Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (14 page)

The question seemed to catch Ethan off guard. He lifted his head. “Not in a long time,” he said.

“Same here,” said Rachel.

They found a row of open machines in the back of the arcade and chose two side by side. The air was dizzy with bells, spinning lights, the dead scent of burnt popcorn. Rachel made change at a machine that sucked in her five-dollar bill and spat out a clatter of quarters. She poured half of them into Ethan's hands.

Their coins released cascades of wooden balls that clacked neatly into their trays. Rachel rolled a few, thinking of what to say next. Without really trying
—
probably because she wasn't trying
—
she scored a hundred points with a casual roll that dropped into one of the two narrow cylinders in the upper corners. The ball shivered inside the tube as if fighting its way through.

“Good one,” Ethan said. “That's the way I like to play it.”

“I just got lucky,” Rachel said.

In fact, after four or five balls, Ethan was ahead by thirty points. As soon as Rachel applied real effort, she racked up a series of gutter balls.

“It's all strategy,” Ethan said. “I go for the hundreds in the corners. Even if you only get two or three out of nine, you're still doing good.”

“You've given this some thought,” Rachel said, rolling a ball that lilted too much to the left, bouncing off the edge of the thirty cylinder, sinking into the ten.

“My brother and I used to come here a lot,” Ethan said.

“Jason?”

“Yeah. You knew him?”

“No,” Rachel said. “I mean, I knew
of
him. I knew him by sight. But I didn't really know him.”

“Me neither,” Ethan said. “And I'm his brother. Crazy, right?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“Just sorry. I lost a brother too. On the Rock-It Roll-It coaster. Last year.” Rachel picked up a ball and felt disgusted with herself for doing to Ethan exactly what she hated people doing to her: rushing in with words, filling in the blank spaces before the awkwardness grew, like vines, around them. She pretended to focus on the game. Her next ball arched gracefully into the fifty as if guided by radar.

“That's the way,” Ethan said. They finished their set, Ethan ending sixty points ahead. “Nice job,” he said graciously, though he couldn't disguise his pleasure with the greater number of yellow tickets that streamed from his machine.

Rachel challenged him to another round. They played intently, silently. Again, Ethan scored higher, but this time by only ten points. More tickets poured from their machines.

“What do you do with all your tickets?” Rachel asked, folding hers into her pants pocket.

Ethan said he put them in a box he kept under his bed. “I save them up.”

“For what?”

“Depends. One year I wanted a laser-tag game. It was really cool. Came with two belts, two laser guns. But it cost twenty thousand tickets. Took me most of the summer to get to fifteen thousand.”

“So what happened?”

A shadow, perhaps of regret, perhaps of some secret shame, crossed his face.

“I couldn't wait for the next season,” he said. “Didn't have the patience, I guess. I got a clock radio instead. And you know what's funny?”

“What?”

“I didn't want a clock radio. I already had a clock radio. But it was exactly fifteen thousand points, so I took it.”

Somewhere in the arcade, a teenage boy shouted, “You ditched it, man, you ditched it!” Another voice trailed behind it with a lot less enthusiasm. “Aw, shit,” it said.

“What about Jason?” Rachel asked. Her next roll clanked the ball off the edge of the fifty, sending it sliding back down the ramp. She caught it before it dropped to the floor.

Ethan smiled. “He didn't get that many tickets. His strategy was all wrong.”

“Why?”

“He rolled for the middle. He had this theory: play it safe and aim for the fifty,” he said, pointing to the innermost targets. “And if you fall short, you stand a good chance of getting the forty or thirty. You keep steady, and you almost never get a gutter ball.”

“Seems wise,” Rachel said.

Ethan shook his head contemptuously. “He never got the big scores,” he said. “I beat him almost every time. My brother would get so mad.”

“Got ya,” another voice said behind them. “Luck, sheer luck,” someone else said. “Not luck, my friend,” the first voice replied. “Mad skills, my mad skills.”

Ethan held a ball with both hands, level with his chest, as if he were about to make an offering of it. “He mentioned it, you know.”

“Who?” Rachel asked, confused. “Mentioned what?”

“Jason, the accident.”

“The roller coaster?”

The arcade seemed to evaporate, as if everything around them had fallen back behind a secret wall for safety. “He said something to you?”

“No,” Ethan said, rolling his ball up the ramp. “Not exactly. He wrote it down. In a journal.”

“A journal?”

Ethan nodded his head. “I shouldn't be reading it, right?”

“No,” Rachel said. “You should. It's what he left behind.” Better, she thought, than a pillowcase full of seashells. “I'd like to read it. The part about the accident, I mean.”

Ethan looked away, torn between silence and speaking. Rachel had seen this before with Curtis. Because of his bullheaded style of walking
—
head down, brows furrowed
—
Curtis had a way of finding things, like loose change, missing earrings, and puzzle pieces. For him, it meant the excitement of discovery. For Rachel, it meant vigilance, directing him away from lamppost collisions or outside the sweep of active swing sets. When he found something, his excitement was immediate and all-consuming; the world around him dropped away as he focused on the one thing that mattered, the thing in his hands. Although his enthusiasm was frankly exposed, getting him to reveal his find was something else entirely. Like a four-year-old, he would cup the coveted treasure with both hands and twist his torso aside to conceal his prize. Cajoling was useless; brute force was out of the question. But even if she could deny her own curiosity, Rachel couldn't ignore the danger. As often as not, the prize was a filthy piece of chewed gum or a ragged shard of broken glass. Over time, she had learned to forgo the frontal assault for a flanking maneuver: shift his attention to something else, get him moving, and then he'd voluntarily open his hands.

Once, Rachel's patience had been rewarded with something truly remarkable, a robin's egg as blue and inviting as an August sky after a sudden storm. Though he didn't know what it was, Curtis cradled the egg in his palm intuitively, the champion of its fragility. Rachel explained what it was, and Curtis's eyes grew wide in anticipation of the extraordinary bird that would eventually peck free from its shell. But when Rachel allowed Curtis to carefully tilt the egg into her own hands, she saw something he hadn't noticed: a hairline fracture that almost certainly meant this bird was lost. “You know,” she had said, “the right thing here is to return this egg to its nest; its mother will be looking for it.” Curtis looked almost frantic, imagining the sorrowful mother searching hopelessly for her lost child. He nodded assent. Rachel made a show of burrowing into a nearby hedge where, with a regret she could still taste, she scraped a shallow hole with the heel of her sneaker, buried the egg, and concealed the crime with fallen leaves. She remembered squinting when she broke free of the hedge into the stinging daylight. “It's home now,” she had said.

“Listen,” Rachel said, taking Ethan by the elbow. “Let's get a prize.” She led him to a counter at the back wall. An attendant, rigid with boredom, sat cross-legged on a high stool. In front of her, a glass case held plastic trays of knickknacks
—
candies, whistles, plastic animals
—
tagged with numbers. Behind her, the wall was draped with bigger items labeled with bigger numbers: stuffed animals, computer games, electronic toys.

“You want that laser tag?” Rachel whispered, watching the attendant from the corner of her eye.

“I don't have enough points,” Ethan said.

“Don't worry about the points.”

Ethan looked at her suspiciously. “I'm too old for laser tag,” he said.

“Something else, then.”

“You're going to give me your tickets?” Ethan asked.

“Something like that.”

He put his hand to his chin, stroking whiskers that weren't there. “An iPhone case,” he said, pointing to one on the wall.

Rachel knocked his hand down. “Don't point,” she said. “Just tell me. The red one on the left?”

“Yeah.”

Rachel almost laughed. Curtis would have picked the same one
—
the deepest red, the loudest color. And it also happened to be in arm's reach. She pulled her tickets out and pressed them into Ethan's hands. She nodded her head toward the attendant. “Get her attention, pick out a bunch of small things. Over there.” She pointed toward the far end of the glass case. “And keep her busy.”

Ethan looked at the tickets in his hands. “There isn't enough for the case,” he said.

“Doesn't have to be,” Rachel said. “You're buying a distraction.”

Outside and a few blocks south of the arcade, under a shelter designated for smokers, Rachel opened up her hands for Ethan, exposing a ruby-red case in a hard shell of clear plastic.

“Holy shit,” Ethan said. “I can't believe you did that.”

“This'll be our secret,” Rachel said.

“Holy shit.”

“The first of many.”

 

 

July 25, 2013

At first, Diana thought I was nuts. But I figured if anyone caught us, so what? “It's your kingdom,” I said.

“It's my father's,” she said.

“Same difference.”

She had the keys, she had the alarm codes—and I can find my way around the park blindfolded. Considering how dark it was, that was a good thing. It was weirder than I expected, Happy World after hours. Without people around, it felt deader than dead—the frozen rides seemed to sulk, a party of wallflowers waiting for someone, anyone, to start dancing.

“I'm getting kind of creeped out,” Diana said, holding on to my arm. “And I don't think my dad would be thrilled.”

“That makes it even better,” I said. A father's disapproval—it's the Tabasco sauce of love. A sharp right after the Pharaoh's Fury and just past the Claw, I found our destination: the Magic Carpet. You lie facedown on a platform, the “carpet,” suspended from an armature swinging out from a rotating column. Once in motion, the carpet rises and falls as the arms turn. I've long admired it as a machine, but to be honest, I hadn't ridden it before. I said as much to Diana, and she said the same was true for her. When she was little, sure, she went on the rides. But she hadn't been on them for years.

Because she took them for granted? I asked.

She said it was something like that. “Maybe it's more about familiarity. You know, breeding contempt.”

But I talked her into it, painting a picture for her of how cool it would be in the dark, in the silence, when we had the park all to ourselves.

Then she asked about the dead man.

I was impressed. I had thought she kept the nuts and bolts of the park at arm's length, but she knew about the dead man. The way it's supposed to work, the rides just won't run unless the operator keeps a hand—or a foot—on the switch. If the operator takes a powder—or drops dead—the ride comes to a halt. That's the way it's supposed to be. But I know the work-arounds the tech crews use to test the rides.

“Don't worry about the dead. I got that covered,” I said. Once I worked my mojo on the operating podium, twisting the safety key while pressing the power and “sequence launch” buttons, we had thirty seconds to climb on our magic carpet, pull the safety cage over our backs, and lock our belts. Of course, the time pressure just made it that much more exciting. When we settled in, I reached for her hand.

“What if it breaks down in the middle of the ride?” Diana asked.

“I guess we're screwed,” I said. “They'll find our bones in the morning. Side by side.” I frowned, mocking the despair of the poor soul who might discover such a tragedy. “Very romantic.”

She laughed, and just then, the ride jolted to life. I had turned off the lights and the sound effects that might've attracted attention. So it was just us, suddenly moving in the dark, an invisible hand lifting us from above, giving us a gentle push forward. We rose over the park fence, where we nearly brushed the adjacent motel, catching our reflection in a window blue with television light, then circled past a popcorn stand, a bend of Rock-It Roll-It Coaster track, and bare asphalt paths without their usual crowds. With each revolution, we dropped into the wink of a Sea Town streetlight and kept moving, the speed slewing our carpet out a little to the side, but never pushing us beyond an easy glide, a relaxed slicing of air, the kind of flight you'd make if you could open your arms and rise to the sky. Though the safety bars were between me and Diana, there was just enough space for us to face each other and, with a little effort, kiss.

The ride dropped into its deceleration pattern, easing us to the ground. I unlocked the cage and helped Diana off the carpet.

“That was amazing,” she said. “I get it now.”

“Why people like rides?”

“Why people like love.”

I would've said it was the ride, but I knew from experience that Diana had the power to make me feel dizzy. A good dizzy. But now I needed to say something smooth, appropriate, in control—and all I could think of was the truth. “It's like everything falling into place,” I said, pressing myself against her, sliding my hands into her back pockets. “For the first time. Like all the pieces coming together.”