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.
“Is everything okay?” I’m careful not to look at him. My throat is still as dry as chalk. I want to buy a water but don’t want to ask Parker to get it. “You seem a little . . .”
“A little what?” He leans forward on his elbows, eyes dark, unsmiling.
“I don’t know. Mad at me or something.” I take a deep breath. “Is it because of the party?”
Now it’s Parker’s turn to look away—over my head, squinting, as if something fascinating is happening midair. “I was hoping we could, you know, actually hang out.”
“Sorry.” I don’t bother pointing out that technically, I never said I would come, only that I would think about it. “I wasn’t feeling well.”
“Really? Didn’t seem like it.” He makes a face. Then I remember I spent the whole day with him at work, laughing, talking, threatening to splash each other with the industrial cleaning hose. He knows I was feeling just fine.
“I wasn’t in the mood to party.” There’s no way I can tell him what I really feel: that I was hoping my note would bring Dara to my door, that she would knock a half second before letting herself in, wearing one of her backless, strapless, gravity-defying tank tops and a thick covering of eye shadow; that she would insist that I change into something sexier, that she would grip my chin and force makeup on me, as if I were the younger sister. “Did you have fun?”
He just shakes his head and mutters something I can’t hear.
“What?” I’m starting to get angry.
“Forget it,” he says. I spot Shirley waddling toward us, scowling as usual. Parker must see her at the same time, because he backs up, toward the door sandwiched between the deep fryer and the microwave. When he opens the door, a wedge of light expands across the narrow space, touching boxes of hamburger buns and towering stacks of plastic soda lids.
“Parker—”
“I said forget it. Seriously. It’s no big deal. I’m not mad.” Then he disappears, silhouetted momentarily before vanishing, and Shirley takes his place, shuffling up to the counter, huffing, moisture clinging to the bleached-blond hair on her upper lip.
“You gonna order something, or just sit there staring?” she says to me. Big dark rings have expanded under her breasts, like the shadows of two groping hands.
“Not hungry,” I say. Which, thanks to Parker, is true.