Vanishing Girls(47)

By the time two thirty rolls around, I can barely keep a smile on my face. Sweat is dripping between my boobs, behind my knees, in places I didn’t even know you could sweat. The sun is relentless, like a gigantic magnifying glass, and I feel like an ant sizzling underneath it. The audience is nothing but a blur of color.

Heather mimes her attack by the sock puppet. At that exact moment, the strangest thing happens: all the sound in the world clicks off. I can see the audience laughing, can see a thousand dark cavernous mouths, but it’s like someone has severed the feedback to my ears. There’s nothing but a dull rushing sound in my ears, as if I’m on a plane several thousand feet in the air.

I want to say something—I know I should say something. But this is my time to stand up, to try and intervene, to save Heather from the dog, and I can’t remember how to speak, either, just like I can’t remember how to hear. I push myself to my feet.

At least, I think I get to my feet. Suddenly I’m on the ground again, not face forward, as I usually fall, but on my back, and Rogers’s face appears above me, red and bloated. He’s shouting something—I can see his mouth moving, wide and urgent, while Heather’s face appears next to him, minus the bird head, hair plastered damply to her forehead—and then I’m weightless, floating across an expanse of blue sky, or rocking like a baby in my dad’s arms.

It takes me a minute to work out that Rogers is carrying me, the way he does before a performance. I’m too tired to protest. Mermaids don’t walk.

Then his voice, gruff in my ear, popping through the static silence in my brain: “Take a deep breath now.”

Before I can ask why, his arms release me and I’m falling. There’s a shock, electric and freezing, as I hit water. It’s a hard reboot: suddenly every feeling powers back on. Chlorine stings my nose and eyes. Underwater, the tail is impossibly heavy, clinging to my skin like a tight casing of seaweed. The pool is absolutely packed with kids and rafts, little legs churning the water to foam and bodies passing above me, momentarily blocking the light. It takes me about a second to realize that Rogers has just thrown me, costume and everything, straight into the wave pool.

I kick off the bottom of the pool. Just before I resurface, I see her: briefly submerged, eyes wide and blond hair extending, halo-like, from her head; briefly visible in between legs scissoring to stay afloat and kids diving beneath the crashing of the waves.

Madeline Snow.

Forgetting I’m underwater, I open my mouth to shout, and just then I break the surface and come out heaving, spitting up water, chlorine burning the back of my throat. The sound has powered back on, along with everything else; the air is filled with shrieking and laughter and the crash of man-made waves against concrete.

I flounder toward the shallows, try and turn around, scanning the crowd for Madeline. There must be sixty kids in the wave pool, maybe more. The sun is dazzling. There are blondes everywhere—ducking, popping up grinning, spouting water from their mouths like fountains, all of them more or less identical-looking. Where did she go?

“You all right?” Rogers is squatting at the edge of the pool, still wearing his pirate hat. “Feeling better?”

Just then I spot her again, struggling to pull herself onto the deck on arms as skinny as rail spikes. I slosh toward her, tripping on the stupid tail, going face forward down into the water and then dog-paddling the rest of the way. Someone is calling my name. But I have to get to her.

“Madeline.” I get a hand around her arm and she thuds back into the water, letting out a surprised cry. As soon as she turns around, I see it isn’t Madeline after all. This girl is maybe eleven or twelve, with a bad overbite and bangs cut blunt across her forehead.

“Sorry,” I say, dropping her arm quickly, even as her mother—a woman wearing denim overall shorts and pigtails, even though she must be in her forties—comes jogging over, her sandals slapping on the wet pavement.

“Addison? Addison!” She drops to her knees on the pool deck and reaches out a hand for her daughter, glaring at me like I’m some pervert. “Get over here. Now.”


“Sorry,” I say again. The woman only shoots me another dirty look as the girl, Addison, hauls herself out of the pool. Over the constant noise of shouting and laughter, I hear my name again; when I turn, I see Rogers, frowning, skirting the edge of the pool, trying to make his way over to me. I slosh out of the water, suddenly exhausted, feeling like an idiot, and flop onto the deck, my tail dribbling all over the pavement. A little girl wearing a diaper points and laughs delightedly.

“What’s going on?” Rogers takes a seat next to me. “You gonna faint on me again?”

“No. I thought I saw—” I break off, realizing how ridiculous I’ll sound. I thought I saw Madeline Snow underwater. I work the zipper down to my feet and stand up, holding the tail closed so I don’t wind up flashing anyone and getting arrested for indecency. I feel a little better, though, now that my legs aren’t suctioned together. “Did I really faint?”

Rogers straightens up, too. “Dropped like a pile of rocks,” he says. “Don’t worry, the kids thought it was part of the show. You eat any lunch?”

I shake my head. “Too hot.”

“Come on,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get you out of the sun.”

We pass two clowns and a juggler on our way back to the office—all of them subcontracted from a local entertainment company, though I know Doug is out there somewhere, suited up like a magician, doing card tricks—surrounded by thick knots of delighted children.