Dreamland Social Club (34 page)

“Save yourself the trouble.” Leo took the petition down, started ripping it up.

“What are you doing?” Jane said.

He just kept ripping. “Loki said it’s open to renegotiating a lease for one more season, since it’ll take that long for their whole plan to be final anyway, but my dad says it’s like negotiating with a terrorist.” He threw the paper bits into the trash can behind the bar, then refilled Jane’s Coke, which she hadn’t even realized she’d drunk. “Technically, the bar shouldn’t even be open now, but my father wanted a last hurrah. He’s been talking crazy talk about moving all the stuff that’s in the bar to a different building overnight tonight. Something to do with Hemingway and a urinal. I have no idea.”

He shook his head, then leaned forward conspiratorially and said, “So what’s the deal? How did you figure it out?”

“My mother drew a map of it all. It was under the wallpaper in her room. And it shows that there’s a bathysphere somewhere right under the Cyclone.”

He shook his head. “I would’ve seen it!”

She shrugged. “It has to be.”

He said, “Let’s go have a look.”

“Now?”

And so they walked down the boardwalk and stopped near the Cyclone and looked. Jane didn’t see a bathysphere, but there was a weird little shed that she had certainly never noticed before. “You think it’s in there?” Leo asked.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, and turned to face him fully. “Two a.m.?”

“Two a.m.” Leo nodded. “Bathysphere or bust.”

Then he said, “I should get back to the bar.” Jane went, too, and after they walked in and Leo went to help his dad serve more drinks, Babette appeared on a stool beside her. “All right,” she said. “Spill it.”

Jane turned. “Nothing to spill.”

“You’re still a bad liar,” Babette said.

Jane looked around to make sure no one else would hear. “We go out sometimes, late at night. My mother had this set of keys to all these secret sort of Coney places.”

“Oh. My. God.” Babette said. “He
is
into you. I never would have thought it possible.”

“Thanks,” Jane said. “Thanks a lot.”

“No, I mean, it’s awesome. I mean, how often does the nice girl win, right?”

“It’s not that simple.” Jane felt like she might cry. “I mean, he’s never
said
he likes me or anything, but I don’t know. This time it just feels different.” She got up and started pacing around, suddenly felt like an animal in a cage, like an elephant about to make a desperate swim to escape. “I’m freaking out,” she said, still pacing. “I don’t even know why!”

“All right, all right.” Babette patted her on the leg. “Just be cool. All right, just be cool. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. Just calm the ef down.”

 

Jane followed the smell of paint and found her father in his bedroom with the furniture covered, rolling pale blue paint onto the walls. There was a glass of whiskey on his desk next to a nearly empty bottle. Some of his paint lines were sort of woozy.

“Dad?” she said, because nothing about the scene indicated whether the drinking was a happy drinking, bad drinking, or just drinking. “What’s up?”

“We got word.” He kept rolling. “Big fat veto.”

“Seriously?” she said, and she plopped down on the bed and felt her world start to spin. Were they going to have to leave Coney? She shook her head and said sadly, “I really thought they’d go for it.”

“Well, here’s the thing.” And still rolling. He’d obviously been at it a while; the room was almost done. “Here we were thinking all of this business was being conducted out in the open, but in the meantime there’s been this secret deal being cut.”

“What kind of secret deal?” Jane couldn’t remember what color the room had been before. He was on his second coat.

“The city is going to buy out Loki.”

“What?” She shook her head. “What does that mean?”

“It means that the Loki plans are being scrapped, the city is buying all of Loki’s property on Coney, and then the city is going ahead with its own redevelopment plan, which has yet to be determined.”

“Wow,” Jane said.

“Yeah, wow.” He stood back and admired his work. “I’ve already been approached by someone from the city council. They like my work. Not necessarily the Tsunami, but they want to see something else.”

Jane felt the start of a new seed of hope. “Do you
have
anything else?”

“On the desk,” he said, and then he set about closing up the paint can and starting to clean up.

Jane walked over to her father’s desk and saw his drawing of a small spiral roller coaster, with just a few cars, that itself spun on its own axis like a dreidel or top. “It’s like the ride from Luna Park,” she said.

Her father came over and pointed things out with painty hands. “Yes, inspired by. But some of the cars go backwards and there are two entwined spiral tracks, not just one. And it can spin both ways on its axis.

“This drawing shows it better,” he said, and he pulled out another rendering, where Jane saw the ride’s name written in pencil and underlined:
Lunacy
. “Named after you, of course.”

“I love it,” she said, and he cocked his head, almost as if surprised, and said, “Me, too.”

“So we’re staying?” she asked, and her hands went to fists and her eyes shut tight and he said, “Yes, Luna Jane. We’re staying.”

J
ANE HAD NOTED THE DUMPSTER beside the fence surrounding the Cyclone earlier that afternoon, and so she walked right over to it. They climbed up on top of it—and it sure did smell something fierce, like rotting bananas and souring meat and worse—then climbed over the fence from there without even talking. Jane thought for sure she’d rip a hole in her jeans, or her legs, but navigated the chain links unscathed, finally jumping off backwards to land on the ground again. All this sneaking around and breaking in was getting easy.

Leo had a flashlight and led the way under the wooden beams of the coaster toward the shack they’d seen. “Watch out,” he said softly, shining his light on the ground. “Dog doo.”

“How romantic,” Jane said before she could stop herself, and Leo said simply, “Just calling it like I see it” with a smile.

When they reached the shack, Leo shined a light on the lock. “Try it.”

Jane stepped forward and tried the key, and the padlock clicked open. She twisted it and slid it out of the shack handles, then opened the door. She shrieked and ducked—Leo, too—when a bird or bat flew out, and then they stepped into the shack and found it.

It was a big metal ball—like a wrecking ball with a few round windows, a large one on one side, and two smaller ones on the opposite. Jane took the flashlight from Leo and shone it on the far side, where the words NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY appeared atop the word BATHYSPHERE atop the words NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY. “Sponsors?” she said.

“Guess so.”

Leo circled the bathysphere now, like it was a bull and he a matador, then he reached out and touched it and whistled. “I did some research. This was the bathysphere made by William Beebe, this guy who totally broke records for deep-sea exploration and like
discovered
all these crazy sea creatures that people had never even seen before.”

“Unbelievable,” Jane said. “And no one even knows or cares that it’s sitting right here? I mean, why isn’t it in a museum? Or at the Aquarium?”

“Because this is Coney.” He reached for the hatch, then unreached and said, “The lady should do the honors.”

Jane reached out and pulled the hatch open, then shone the flashlight inside, shrugged, and smiled. She climbed in. “Come on!” She poked her head out. “Before someone sees.”

There was barely enough room for two people in there, so they sat close. Hip to hip. Again.

“Wait.” Leo shifted, then lifted an arm and put it around her to make more room. “Okay,” he said. “That’s better.”

Then he said, “I feel as though I’m leaving a world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays.”

It was a line from
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
and it made Jane replay the scene in her mind, where the scientist in the bell—the
bathysphere
—is looking through the small round window for the beast, roving the ocean’s bed. She felt a little bit of sympathy for the monster awakened by the bomb, felt like that microscopic explosion in her mother’s brain all those years ago had awakened a beast inside her, too. She smiled a little and said, “What kind of idiot signs up for that mission?”

“I don’t know.” Leo smiled back. “I might’ve done it.”

Jane remembered the film’s final, fiery scenes. The whole thing seemed horribly sad, and funny, and for a second she wondered whether she should climb the Cyclone and cry out in a rage like the beast had, whether that would feel good. Whether her mother had wanted to step into the beast’s shoes, too. Whether that explained the Dreamland Social Club’s inaugural stunt.

She sat back against Leo then, thinking of the moment she first saw him and had felt that shock of recognition. Maybe it hadn’t
really
been the seahorse at all. Maybe it had just been
him
. She remembered the first day they’d talked on the boardwalk, the way she’d imagined climbing into a submarine and telling each other their darkest secrets. A bathysphere would have to do, and then a realization dawned. She pushed Leo aside and said, “It has to be here,” and started looking everywhere, in every nook of the bathysphere’s small chamber.

“What has to be here?” Leo said.

“Her journal.”

“Jane, it’s been years.”

But she was already standing, though bent, and her knees were pressing against Leo’s chest or his shoulder, she didn’t know/didn’t care, because right then, on a ridge by a seam in the metal, her hand found something.

A notebook.

She pulled it out and then they sat back down again.

Leo was quiet for a moment, then just said, “Wow.”

“Yeah.” She rubbed her hand across it, knocking off a layer of dust. She sat staring at its cover, a canvas material on which her mother had drawn her name in bubble letters and a few other small pictures, like a Ferris wheel and, yes, another bathysphere. “I think I’m afraid to look.”

“Why?”

Jane exhaled. “Because what if it tells me stuff about her that I don’t want to know?”

“Rats or excessive fruit flies?”

“Exactly.”

She felt his shrug when he said, “I’d want to look.”

She held her notebook on her lap and studied its cover again.

“Just do it,” he said.

“I’ll just sit here and hold the flashlight. You know, in case you need me to shoo the rats away.”

And so Jane opened to the first page of weird drawings and quotes and the names of bands written in different kinds of print: Bubble. Block. Script. Page after page was covered in doodles and quotes and dates and random scribbling.

“Beth Loves Jimmy”

“SML 5/3/88”

“Warriors! Come out to play!”

“Wherever You Go There You Are”

“Gabba Gabba Hey!”

“OMFUG”

It was endless, with words written in impossibly small print in every available white space. Just page after page of miniature graffiti, with only the occasional actual paragraph or two of writing. When she finally found a solid paragraph beside a drawing of a mermaid, she read:

She was stunned by how much like a teenager her mother sounded. It only made sense, of course. She had
been
a teenager, but Jane had always thought of her mother as wildly sophisticated and sort of figured she must have always been that way. To discover that she had been just a regular girl came as a bit of a shock. And a relief.

Flipping through more and more pages of sketches and doodles and graffiti, she saw a big, juicy heart with a knife stuck into it, and she stopped and stared. It was familiar, maybe something her mother had drawn absentmindedly when she was talking on the phone or making a shopping list. She read the neighboring paragraph:

It took Jane a second to realize that Mrs. Mancuso was Beth’s mother, Leo’s grandmother, and then she kept reading.

Jane flipped ahead a few pages, found the same heart and a drawing of a gravestone with the name Anastasia Marie Mancuso, then “RIP,” written on it.

Leo hadn’t moved an inch the whole time.

She flipped through the rest of the book, finding a few random paragraphs that said nothing much at all, and then to the last page to see where it ended. There she found a drawing of a man with a head that shrank toward the top, like the pinheads she’d read about. The only writing on the page said, again,
Gabba Gabba Hey!
Jane flipped through the rest of the pages to be sure that was the last entry, and it was.