Three boys, maybe a little younger than I am, are standing in front of Boom-a-Rang’s, lighting off sparklers right on the pavement and throwing snaps as hard as they can so they crack off in a cloud of gas.
The fireworks have started. As soon as I pass through the FanLand gates, a huge shower of gold lights up the sky, trailing long tentacles like a glittering sea creature pinned up in the sky. The next one is blue, and then red, these brief, tight bursts, small fists of color.
Dara must be here. She must have come.
I push through the crowds still milling down Green Row, lining up to shoot basketballs through hoops or to try their hand on the strength hammer. It’s all lights and flash, the ring-ring-ring of games starting and ending, kids shrieking with joy or disappointment, the sky lit up green or purple or startling blue as the fireworks attain some height and, miraculously, transform, scattering like ashes across the underbelly of the clouds. I wonder how high they know to go.
I turn toward the Gateway: it, too, is lit up in flashes, its high point gleaming like a burnished nail.
The lawns are crowded with blankets and picnicking families. I’m skirting the merry-go-round when someone hooks an arm around my neck. I spin around, thinking Dara, and am disappointed when it’s just Alice, laughing, her hair coming loose from her braids. Immediately, I can tell she’s a little drunk.
“We did it!” she says, flinging an arm out as though to take in the sky, the rides, everything: and I remember what she said, that she wanted to die at the very top of the Ferris wheel. “Where’d you go?”
“I had a thing,” I say. She has changed out of her work shirt and is wearing a flowing tank top that shows off two more tattoos, wing tips peeking out beneath her shoulder straps. I’ve never seen her without her uniform before, and in that moment she looks almost like a stranger.
“Have some,” she says, as if she can tell what I’m thinking; and passes me a flask from her back pocket. “You look like you need it.”
“What is it?” I uncap the bottle and take an experimental sniff. Alice laughs when I make a face.
“Jame-o. Jameson. Go on,” she says, nudging me with an elbow. “Take a load off. FanLand turned seventy-five today. And it doesn’t taste that bad, I promise.”
I take a swig—not because FanLand turned seventy-five, but because she’s right, I do need it—and immediately start coughing. It tastes like lighter fluid going down.
“That’s disgusting,” I choke out.
“You’ll thank me later,” she says, patting me on the back.
She’s right: almost immediately, a fizzy warmth travels from my stomach to my chest, settling somewhere just between my collarbone, like a giggle I’m trying to hold back.
“Wanna come watch from the hill?” she says. “It’s the best view. And Rogers even brought”—she lowers her voice—“like an ounce of pot. We’re taking turns in the maintenance shed.”
“I’ll be there soon,” I say. Suddenly the insanity of what I’m about to do—what Dara and I are about to do—hits me. Then I really do feel the urge to laugh. I take another swig of Jameson before passing the flask back to Alice.
“Come now,” she says. “You’ll never find us.”
“Soon,” I say again. “I promise.”
She shrugs and starts skipping backward down the path. “Up to you,” she says, and raises the flask high, so it momentarily picks up the colored reflection from the sky: this time, a sudden dazzle of pink embers. “Happy anniversary party!”
I raise a pretend glass and watch until she has merged into shadow with the rest of the crowd. Then I take a shortcut, pushing into the stretch of woods that keeps the Gateway relatively isolated: a part of the park once designed, like every other overgrown area, to look tropical and exotic. Stepping off the path feels like stepping into another world. Unlike the other wild stretches, this one has been allowed to grow riotous, and I have to swat creeper vines out of my way and duck underneath the fat, broad leaves of palmetto trees, which reach out like hands to slap me when I pass.
Almost instantly the sound is muffled, as though by a thin sheen of water; the gnats and crickets are buzzing from unseen places, and I can feel the feather-thin sweep of moth wings beating against my bare arms. I shove through the growth, stumbling a little in the dark, keeping my eye on the Gateway’s shimmering point. Distantly I hear a pop-pop-pop and the roar of the crowd: the finale. All of a sudden the sky is a crazy patchwork of colors, colors with no name, blue-green-pink and orange-purple-gold, as the fireworks come hard and fast.
There’s a rustle to my left and muffled laughter; I turn and see a boy hitching up his pants and a girl, laughing, pulling him by the hand. I freeze, terrified for no reason that they’ll think I was spying; then I’m alone again, and I move on.
The final display of fireworks goes up as I fight through the last of the growth; in its glow, a sudden shower of bright green that lights the underside of the clouds the same color as a murky ocean, I see that someone is standing by the Gateway, looking up at its high point.
My heart flips. Dara. Then the tendrils of green light fizzle out again and she becomes nothing but a dark brushstroke, a spiky silhouette against the landscape of steel.
I’ve covered half the distance between us before I realize that it isn’t Dara—of course it isn’t—the posture’s all wrong, and the height, and the clothes, too. But by then it’s too late to stop, and already I’ve half shouted so when he turns around—he—I draw up, horrified, with nothing to say and no excuse to give.
His face is very thin and covered with stubble that in the half-dark looks just like shadow smeared across his jaw. His eyes are sunken and yet weirdly overlarge, like pool balls dropped only halfway into their pockets. Even though I’ve never seen him before, I know him instantly.
“Mr. Kowlaski,” I say reflexively. Maybe I need to name him. Otherwise seeing him, coming across him here, in this way, would be too awful. Like how Dara and I used to name the monsters in our closet so we wouldn’t be so frightened of them, silly names that reduced their power: Timmy was one, and Sabrina. Because there is something awful about him, something haggard and also haunted. It’s as if he’s looking not at me but at a photograph showing a terrible image.
Before he can say anything, Maude appears, shoving past me and immediately linking an arm through Mr. Kowlaski’s, as if they’re partners at a square dance about to do-si-do. She must have been sent to intercept him. As soon as he starts to move, I can tell he’s drunk. He’s stepping extra carefully, like people only do when they’re worried about seeming sober.
“Come on, Mr. Kowlaski,” Maude says, sounding surprisingly cheerful. Funny how she only seems happy during a crisis. “The show’s over. The park will be closing soon. Did you drive here?” He doesn’t answer her. “How about a cup of coffee before you go?”
As they move past me, I have to turn away, hugging myself. His eyes are like two pits; and now I feel as if I’m the one who’s seeing terrible things, seeing all the times I tried to help Dara, to save her, to keep her safe: the times I lied to Mom and Dad for her, scoured her room for Baggies full of white residue or green nubs, confiscated her cigarettes and then, relenting, gave them back when she put her arms around me and her chin on my chest and stared up at me through those silky-dark lashes; the times I found her passed out in the bathroom and brought her instead to bed, while she exhaled the sharp stink of vodka; the notes I forged for her, excusing her from gym or math class, so she wouldn’t get in trouble for cutting; all the bargains I made with God, who I’m not sure I even believe in, when I knew that she’d gone out joyriding, drunk and high, with the random collection of freaks and losers who accumulated around her like a heavy snow, guys who bounced at clubs or managed sleazy bars and hung around high school girls because all the girls their age were too smart to talk to them. If Dara gets home safe, I promise I’ll never ask for anything again. So long as nothing bad happens to Dara, I promise to be extra good. And what happened at the Founders’ Day Ball will never happen again.
I swear, God. Please. So long as she’s okay.
How stupid I was to think Dara would come, that she’d be pulled to me, magnet-like, the way she was when we were younger. She’s probably out somewhere in East Norwalk, drunk and happy or drunk and unhappy or high, celebrating her birthday, letting some guy slip his hand between her legs. Maybe Parker is the guy.
By now, the fireworks are over, and the park is beginning to empty. Already I detect the action of the grave diggers—seven of them on shift to clean up after tonight, including Mr. Wilcox himself—in the evidence they’re leaving, of trash bags piled neatly by the gates and chairs stacked in high towers.
Two security guards are posted by the gates, making sure that the park clears out. The parking lot has emptied. The boys are gone from in front of Boom-a-Rang, though the air still has that lingering gun-smoke smell of firecrackers. When I finally climb back in Dara’s car, I’m so tired I feel it through my whole body, a dull ache in all my joints and behind my eyes.
“Happy birthday, Dara,” I say out loud. I fish my phone from my pocket. No surprise, she never texted me back.
I don’t know what makes me call her. A simple desire to hear her voice? Not exactly. Because I’m mad? Not exactly that, either—I’m too tired to be angry. Because I want to know whether I’m right, whether she simply forgot about dinner, whether even now she’s sitting on Parker’s lap, warm and tipsy and loud, and he has one arm around her waist, pressing his lips in between her shoulder blades?
Maybe.
As soon as the ringtone starts up in my ear, a secondary ring, slightly muffled, sounds in the car, so for a moment I can’t tell which is which. I dig my hand in the space between the driver’s seat and the door, close my fingers around cool metal, and unearth Dara’s phone, which must have somehow gotten wedged there.
It’s no surprise that she’s been using the car when she isn’t supposed to: Dara might not be the best student, but she gets an A+ in any subject that involves breaking rules. But it’s weird, and worrying, that she doesn’t have her phone. Mom used to joke that Dara should just have the thing surgically attached to her hand, and Dara always said that if scientists could figure out a way to do it, she’d be the first to sign up.
My finger hovers over the text message icon. I’m suddenly uneasy. One time, when I was in fifth grade, I was in the middle of a social studies test—I was filling in the countries of Europe, I remember, on a blank printout of a map—and had just reached Poland when I had the sudden, sharpest pain in my chest, like someone had put a hand around my heart and squeezed. And I knew, I felt, that something had happened to Dara. I didn’t realize I’d stood up, knocking my chair backward, until everyone was staring and my teacher, Mr. Edwards, told me to sit down.
I did sit down, because I had no way of explaining that something had happened. I switched the location of Germany and Poland and didn’t even remember to label Belgium, but it didn’t matter anyway; halfway through the test, the vice principal came to the door, her face pinched tight like the toe of a nylon stocking, and gestured for me to come with her.
During recess, Dara had attempted to climb the fence that separated the blacktop from the industrial complex on the other side: a factory that manufactured AC components. She’d made it all the way to the top before a teacher, spotting her, had called for her to stop; Dara, losing her footing, had fallen a dozen feet and landed with the blunt, rusted edge of a galvanized pipe, discarded for no apparent reason in the underbrush, lodged partway into her sternum. She was silent on the way to the hospital. She didn’t even cry, just kept fingering the pipe and the spot of blood on her T-shirt as if it fascinated her, and the doctor managed to extract the metal successfully and sew her up so smoothly the scar was barely visible, and for weeks afterward she bragged about all the tetanus shots she had received.
Now, sitting in the car, the feeling returns to me like it did that day: the same horrible, squeezing pressure in my chest. And I know, I just know, that Dara’s in trouble.
All along, I’ve been assuming she just blew us off tonight. But what if she didn’t? What if something bad happened? What if she got drunk and passed out somewhere and woke up and has no way of getting home? What if one of her loser friends tried to scam on her and she ran off without her phone?
What if, what if, what if. The drumbeat of the past four years of my life.
I pull up Facebook. The photo on Dara’s profile is an old one, from Halloween when I was fifteen, and Dara, Ariana, Parker, and I crashed a senior party, banking on the fact that everyone would be too drunk to notice. In it, Dara and I are hugging, cheek to cheek, red and sweaty and happy. I wish that photographs were physical spaces, like tunnels; that you could crawl inside them and go back.
There are dozens and dozens of birthday messages posted to her wall: We love you always! Happy birthday! Save a shot for me wherever you’re partying tonight! She hasn’t responded to any of them—unsurprising, since she’s without her phone.
What now? I can’t call her. I switch back to my phone and pull up Parker’s number, thinking that, after all, he might be with her or at least know where she went. But his phone rings only twice before going to voice mail. The pressure is building, flattening out my lungs, as if the air is slowly leaching out of the car.
Even though I know she would kill me for looking through her messages, I pull up her texts, swiping quickly past the one I sent earlier and several in a row from Parker, not sure what I’m looking for, but sensing that I’m getting close to something. I find dozens of texts from numbers and names I don’t recognize: pictures of Dara, eyes huge and pupils big and black as holes, at various parties I never knew about or was invited to. An unfocused shot—maybe a mistake?—of a guy’s bare shoulder. I study it for a minute, wondering whether it’s Parker, and then, deciding it isn’t, move on.
The next text, and the pictures attached to it, make my heart stop.
This one is almost professional-grade, as if it had been styled and lighted. Dara is sitting on a red sofa in a room almost barren of furniture. There’s an AC unit in one corner, and a window, although it’s so coated in grime, I can’t see beyond it. Dara is dressed in nothing but her underwear; her arms are stiff by her sides, so that her breasts, and the small dark spots of her nipples, are center frame. Her eyes are focused on something to the left of the camera and her head is tilted, like it often is when she’s listening. I imagine, immediately, a person standing behind the camera—maybe more than one person—calling instructions to her.
Put your arms down, sweetheart. Show us what you got.
The next picture is a close-up: only her torso is visible. She’s tilting her head back, eyes half-closed, sweat dampening her neck and clavicle.
Both pictures were sent from a phone number I don’t recognize, an East Norwalk phone number, on March 26.
The day before the accident. I have the feeling of finally hitting ground after a long fall. The breath goes out of me and yet, weirdly, I feel a sense of relief, of finally touching solid earth, of knowing.
This is it: somehow, in these pictures, the mystery of the accident is contained, and the explanation for Dara’s subsequent behavior, for the silences and disappearances.
Don’t ask me how I know. I just do. If you don’t understand that, I guess you’ve never had a sister.