Vanishing Girls(46)

“I’m fine.” I shoulder my bag and edge past her. “Everything’s fine. I’ll see you tonight, okay? Seven thirty. Sergei’s.”

Mom nods. “Do you think—do you think it’s a good idea? Tonight, I mean? All of us sitting down together?”

“I think it’ll be great,” I say—which, if you’re counting, is already the third lie I’ve told this morning.

Dara’s not in the den, although the blankets are all balled up on the sofa and there’s an empty can of Diet Coke lying on the ottoman, suggesting that she did spend part of the night downstairs. Dara’s like that, mysterious and undirected, always appearing and disappearing at will and never noticing, or maybe just not caring, that other people worry about her.

Maybe she went out last night for an early birthday celebration and wound up sleeping on some random guy’s couch. Maybe she woke up early in one of her rare bouts of penitence and will come through the front door in twenty minutes, whistling, makeup-free, bearing a big paper bag full of cinnamon doughnuts from Sugar Bear and a trayful of Styrofoam cups of coffee.

Outside, the thermometer is already at ninety-eight degrees. There’s a heat wave due this week, a massive, record-breaking blast of oven-temperature air. Just what we need today. Even before I get to the bus stop, I’ve chugged through my water bottle, and even though the air-conditioning on the bus is on full blast, the sun still seems to beat through the windows and turn the whole interior the murky, musty warm of a dysfunctional refrigerator.

The woman next to me is reading a newspaper, one of those obnoxiously thick ones packed with flyers and coupons and pamphlets advertising sales at a nearby Toyota dealership. The headlines are, no surprise, still given over to the Snow case. On the front page is a grainy picture of Nicholas Sanderson leaving the police station with his wife—both of them walking head down as though against a driving rain.

Nicholas Sanderson just moments after he was cleared of involvement in the Snow disappearance, reads the caption.

“It’s a damn shame,” the woman says, shaking her head so that her chin shakes, too. I turn away and look out the window, watching as the coast and its commercial clutter come into view and beyond it, the ocean, white and flat as a disk.

The FanLand sign is partially obscured behind a gigantic mass of balloons, like a multicolored cloud. A short distance away, the owner of Boom-a-Rang, Virginia’s Largest Firecracker Emporium, stands outside, smoking a thin brown cigar, looking doleful. In my nine days at FanLand, I have not yet been able to determine the reason for Boom-a-Rang’s hours, which seem whimsical to the point of insanity. Who shops for fireworks at eight in the morning?

Inside the park, it’s chaos. Doug is herding a group of volunteers—none of them older than thirteen—toward the amphitheater, yelling to be heard over the constant thrum of preteen chatter. Even at a distance of twenty feet, I can hear Donna shouting into the phone, probably telling off some food vendor who forgot to deliver a thousand hot dog buns, so I steer clear of the office, figuring I can drop off my bag later. Even Mr. Wilcox looks miserable. He passes me on the footpath leading down to the Ferris wheel but barely grunts in response to my hello.

“Don’t mind him.” Alice skims my back with a hand as she jogs past me, already sweating freely, a long sheath of napkins tucked under one arm. “He’s a stress case this morning. Parker called in sick, and he’s freaking out about staffing.”

“Parker’s sick?” I think of the way he looked last night in front of the wave pool, with the colors patterning his face and transforming him into someone unrecognizable, with the light throwing up fingers to the sky.

Alice is already twenty feet in front of me. “Guess so.” She turns around but continues to half step down the path. “Wilcox is having a hissy fit, though. And don’t even get close to Donna. Someone missed her morning dose of happy.”


“Okay.” The sun is blinding. Every color looks exaggerated, like someone has turned up the contrast on a big remote. I feel weirdly uneasy about Parker, about how we left things last night. Why did I get so upset?

I have another flashback to Dara, to his car, to the night the rain came down in heavy sheets, as if the sky were breaking off in pieces. I blink and shake my head, trying to dislodge the memory.

“You’re sure he’s okay, though?” I call out to Alice. But she’s too far away to hear me.

By 10:00 a.m., it’s obvious that even Mr. Wilcox has underestimated the crowds. The park has never been so busy, despite temperatures inching past 103 degrees. I refill my water bottle a half-dozen times and still don’t have to pee. It’s like the liquid is evaporating straight from my skin. As a special treat, and because our little musical number has become something of a sensation, at least for the under-six crowd, we’re doing three different shows: ten thirty, noon, and two thirty.

In between shows, I wrestle off the mermaid tail and collapse in the front office, the only interior space with a functioning AC, too sick with heat to care that my underwear is visible to Donna, while Heather removes her parrot costume and paces the room, cursing the weather and fanning out her underarms, wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of Spanx.

It’s too hot to eat. It’s too hot to smile. And still the people come: rushing, pouring, tumbling through the park gates, a flood of kids and parents and grandparents, teen girls wearing bikini tops and cutoffs, and their boyfriends, shirtless, shorts slung low over bathing suits, pretending to be bored.