Pawned

by Laura Bickle

  Along the boardwalk are little concession stands, hot dog joints, places to buy cotton candy and soft drinks. I buy Lily a hot dog and cotton candy, and I get a dog and a Coke. We sit at the edge of the boardwalk in silence and watch the carnies start to open up the carnival at the other end of the boardwalk. There’s a Ferris wheel, a carousel, and a bunch of other rides designed to appeal to tourists. Sid took me on them once when I was a kid.

  Lily pulls a string of cotton candy from the top of the pile. It’s pink. I’ve never noticed that cotton candy has different flavors, but Lily swears it does, depending on the color.

  “So,” she says, “if you were to leave, where would you go?”

  I shrug and lick the mustard off my thumb. “Dunno.”

  “Would you go try to find your mom?”

  And there’s the million-dollar question. I make a face, but my heart leaps just a little at the thought. I haven’t seen my mom since I was small. She left after she and my dad had a spectacular argument. She didn’t even come back to bury Zach. My dad said he tried to reach her to tell her, but I don’t think he tried that hard.

  “I’m not sure,” I say with as much nonchalance as I can muster.

  “It’s okay if you want to,” Lily tells me. “I think about reconnecting with my dad every once in a while.”

  “Your dad’s in prison,” I point out.

  She gives me a dirty look. “Yeah. I know. But at least I know where he is. That’s what my mom says, anyway.”

  “Do you think he’ll ever get out?”

  She stares up at the sky. Close to the ocean, it seems bluer. “I dunno. Mom always told us he was in for embezzlement, but I looked it up online. He’s actually in there for several fraud offenses, counterfeiting, and conspiracy to commit murder.”

  I think about that for a moment. “Why didn’t your mom tell you?”

  The corner of her mouth turns down, then up, as if she can’t decide how she feels about it. “I think she was trying to protect us. In her own way. Like she’s doing with this Mob thing. Maybe she borrowed money, or it’s something stupid that my dad’s done while in prison. But she’s not going to give me the truth.”

  I stare down at my shoes, dangling above the sand. “I can’t imagine my dad doing that.”

  “Lying to you?”

  “No...trying to protect me.”

  A gull walks up to me. The expression on his face says, ‘Hey, brother, have you got a dollar?’ I’m grateful for the distraction. I give him the last bit of my hot dog bun. He snatches it up and wings away.

  Lily doesn’t try to downplay what I’ve said. She seems to think about it hard, spiraling cotton candy around her finger. “I think,” she says, “that your dad has a secret desire to blow his brains out.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “No shit?” I’m stunned. So stunned, that’s all I can say.

  She nods. “Your dad’s a hustler. He’s always trying to keep a step ahead of the game, but he knows he’s falling behind. He plays games with the edge. But he’s absolutely miserable and can’t see a way out.”

  “Whoa.” I stare at her. “How do you know that?”

  She shrugs. “My dad was like that in a lot of ways. But different. I knew he loved us. But he had this craving for...excitement. Danger. Whatever. Rose says that’s because he really wanted to kill himself but was too chickenshit to actually do it. So he put himself in bad situations just to see if fate or some cop would pull the trigger for him.”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry for that.”

  She leans forward. “When someone feels like they got away with something without being punished...they make themselves pay. In all kinds of little ways, and big ones. But it eats away at them. Guilt leads to self-destructiveness.”

  “You can see all that?” I wonder what else she sees. I never told Lily about the Bunko or any of the magical happenings in the shop. I want to keep some boundaries, at least keep her outside our fucked-up little world, on the sane side of the looking glass.

  But I also want to confess. To tell someone about all the bad shit I’ve done and the terrible things I’ve seen, and for her to accept me anyway.

  Maybe that’s not possible. Not really. The men in my family drive women away with this stuff, and I don’t want to poison Lily’s life like that, make her run to the distant corners of the earth to keep away from me.

  This is as close as I can get. And I have to be content with that.

  We sit for some time before she speaks again. The gulls caw and the waves scrape the sand in long sighs.

  “I do see it,” she says at last. “More than you think. Under all that macho bravado...I see it.”

  My resolve falters. I lean forward, reaching up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Lily’s ear. She blushes, looking down. I cup her face in my hand and kiss her.

  I don’t know if I do it because I want to silence her—maybe I don’t want to know how much she knows. But I do know that I want to feel close to her, to taste the sugary sweetness clinging to her lips and the warmth of her mouth. The breeze from the ocean slides her hair across my cheek, and her fingers wind in mine. It’s like falling into sunshine. My fingers slip back, feeling the softness of her hair against my palm. Bliss. Total bliss.

  I mean, I’ve wanted to get close to Lily for a long time, but never really worked up the nerve. I was afraid she’d brush me away, tell me what a good friend I was. How she didn’t want to mess up what we had. But this short-circuits my brain. I feel alive, like the heat of summer sunshine rolling over my skin. It feels good. Right.

  I break off the kiss first, afraid to fall too far into it, afraid I’ve fucked it all up. When I open my eyes, she’s smiling at me. Her lips are red, and a blush blooms on her cheeks.

  I climb to my feet, offer her my hand. “Let’s go,” I say.

  “Where?” she asks. There’s no wariness about her. She takes my hand and stands up with me.

  “Let’s get away.”

  We walk toward the carnival at the end of the boardwalk, toward the glittering lights and faint tinkle of music. I savor the warmth of her hand in mine.

  Lily pulls back for a moment. “Don’t you want to go see your Pops?”

  I hesitate. “Not now. Later. Now, I just...” I look up at the sky. The sun is white and distant. “Now, I just want to forget everything.”

  She squeezes my hand. “Let the forgetting begin.”

  IN AN OLD MOVIE, THEY called this one place an oubliette. Sort of like a dungeon, a dank pit in the bottom of a castle. A prisoner would be dropped into one and forgotten about. I somehow doubt a prisoner would forget who or what they were there for. But I suppose that could happen, given the right amount of darkness and sensory deprivation.

  The carnival, though, is a perfect opposite of that, though it still makes one forget one’s troubles. I buy two tickets at the gate, and we wander inside the maze of light and sound. We ride the Scrambler, clinging to the steel bar to keep from slamming around in the car like pinballs. We take a ride through the haunted house. Lily’s completely unfazed by the monsters that leap up from the machinery, laughing in the faces of the ghosts and goblins and trying to reach for their mechanical handsl.

  We play some games of ring toss and lose. We throw some darts against a wall of balloons. I slip the carnie ten bucks and ‘win’ a plush animal for Lily. She chooses the strangest-looking creature on the wall, a purple platypus. He’s a terribly awkward creature, with a duck’s bill and webbed feet and the body of a groundhog. She hugs it to her chest happily.

  “It’s like God had a bunch of spare parts in his part box that he threw together at the last minute and decided, ‘Eh, good enough.’” I’ve never seen a platypus in person. Maybe someday I’ll see one in a zoo.

  “He’s adorable!” Lily cries defensively. “And besides which, they’re poisonous.”

  “Of course he is.”

  She grins and strokes his fuzzy head. “I’m naming him...Platytude.”

  I laugh.
Lily names everything from stones to pigeons to stray cats. Every cat that visits our alley gets a name.

  Platytude sits across our laps on the Ferris wheel. There are only six other people on it, and it takes a long time to ratchet up to the top. Lily swings her feet in the air.

  “Look,” she points. “There’s the Pompey and the Red and Black.”

  I can see the casinos from here, the tall buildings and signage just north of us.

  “There’s the Shiny Nickel. And the Byzantium. See the laurel leaves?”

  “Looks smaller from here.” Our whole world does. From this height, I can see that the boardwalk isn’t perfectly straight, that it veers a little right and left around docks.

  Lily leans forward against the steel safety bar. “There’s where we live.”

  Flat roofs are covered by asphalt and pierced by air conditioning units. The Ferris wheel sinks, rises again. I catch sight of our homes again, stare past them, at the jail festooned with ribbon razor wire, the shining white hospital...and somewhere on the hazy horizon, I think I can make out something green. Like trees.

  Lily snuggles up next to me, and I put my arm around her. The places we know seem like toy buildings, tiny parts of a very big skyline and a very big world. This time with her feels both calming and exhilarating. Like a glimpse of a future that might not be so bad. Another world that just might be, if I only close my eyes and wish hard enough.

  We eventually come back down to earth. The ground feels wobbly for some time afterward, until we leave the carnival. I’m not ready to go home yet.

  Lily can sense it. “We should go see Pops.”

  “Yeah,” I say. Back to the real world.

  We catch a bus that takes us there at a leisurely pace. We’re the only people on the bus. The bus driver stops for a break outside a strip club. He shuts off the engine and vanishes.

  “Must be part of his regular route,” Lily muses. She looks out the dirty window as he goes behind the mirrored doors. She opens the window to let the breeze in.

  I stretch my legs out in the aisle and stare at the empty driver’s seat.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks, idly petting Platytude.

  “I’m wondering what it would be like if I hijacked the bus and drove until the tank ran out.”

  Lily laughs. “I don’t know how far that bus got in Speed before it ran out of gas.”

  I stand up and walk toward the front of the bus. I go as far as to check for keys before coming back to our seat.

  “No keys?” she asks.

  “No keys,” I say glumly.

  “So,” she says. “Do you really want to run away?”

  I screw up my face. “With you? Sure.” My heart races as I say it.

  She punches me in the arm. “I’m serious. Do you want to?”

  “Would you really run off into the sunset with me?”

  “Yeah. I think I could. Under the right circumstances.”

  I jam my chin down on my hand, thinking. “Well, we’d need transportation. And money. Maybe I could get in touch with my mom.”

  “I could probably make fake IDs,” she says.

  I look sidelong at her, a bit startled.

  “Hey, I’m good with art. It’s good for some things.”

  “Where would we go?”

  She takes a deep breath. “Someplace to start over? Maybe a college town. Not someplace too big or too small. Just big enough to get lost in, but not so big that we’d be lost.”

  Makes perfect sense. Maybe someplace like I saw when I Bunkoed the ice cream truck. Suburblandia. I don’t know if we’re just daydreaming here or actually planning, but...damn. I want it.

  “I don’t want to take you away from your family,” I say. “And you just got accepted at SCCC.”

  She squeezes Platytude so hard his belly wrinkles. “I do love them. And they love me. But...I want more. Besides, I’m pretty sure there are other community colleges out there in the world.”

  The bus driver gets back on the bus. His collar is buttoned up the wrong way. Three women get on the bus after him, taking over the first three seats, sinking down into them, limp as noodles. They’re girls from the strip club, I realize. I can tell by the clear Cinderella hooker heels poking out from their tote bags. They all have long hair, wear lots of makeup, and are dressed in sweat clothes, which seems a little incongruous with all the glitter eyeshadow. But I guess if I were stuck wearing...or not wearing...what they did for a full shift, I’d be wanting my sweats, too.

  Lily catches me looking. She leans forward, watching them. “The one on the right is our age.”

  I look again. She does seem very young, now that I really look at her.

  “How can you tell?” I ask.

  Lily’s hand comes up to her throat. “She doesn’t have any neck wrinkles. She’s under age.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. Also, she used to go to our school. She dropped out last year.”

  The girl catches us looking at her. She ducks and looks away, hiding behind a curtain of hair. She must recognize Lily. She fusses in her purse and starts counting her money.

  Lily looks out the window. “Sometimes it seems like there’s no good way out.”

  “YOU AREN’T GETTING away that easily.”

  Pops is asleep, or pretending to be. Since a bit of drool has escaped his lips, I’m thinking he’s on a whole lot of painkillers. He has two different IV bags dripping stuff into his veins. I hold his other hand, the one that isn’t attached to the arm pierced by needles. It feels warm and dry.

  He looks good. His cheeks are rosy, and his breathing’s deep and even. He’s kicked the covers off, and his Fred Flintstone feet are open to the air. The old man hates to sleep with his feet covered. That bit of spark makes me think he’s going to make a comeback.

  Pops emits a juicy snore.

  “He’s going to be fine,” Lily whispers.

  “Yeah.” And Hoodie has pretty much guaranteed it.

  Lily kisses Pops on the forehead. She squeezes my shoulder. “I’m going to head down to the cafeteria, let you two have some time alone. I’ll be back.” She places Platytude on Pops’s stomach and slips out of the room.

  I sink back in my chair. I can’t be angry at Pops for my dad’s piss-poor decision making. I want him to live forever, too. But he’s an old man, and I wonder how many more deals with the devil my dad would make to keep him alive.

  One thing’s for sure: I’m not going to keep my dad’s secrets, not the way he’s kept things from me. I resolve to tell Pops the truth, once he’s awake and able to hear me. I know he’ll be furious. But the truth needs to come out.

  Pops snorts and wakes himself up. He blinks his blue eyes up at the ceiling and groans.

  “You okay, Pops?”

  He twists his head back and forth in bed. “Dammit. I’m still here.”

  “We’ll take you home as soon as they release you,” I reassure him. “You’ve had a tough time of it.”

  He stares at the purple platypus on his chest. “What the hell is this monstrosity?”

  “It’s Lily’s. It’s a platypus.” I pull it off him and drop it on my own lap.

  He shakes his head. “I’m still here.” His mouth turns down, radiating bitterness. A tear snakes down the craggy wrinkles of his face.

  “Are you all right? Do you need some more meds?” My hand hovers above the nurse call button.

  Pops rubs his eyes. “I’m okay, I just...I was somewhere else. Not long ago.”

  “Dreaming?” I relax my hand. “Morphine will give you some trippy dreams.”

  “No. I was walking through a tea garden with that kami from Japan.”

  A chill runs up my arms, and I feel the hair rising. “When was this?”

  “Yesterday. She said she was taking me to your grandmother. She was just as I remembered her: black hair, smelling like cherry blossoms. Her face was serene, like the moon. We were walking arm in arm, down a path in a tea garden.” He stare
s up at the ceiling. “It was real nice. Cherry blossoms blowing in the breeze, petals everywhere. Then...then the wind picked up, tearing the blossoms from the branches. The wind was so strong, I could barely breathe. The expression on her face changed, became angry. Inhuman.

  “She said I was going to have to go back. That someone had called me back, and that there was no way she could stop it. The wind pulled her away and sucked me down a black tunnel. And that’s all I remember.”

  His eyes are glazed, and his breathing is sharp. He looks me full in the face for the first time. “Where the hell is your dad? You’ve got that look on your face...”

  I stare down at the platypus. “We’ll talk about this later, Pops.”

  The old man’s breathing softens, evens out, and he falls back to sleep.

  I feel like a coward for not telling him now. Like my father. But I will. I will tell him the truth—when he’s strong enough to take it.

  WE CATCH THE LAST BUS going to our end of town. I don’t really want to go back, but I have a whole lotta planning to do. I was hoping to do some of it on the bus, but it’s full of the evening dregs of society who’ve just crawled out of their holes. A guy who might be on meth is scratching off his skin at the front of the bus. At least, I hope it’s meth and not scabies.

  Lily sits by the window, and I sit on the aisle. Neither of us makes eye contact with a group of drunk men in their twenties or the guy in a hospital gown and flip flops talking to himself.

  We get off the bus two stops before the one we should take. Meth Head is screaming at the bugs under his skin, and the drunk men have started yelling back at him. The bus driver is threatening to call the cops, and he stops the bus. Seems as good a time as any to get the hell off.

  We walk down the sidewalk in silence. It feels good not to be cooped up with the crazies—though these people are objectively no less crazy than my family. Just less socially acceptable. More obvious.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” I tell Lily.

  She hugs Platytude close to her chest. “Anytime.”

  “I really appreciate it. I just want you to know that...my family is a good deal more fucked up than it looks.”