He steps away. He brushes at his eyes.
THE GIRL: Don’t.
HER FATHER: Don’t what?
THE GIRL: Don’t take your hand away. I like it when you stroke my hair the way you used to. When I was little.
He doesn’t. He doesn’t take his hand away. He doesn’t take his hand away for the longest time.
“You’re sure about this?” I said.
“I’m sure,” said Julie. She was pale, had a hand on my arm, but she was wearing a faint smile.
The Ferris wheel clunked to a stop, swung back and forth for a moment, a pendulum in the night air. The breeze that drifted past us was full of seawater, fizzing with it—the sky around us so dense you could have held it in your hands. Strings of light snaked out from the blaze of brightness below us, a glittering, phosphorescent bacterial culture, shimmering with neon, every color that forms the light we see, blinding.
Julie looked down. Breeze ruffled her hair, and the sun glinted on the metal bars of the seats. “Remember Paris saying she wanted to wrap her arms around the little people down there?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“To protect them.”
I nodded.
There were words in the air between us, the ocean air, that did not need to be spoken: we couldn’t protect her.
We didn’t know she was dead. I mean, we knew. But we didn’t know for sure. We still talked to Agent Horowitz, me more than Julie, I’ll admit. I tried not to call him too often, knew that it annoyed him, but it seemed like he had resigned himself to it, like he understood that I was never going to stop.
Progress was slow. They had Paris’s father’s license plate; they could prove that his car, at least, traveled from New York down to Oakwood the day before Paris disappeared. But he was saying he’d lent the car out to a friend, and at the moment it was stalemate. There was still no actual physical evidence. It might even have been the Houdini Killer. Hell, Paris’s dad might have been the Houdini Killer, though it seemed unlikely, what with him living in New York, and as far as I could tell from Agent Horowitz, who was understandably reluctant to share too much, they hadn’t caught his plate on other occasions.
So.
Run away? I was pretty sure not.
Father killed her? Probably.
Houdini Killer? Maybe.
Dead?
Definitely.
And would I ever have closure, would I ever know for certain, would anyone ever pay for it?
Most likely not.
But Julie and I could still do this. Could still finish something, at least.
Julie took a deep breath. “We can’t protect any of those people.” They moved, below us, so many of them, bacteria under a microscope. “We can’t protect anyone.”
“No,” I said. “But that’s okay. It’s okay.”
Julie looked at me, surprised.
“We can’t keep anyone safe,” I said. “So we just have to cling onto people when we can.”
A moment of silence.
Then Julie smiled.
And took my hand.
“You got the bags?” I said.
“Yep.”
Julie lifted the bags; they were just plastic shopping bags from a 7-Eleven. She held the first out to me, and I took one of the handles too, so we were holding it together, then we stood. The car of the wheel hung suspended in space and time.
“Now?”
“Now.”
We tipped the bag over the side of the car. Then we did the second bag. Someone gasped in one of the cars below us. The cranes spilled, fluttering, all the colors of the lights below, falling in spirals, catching on the air, twisting. Sharp angles of their wings and beaks. Two hundred and sixty-one of them, paper birds, a confetti of birds, drifting down through the night air, spreading as they fell, caught in eddies and currents, caught on the struts of the wheel, landing inside cars.
I thought of Julie saying that Paris loved everyone, of Paris saying that she would embrace the town if she could.
Good-bye, Paris, I said silently in my head. I kept my eyes on the falling birds as long as I could, the cranes, which she had folded with her own hands, all of them.