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.
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.
Still more people are arriving: so many people, it makes you wonder how all of them could exist, how there can be so many individual lives and stories and needs and disappointments. Looking at the line snaking down from the Plank, while the Whirling Dervish spins around on its track, hurling its passengers in tight ellipses and sending sound waves peaking and crashing, I have the weirdest moment of clarity: all the search parties, all the news stories, all the twenty-four-hour updates and tweet blasts from @FindMadelineSnow are pointless.
Madeline Snow is gone forever.
I find Alice in the office, taking her own turn in front of the AC. Donna is not there, thankfully, and the phone keeps ringing, barking shrilly four times and then falling silent again when the automated message—Hello and welcome to Fantasy Land!—kicks on. Rogers insists that I drink three cups of ice water and eat half a turkey sandwich before clocking out.
“Can’t have any accidents on the way home,” he barks, standing over me and glowering as though by the sheer force of eye contact he could make me digest faster.
“You’ll come back for the fireworks, right?” Alice says. She has her shoes up on the desk, and the small room smells faintly sour. Alice has explained, with a shrug, that she was working the Cobra when a girl teetered off the ride, grinning, turned to Alice, and puked directly on her shoes.
“I’ll be back,” I say. The park has extended hours for the anniversary party: we’ll be open until 10:00 p.m., with fireworks beginning at nine. I’m starting to get nervous. Only a few more hours to go. “I’ll be back for sure.”
Tonight Dara and I wake the beast together. Tonight we ride the Gateway up to the stars.