Dreamland Social Club(46)

“Sorry,” he whispered back, and then they took off, with him guiding her down the street with a hand on her elbow. “I realized I shouldn’t let you walk by yourself. After the other night.”

He had his backpack on again, and another tight band tee, and they headed straight for the fence around the abandoned tower. Quietly, they circled its perimeter, methodically trying the locks they found at the four gates—one per side—but had no luck at all.

“Well, it has been a long time,” Leo said, and they took a break on a bench on the boardwalk. It was breezy and there was a cool edge to the air, a threat from fall.

“Are we giving up?” Jane asked, but Leo shook his head. Then he said, “Let’s go back this way,” and led her to a post at one corner of the fence. After looking up and down the boardwalk—they were the only two players in their noir scene—he cupped his hands down low and said, “Okay, step up and over, using the post.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Jane had never climbed a fence or trespassed before, but she took one look at the moon—and saw the outline of the whole of it, lit by the crescent—and felt that gravitational pull again, this time like a tug in her Achilles’ heel. And then there was her foot in Leo’s cupped hands. And then there was her body going up, up, up. And then there were her hands grabbing fence, and then her belly was scraping wire, and then her feet were finding footing, and then moving down, down, down, and then with a jump backwards she was in.

In no time, Leo hooked his backpack over the fence to her, then scaled its rungs. Soon they were taking crunchy steps through tall grass toward the tower, which looked so much larger now, like it couldn’t possibly be that same steel flower she’d first spied from the cab. Jane followed Leo right up to its base—the beams were so much thicker, wider, redder—where he stopped and unzipped his backpack and spread out his small blanket. He lay down, looking up, and patted the spot next to him.

“Best view in the world,” he said, and Jane realized something. She said, “Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this all before?”

When he just smiled, she took her place beside him, looking up at the steel tower. From here, lit just so, it took on the shape of a roulette wheel in the sky, and that felt somehow fitting. She closed her eyes and imagined it spinning and spinning and spinning. Jumping off it had been a gamble, just like being here tonight. It was time to go for broke.

“I’ve been remembering things,” she said quietly. “About my mom.”

“What kind of things?”

“All these games we used to play when I was little.”

Leo looked over at her and raised his eyebrows.

“We moved around so much so we didn’t have a lot of toys, I guess.” She looked up at the shadow moon as she spoke but felt Leo watching her. “So she’d always make up games using stuff we had around the apartment, like Trip to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Like inspired by Luna Park.”

When he said nothing, she just kept talking.

“Like she’d turn a box into a spaceship or pretend that green string was seaweed, or she’d dress up as an Eskimo or pretend to be the captain of a ship going to the moon.” Jane put on a deep voice. “This is your captain. We are traveling through a storm. We are quite safe.” She added, “That was from Trip to the Moon.”

Leo spoke very slowly when he said, “That. Is. Awesome.”

Jane had to keep talking to keep from crying. “One of my favorites was playing Elephant Hotel. One time she actually made a bed of peanuts for us to sleep on. I’d never seen so many peanuts.”

Leo laughed.

“We had a game about living under a roller coaster, too. She must’ve been thinking of the Thunderbolt.”

“How old were you when she died?” Leo asked tentatively, sadly.

“Six,” Jane said. “So I don’t remember a lot. Or didn’t. Until lately. And I mean, I didn’t even know she’d ever been to a mermaid camp or kept a journal or anything, really.”

In the silence that followed, Jane felt a magnetic pull between their hands, their bodies, and knew she wasn’t making it up. “I just found out, from your mom, actually, that my mother actually dated one of the Claveracks.”

“Oh, snap.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Exactly. I mean, how is that even possible? Nothing makes sense.” She shook her head. “I really wish I could find that journal.”

“It’s been a really long time, Jane,” he said, sort of sadly, and Jane said, “I know. But we used to play this game, hiding this little journal I kept when I was little. I feel like she must’ve hidden hers, too. And like maybe I could find it.”

“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t sound convinced, and Jane couldn’t blame him. She wasn’t entirely convinced either.

“So what was the deal anyway?” He pulled a blade of a grassy weed up out of the ground and played with it. “How come your mother never came back to visit or anything? My mom said she hasn’t—hadn’t—seen her in like twenty years.”

“I don’t know.” Should she know? “I guess she never really got along with Preemie, and then she met my dad and they just started traveling and stuff and it sounds like Coney Island was pretty awful back then, too. But we were all going to come back together, apparently, when I was little. To meet my grandparents, probably even your mom, when I was six, but then she died and we never did.”