Dreamland Social Club (28 page)

Marcus said, “Whatever you want, Dad.”

“Well, that’s easy for you to say,” he replied. “You’re going away to college.”

Marcus had just that week started obsessively checking the mailbox hanging on the porch. Letters of acceptance—and Jane was sure they’d mostly be acceptances—were due to start arriving any day.

Their father said, “Jane, what about you?”

“When is the house officially mine and Marcus’s?” she asked, surprising herself. But all the talk of real estate this year made her realize that stuff like this was important. They hadn’t actually spoken in months about the fact that the fate of the house was really up to Jane and her brother, not their dad.

He rubbed his eyes and then looked at her. “The easiest thing would be to stay here until you’re both eighteen and entitled to proceeds. And then sell it and divide the money down the middle. Earlier than that and the money will go into a trust.”

“You want to stay until I’m eighteen?” Jane asked. In July she was going to be seventeen. That meant staying another year and a half or more. It meant
graduating
.

Her father shrugged. “Well, it depends on what happens with this vote.”

“I think I’m okay with that,” she said, though she wished this moment could have ended up being more joyful. The idea of spending more than one year somewhere—
anywhere
—was enough to make her want to cry with happiness, but things with Leo were complicated enough now that fleeing had its appeal, too. But it was better to be here on the wrong side of things than to be right but be gone. Wasn’t it?

 

Her father went to look for an ax, claiming he thought he’d seen one in the back of a closet on the second-floor hall. They were going to try to bust the horse free. Jane went into the living room and approached the horse and petted it the same way Leo had the night he’d come over. She wanted to ask her father whether he had known about the FOR LEASE signs, about the closings of the Anchor and Wonderland, but she almost didn’t want to know the answer. “I was thinking,” she said when he came in with the ax, “about the Tsunami.”

“What about it?” He knelt and surveyed the radiator, the chain.

“I was just thinking about how when they built this other roller coaster, the Thunderbolt, they ran the beams and stuff through the hotel that was in the way, so that they didn’t have to close it down.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Honey, I know it’s your friend’s father’s place, but you don’t know the whole story.”

“Well then, tell me.” She turned away from the horse.

“Okay,” he said. “Apparently, your friend’s father owes
thousands of dollars
in back rent because one day he just decided to stop paying.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jane said, but her father just kept talking.

“They’ve been cited for violations of a few safety and fire regulations, which they’ve done nothing to fix,
and
they have a ton of open health code violations. There are rats, mice, roaches, you name it.”

“Loki made those up. Leo told me.”

“There’s video of the rats, honey. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you,” he said. “But it’s really easy to romanticize a place like that if you get to thinking that way. It’s just not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s just not worth saving.”

“What
is
, then?” Jane grew suddenly angry, remembering the trash bags on the porch. “What does someone like you think is worth saving?”

Her father got up, almost sadly, and walked out of the room, and then he came back with a small wooden box in his hands. He put it down on the coffee table and opened it and pulled out a bunch of items: a ticket stub “from my first date with your mother,” a program from a play “from my second date with your mother,” a penny that had been stretched long like a funhouse mirror “from my third date with your mother.” He didn’t stop until the box was emptied of letters and trinkets and notes, leaving only a few pieces of jewelry and a photo.

“My favorite picture of her,” he said, and he handed it over. Jane saw her mom sitting on a beach chair, a bandanna on her head, drinking a cocktail out of a pineapple with a straw.

“I was saving
this
for you,” he said. “Her wedding band. For when you were older.”

Jane thought she was going to cry when he held out the ring toward her and said, “I guess I might as well give it to you now, though this isn’t exactly the scene I was picturing.”

“No,” she said, pushing it back. “When I’m older, whenever you think is right.”

He was still looking at the trinkets and tickets.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Jane said, and he sighed.

“I don’t want you to be sorry, honey. I want to be able to talk about stuff like this and disagree and have that be all right. And sometimes I want you to trust that I’m right.”

“But you’re not right about this.” She shook her head. “You can’t be.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to find out for yourself, then.” He started to put his mementos away. “In the meantime, come with me on Thursday, will you? To the presentation? So you can see the whole of the plan and judge for yourself. I have four tickets for VIP seating. Marcus is coming. And you can bring a friend.”

Jane nodded. “Sure, Dad. Of course.”

“Okay,” he said when Marcus came into the room. “Here goes nothing.” He lifted the lock and chain so that it rested on a block of wood he’d found and then pulled it as far away from the horse as it would go. “You’d better stand back,” he said to Jane, and she stroked the horse’s mane before she did.

“Should I pre-dial 911 right now?” Marcus asked from the couch.

The ax missed the chain entirely on their father’s first try. He swung again, and this time the sound was hot and hard but still, the chain remained strong.

After a few more useless hacks, he put the ax down and rested his hands on his hips. “Tell them if they want it they have to come get it.”

 

It had been a long time since Jane had climbed the stairs to the attic, pulled the tiny metal beads of the bare bulb’s pull-string, breathed in all that dusty air. It was less dusty than it had been when they’d first arrived so many months ago, but it still felt heavy, old.

She studied the demon from Hell Gate up close for the first time, felt the chipping paint and the smooth lines of the curvature of its lips. She tried to imagine what it had been like to ride through Hell Gate, tried to understand the desire to pay hard-earned money in order to take a boat ride through a simulated hell, to confront its fiery circles, to look Satan in the eye. It seemed that people who lived all those years ago had had a hard enough time just dealing with the realities of their own world—epidemics, wars, outhouses. Did they really have to make it any worse? Any scarier? What was this fascination with the morbid and terrifying and weird? And why didn’t people have it anymore?

Or did they?

Looking around the room, Jane saw a few other things she was going to have to part with, whether her family ending up staying or not. Those “swinging” and “stationary” signs, for example. The invitation to Trump’s Demolition Party.

Those she wouldn’t miss.

But those films!

She’d grown so fond of those orphans, those diving horses, the old footage of Luna Park. They weren’t old family movies, no, but they’d started to feel that way. Apart from
Is It Human?
they were all she had.

But still . . .

She found a pen and paper and started to make a list of things she thought the Coney Island Museum might want. After she wrote down “Old Film:
Orphans in the Surf
,” she decided to watch it again, maybe for the last time, and it didn’t seem quite so horribly sad this time around. The shock of it was gone, and in its place was sadness, sure, but not nearly as much of it. When it ended, she returned to her list and wrote down, “Old film reel:
‘King’ & ‘Queen’ the Great Diving Horses
.”

She had neglected to turn off the projector, and after she added a few more items to her list, new words appeared on the attic wall.

Baby Class at Lunch
.

A new film started playing, tacked onto the same reel as
Orphans
.

It was impossible to tell for sure if it was the same toddlers. This time there were more of them, sitting on a staircase and eating sandwiches from brown bags. They were chewing and smiling and laughing and making funny faces, and even the herky-jerky grain of the film couldn’t change that fact.

They seemed . . . happy.

In the quiet of the attic, Jane let out a laugh.

Baby Class at Lunch
?

The title seemed ludicrous.

Hilarious, even.

And the laugh turned into a giggle as she watched these orphans chew and mug for the camera. She couldn’t stop.

That’s
what they’d called it?

Baby Class at Lunch
?

Because if they’d called the first one
Baby Class at the Beach
instead, she would have been spared an awful lot of heartache.

When the film was done, just a minute after it started, Jane took the reel off the projector and put it in a box with the others. It was time.

A
LL RIGHT, PUT YOUR BOOKS AWAY.” Mr. Simmons turned to the board and started to draw a big building. It had columns on the front and peaked roofs, and above the doorway, where an inscription might appear cut into marble, he wrote TOWN HALL.

“Since you’re all aware that Loki Equities is trying to force ‘the future of Coney Island’ to arrive”—he put the chalk down and brushed his hands together—“I thought we’d take today to talk about some of this past weekend’s events in our own mock town hall meeting.”

He looked out at the room, stroked his goatee. “Anyone want to get us started and jump right in?”

Leo stood. “My father’s bar is getting shut down. It’s not fair.”

Somebody in class, maybe an Emmett, said, “Nobody’s making him sell it! Just don’t take the money!”

“They don’t
own the land
.” Leo turned to speak directly to the guy. “They rent the space, and Loki is forcing them out by not negotiating a new lease.”

“The Anchor’s a dump,” another person, possibly a Stephanie, said.

Leo said, “Sure, it’s run-down and stuff, but it’s old. And it’s run-down because it caters to thousands and thousands of people. It’s a Coney Island institution.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Simmons was writing years on the board: 1949, 1964, 1985.

Then after that he wrote,
History repeats
.

“Today, my dear students, you are taking part in an age-old Coney tradition. Namely, fighting about what Coney means, what Coney’s future should be. We can, and should, look to the past as a series of cautionary tales, because each time”—he pointed at each year with the piece of chalk in his hand, making a click each time—“Coney was going to be redeveloped . . . and each time . . . what happened?”

“Nothing,” Legs said.

“Exactly,” Mr. Simmons said. “What, if anything, is different this time?” He put the chalk down on the ledge beneath the blackboard.

“It’s hard to say,” Babette said. “Something is different every time. This time it’s Loki.”

Mr. Simmons said, “Well put. Loki does seem to be serious. And of course the city has a few acres of its own to develop. Though politics seems to have brought all that to a screeching halt.”

Jane had sort of hoped her father had been misinformed about that.

“The long and short of it,” Mr. Simmons said, “is that I might be—
any of us
might be—rolling in our graves by the time any of this actually happens.”

“Mr. Simmons?” Leo said. “Why don’t you ask Jane for any insider information she might have? In case you haven’t heard, her father designed Loki’s weenie.”

Something about the look in Leo’s eyes when he turned to her made her blood boil, and she said, “The only inside information I have is that your father hasn’t paid his rent in months and that there are rats in the bar.”

“You’re joking, right?” Leo rolled his eyes.

“Now, now,” Mr. Simmons said, patting the air in front of him with his palms to say calm down. “I am curious, though, Jane. What do you think of Loki?”

She said, “I was thinking of reserving judgment until after I actually see the new plan.”

“I suppose that’s sensible enough,” Mr. Simmons said, and Leo snorted.

He took his petition up to the front of the room after class ended. Mr. Simmons signed without batting an eye. Was she the only one who saw how complicated all this was?

“Yikes,” Babette said, appearing by her side in the hall.

“Yeah.”

And then there was Leo, right in her face.

“I just don’t get you. At all.” He looked visibly shaken for the first time since she’d known him; even his seahorse seemed agitated, blurry. “It just seems sometimes you do one thing, then do something else that’s like the total opposite.”

“What are you even talking about?” Jane said.

Legs walked past them then and Leo looked up at him and nodded briefly, and it felt like some sort of weird exchange of male sympathy, like they both felt they were better off not even dealing with crazy girls like Jane.

“Forget it, Jane.” Leo looked back at her, seemed to shake something off. “But I mean, what side are you on anyway?”

It wasn’t about sides.

There
weren’t
sides, unless there could be like a million of them.

Nothing about it was black and white, this or that.

“You know what?” Jane said to Leo, and Babette drifted away with an apologetic raise of the eyebrows. “I don’t get
you
either. I don’t get how you can be so smart about so many things and have such ridiculous tunnel vision about this. About the bar. And I mean, have you even
looked around
lately? Taken a good look? Coney is a
dump
, and Loki’s the only person—or company or whatever—who’s really trying to do anything about it.”