How to Save a Life(76)

We drove in silence for ten minutes. I didn’t know Wichita, but I assumed Evan was taking us back to our motel.

“It feels like we’re going the wrong way,” I said.

“I know. I think we’re…” His words tapered off as his eyes narrowed at interchange. He hit the blinker and took the exit for 135 South.

“South? Where are we going?”

Evan said nothing but drove for another few minutes. South, when he’d been so insistent we stay north. Always north. Then I saw the sign. A tall blue rectangle with the word Joyland tumbling down its length. A curving arrow between joy and land pointed toward the park entrance.

“I’ve been here before,” I said as Evan turned Snowball down the overgrown, pot-holed drive.

“Looks like it’s been closed for years,” he said.

“But I was here.” I stared out the window, my mouth slightly parted and my hand reached for his. “My mother took me here.”

He gave my hand a squeeze as he parked the car. “Come on.”

We walked hand-in-hand through the old amusement park. In the falling light of the afternoon, the park was a quiet and lifeless ghost town. The rides sat motionless, peeling paint and rust. The game booths were either shuttered up or gutted completely, shelves robbed of their prizes. Food carts lay overturned among weeds and dried leaves choked the pathways.

I stopped walking and closed my eyes. My ears imagined children laughing, the metallic grinding of old rides and carnies cajoling passerby to try their hand a game of chance. I smelled cotton candy and popcorn and hot dogs, kettle corn and barbecue sauce. A cloud of carnival perfume wafting in the still dark air of a summer night.

Colored lights flashed behind my closed eyes and I felt my mother’s hand in mine. Now it was her laughter I heard. She laughed as she pulled me by the hand from one game or ride to another. Her lights were on and they shone brighter than all the bulbs of the midway.

I opened my eyes. The park was a burned-out dream. Only rusted metal and rotting wood hung their scents in the air. Evan’s hand held mine now.

We walked on, leaves crunching around our feet. We came to the sign with the clown, his smile manic as he beckoned visitors deeper into Joyland. I remembered him. He was rusted now, his stance tilted on one broken leg. His paint was chipped, the primary colors faded by a decade of sun. But my memory restored him, brought back his conical cap and polka-dots.

“Mama told me to close my eyes,” I said. “Open your mouth and close your eyes. She put a pinch of cotton candy on my tongue. I’d never had it before. I remember thinking it tasted exactly like its name: a cotton ball of sugar that melted away.”

Evan smiled at me but said nothing.

“I wanted more and my mom laughed and held out a plastic bag full of it. I tore out a pink hunk and crammed it in my mouth. Instead of telling me to slow down or take smaller bites, my mother laughed and hugged me and pulled me toward the Tilt-a-Whirl. My stomach lurched the whole ride. I was woozy afterward, so we washed the cotton candy down with ice cream sodas and I crashed on the car ride home. Dozed in the passenger seat with my head cradled in the seatbelt. Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’ was on the radio and my mother sang along. She had a beautiful voice…”

Evan gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “Then what happened?”

“I pretended to be asleep when we got home. So she’d have to carry me to bed. She knew I was faking but she played along. She tucked me into bed with my blue whale in the crook of my arm. She kissed my forehead and said, ‘This was a good night, Josie.’ I couldn’t pretend to be asleep anymore. I put my arms up around her neck, held her tight and said, ‘No, it was the best night.’”

I breathed in the night air, let it out, waiting for the memory to fade back to gray. It didn’t. Joyland was a ghost town around us, but in my mind it was bright and brilliant, full of color. And my mother was closer now, too. I could see her face so much clearer now.

I looked up at Evan in the darkening night. “How are you doing this? How do you know to take me to these places?”

“I don’t,” he said.

“Evan…”

“Does it make you happy? To be here?”

I stared. “Well…yes, of course. I’m getting my mother back. Little by little. It’s like a miracle. But, Evan—”

“Then that’s why. As for how…?” He shrugged. “I don't know to take you to these places, Jo. That’s not how it works. I dreamed it but can only remember little pieces. It doesn’t come back to me until we’re in the moment. I wait and listen, and when it comes, I follow.”

I nodded, not sure what to say. However he was doing it, he was giving my mother back to me, piece by piece. A gift more valuable to me than I had the words to express right there, in the falling dark.

Evan moved close, touched my cheek softly. “More than anything, I want you to be happy. If there’s a driving force then that’s it. Your happiness.”

He held me close, wrapping me in his warmth just as he had four years ago.

I leaned into him. “I’m happy. More than I’ve ever been.”

“Then I’m taking you exactly where you need to be.”





I woke up with a gasp, and half sat up, the dream slipping away before I could grasp all of it. As usual. But this time a few fragments lingered; names and objects.