she says softly. “You can’t just let go like this.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask. Then I look at her. “What’s official?”
“Mark and Cassie won the scavenger hunt,” she says. “Big surprise.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Seems like everyone’s full of surprises.”
“You don’t have to give me the details, just tell me enough so I know who to go beat the crap out of.”
I laugh softly, then stop. “I think I’m going crazy,” I say, closing my eyes.
“Then Robin Hood was right,” she says. “Twice.”
“Twice?” I ask, and sit up. She hands me a tissue and smiles.
“First about me and Jesse,” she says, and her cheeks go pink.
“Really?” I ask. “What about the girl in Epcot?”
“It was an interview. Robin Hood conveniently forgot to tell me that the girl was actually Dr. Phoenix, the head of the horticulture division.” She smiles and looks down at her hands. “I guess this isn’t the best time to be telling you about this.”
“No, tell me. I could use a little good news.” I lean my head back against the wall and watch the side of her face.
Dream Factory Page 17