Dreamland Social Club(88)

“Rats or excessive fruit flies?”

“Exactly.”

She felt his shrug when he said, “I’d want to look.”

She held her notebook on her lap and studied its cover again.

“Just do it,” he said.

“Now?”

“I’ll just sit here and hold the flashlight. You know, in case you need me to shoo the rats away.”

And so Jane opened to the first page of weird drawings and quotes and the names of bands written in different kinds of print: Bubble. Block. Script. Page after page was covered in doodles and quotes and dates and random scribbling.

“Beth Loves Jimmy”

“SML 5/3/88”

“Warriors! Come out to play!”

“Wherever You Go There You Are”

“Gabba Gabba Hey!”

“OMFUG”

It was endless, with words written in impossibly small print in every available white space. Just page after page of miniature graffiti, with only the occasional actual paragraph or two of writing. When she finally found a solid paragraph beside a drawing of a mermaid, she read: I talked Beth into coming to Florida with me. We’re going to audition to be mermaids and I just KNOW we’re going to get it. We’re going to have the best summer ever. And as soon as it’s official I am going to rub it in the face of the people—you know who you are—who are saying it’s a dumb thing to do, that I’ll never make it. I don’t care if people think it’s dumb. I’m doing it. So there! Oh my God, it’s going to be soooooo cooooooool.

She was stunned by how much like a teenager her mother sounded. It only made sense, of course. She had been a teenager, but Jane had always thought of her mother as wildly sophisticated and sort of figured she must have always been that way. To discover that she had been just a regular girl came as a bit of a shock. And a relief.

Flipping through more and more pages of sketches and doodles and graffiti, she saw a big, juicy heart with a knife stuck into it, and she stopped and stared. It was familiar, maybe something her mother had drawn absentmindedly when she was talking on the phone or making a shopping list. She read the neighboring paragraph: Mrs. Mancuso is sick. Like really sick. Like not going to live cancer sick. Beth can’t come to Florida.

It took Jane a second to realize that Mrs. Mancuso was Beth’s mother, Leo’s grandmother, and then she kept reading.

I’m sick about it, too, and sick for Beth. It really makes you think . . . about, well, life. And how you never know what’ll get you in the end. And how important it is to really enjoy every day. Which is pretty hard considering how lame school is. Honestly, I don’t think I’m going to go to college. I’d rather run off and get married or backpack around Europe or maybe be a mermaid at Weeki Wachee forever than bury my face in books. I know college is the smart thing to do, but what’s going to make me happier? I feel awful for Beth. Just awful.

Jane flipped ahead a few pages, found the same heart and a drawing of a gravestone with the name Anastasia Marie Mancuso, then “RIP,” written on it.

Leo hadn’t moved an inch the whole time.

She flipped through the rest of the book, finding a few random paragraphs that said nothing much at all, and then to the last page to see where it ended. There she found a drawing of a man with a head that shrank toward the top, like the pinheads she’d read about. The only writing on the page said, again, Gabba Gabba Hey! Jane flipped through the rest of the pages to be sure that was the last entry, and it was.

Finally, she looked up. “Do you know what ‘Gabba Gabba Hey’ means?”

Leo turned off his flashlight. “Ever hear of the Ramones?”

Jane shook her head. A determined sliver of light from the street penetrated a gap between shed planks and sent murky waves of light through the round windows.

“Never saw Rock ’n’ Roll High School?”

She shook her head again.

“Really?” His body tensed with surprise.

“Really.”

“Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” he said, and Jane said, “Oh!”

He shook his head, like he couldn’t believe it. “I’m gonna forgive you for not knowing that that song is by the greatest band to ever come out of New York City because we’re sitting in the bathysphere thanks to you, but we’ll have to educate you on that front. And fast. ‘Gabba gabba hey’ was sort of their catchphrase.”

“But what does it mean?” It was her mother’s final message, the last thing she’d written in this book she’d kept for years.

“Nothing, really.” Leo shrugged. “It’s supposedly some variation on the whole ‘Gooble gobble, we accept her’ thing. I don’t know why they made it gabba. I don’t think anyone does.”

Jane felt sadness creep in. It wasn’t a clue to who her mother was. It was more old carny crap. Her voice started to shake and crumble when she said, “I guess I thought it would tell me more about who she was. Or who to be.”

Leo squeezed her close as she started to cry, and the sound of it echoed inside the bathysphere, rippled through the air around them as if through water.

“You know what?” The excitement in Leo’s voice filled the whole echoey chamber. “You know who she is. Or was. But no”—he shook his head—“I’m sticking with is. Present tense. Because she’s right here. I mean, God, she’s not even my mother and I can’t stop thinking about her. About Trip to the Moon. Elephant Hotel. I want to fastforward to when I have kids of my own just so I can play those games with them, you know?”