Dreamland Social Club(40)
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 song 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?
Most of what was left seemed to be, well, junk, but it was the sort of junk that had to be sifted through very carefully because every once in a while, mixed in with a pile of old, useless bills or receipts, there’d be a photo or a birth certificate or a baptismal gown or a program from a play her mother had been in as a child or the newspaper announcement of Preemie and Birdie’s wedding. Her grandparents seemed normal in those moments of discovery, when the ordinariness of their lives loomed larger than the weird stuff. Jane liked it, though she didn’t like that it made her wonder whether her mother had maybe overreacted. Leaving and staying away for so very long.
Leaving them.
Leaving her.
Putting on “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” before heading back up to the house, Jane lay down on Birdie’s red sofa and thought back hard, to that day, that other sofa. She was getting better at this remembering thing, so thought she might try willing it into happening, willing a memory to life. The couch was blue, not red. The day was cold, not hot. They’d been shopping. Or something. Hadn’t they? And there it was....
I’m tugging at my mother, who is lying on the couch, with a hand to her forehead. “Come on,” I’m saying. “Get up, Mommy.”
We are having a dance party in the living room, dancing to some crazy loud and fast music—“Hey! Ho! Let’s go!”—and I don’t want to stop.
“In a minute, honey,” she says, and she takes my hand and strokes it. “I don’t feel so hot.”