Vanishing Girls(22)

Maude squints at me. “No, she lived happily ever after,” she says, and then shakes her head, snorting. “Of course she died. That thing is, like, one hundred and fifty feet high. She fell from the very top. Straight to the pavement. Splat.”

“Why don’t they tear it down?” I ask. Suddenly the Gateway looks not sad, but ominous: a finger raised not to get attention but as a warning.

“Wilcox won’t. He still wants to get it running again. It was the girl’s fault, anyway. They proved it. She wasn’t wearing her harness correctly. She unlocked it as a joke.” Maude shrugs. “Now they’re all automated. The harnesses, I mean.”


I have a sudden image of Dara, unbelted, falling through space, her arms pinwheeling through empty air, her screams swallowed by wind and the sound of children laughing. And the accident: a brief photo explosion in my head, the sound of screaming, a jagged face of rock lit up by the headlights and the wheel jerking out of my hands.

I close my eyes, swallow, will away the image. Breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, ticking off long seconds, like Dr. Lichme taught me to do—the only useful thing he taught me. Where were we coming from? Why was I driving so fast? How did I lose control?

The accident has been clipped from my memory, just clean lifted away, as though surgically excised. Even the days before the accident are lost in murk, submerged in deep, sticky strangeness: every so often a new image or picture gets spit out, like something surfacing from the mud. The doctors told my mom it may have had something to do with the concussion, that memory would return to me slowly. Dr. Lichme said, Trauma takes time.

“Sometimes her dad still comes to the park and just, like, stands there, staring up at the sky. Like he’s still waiting for her to fall down. If you see him, just get Alice. She’s the only one he’ll talk to.” Maude curls her upper lip, revealing teeth that are surprisingly small, like a child’s. “He once told her she reminded him of his daughter. Creepy, right?”

“It’s sad,” I say. But Maude doesn’t hear. She’s already walking away, skirt swishing.

Alice directs me to spend the rest of the morning helping out at the booths that line Green Row (so named, she explains, because of all the money that passes hands there), distributing stuffed parrots and keeping the kids from bawling when they don’t manage to peg the wooden sharks with their water pistols. By twelve thirty I’m sweating and starving and exhausted. More and more visitors keep arriving, flooding the gates, a tidal wave of grandparents and kids and birthday parties and campers dressed identically in bright orange T-shirts: a dizzying, kaleidoscope vision of people, more people.

“What’s the matter, Warren?” Mr. Wilcox, weirdly, isn’t sweating. If anything, he looks even better and cleaner than he did this morning, as if his whole body had recently been vacuum-cleaned and ironed. “Not hot enough for you? Go on. Why don’t you grab some lunch and take a break in the shade? And don’t forget to drink water!”

I head for the opposite side of the park, toward the pavilion Parker showed me yesterday. I’m not particularly looking forward to braving another conversation with Shirley, or Princess, but the other pavilions are absolutely packed, and the idea of trying to fight my way through a crowd of sweaty preteens is even less appealing. I have to pass under the shadow of the Gateway again. Impossible not to look at it: it’s so high, the sun looks like it might impale itself on the metal. This time, it’s Madeline Snow I picture, the girl from the news, the one who disappeared: free-falling through the air, hair blowing behind her.

It’s quieter on the eastern side of the park, probably because the rides are sedate and farther apart, separated by long tracks of manicured parkland and benches nestled beneath tall spruces. Alice told me that this section of FanLand is known as the Nursing Home, and I see mostly older people here, a few couples tottering along together with their grandkids; a man with a face full of liver marks napping, upright, on a bench; a woman making painstaking progress toward the canteen with her walker, while a younger woman next to her does a bad job of pretending to be patient.

There are only a few people eating at the pavilion, sitting beneath the metal awning at metal picnic tables. I’m surprised to see Parker behind the counter.

“Hey.” I step to the window, and Parker straightens up, his face moving through an array of expressions too quick for me to decipher. “I didn’t know you were manning the grill.”

“I’m not,” he says shortly, not smiling. “Shirley had to pee.”

Next to the window are dozens of multicolored flyers, layered like feathers over the glass, advertising different special events and discounted specials and, of course, the anniversary party. A new one has been recently added to the mix, this one glaringly out of place: a grainy photograph of the missing girl, Madeline Snow, face tilted to the camera, gap-toothed and grinning. In big block letters above her image it says simply: MISSING. Now it strikes me that the girl with the blond ponytail, the one who was standing with the cops and seemed somehow familiar, must be related to Madeline Snow. They have the same wide-spaced eyes, the same subtly rounded chin.

I touch my finger to the word Missing, as if I could erase it. I briefly think about the story Parker told me, about Donovan, an everyday guy just walking around wearing a big smile and collecting kiddie porn on his computer.

“You going to order, or what?” Parker says.