Alice is already twenty feet in front of me. “Guess so.” She turns around but continues to half step down the path. “Wilcox is having a hissy fit, though. And don’t even get close to Donna. Someone missed her morning dose of happy.”
“Okay.” The sun is blinding. Every color looks exaggerated, like someone has turned up the contrast on a big remote. I feel weirdly uneasy about Parker, about how we left things last night. Why did I get so upset?
I have another flashback to Dara, to his car, to the night the rain came down in heavy sheets, as if the sky were breaking off in pieces. I blink and shake my head, trying to dislodge the memory.
“You’re sure he’s okay, though?” I call out to Alice. But she’s too far away to hear me.
By 10:00 a.m., it’s obvious that even Mr. Wilcox has underestimated the crowds. The park has never been so busy, despite temperatures inching past 103 degrees. I refill my water bottle a half-dozen times and still don’t have to pee. It’s like the liquid is evaporating straight from my skin. As a special treat, and because our little musical number has become something of a sensation, at least for the under-six crowd, we’re doing three different shows: ten thirty, noon, and two thirty.
In between shows, I wrestle off the mermaid tail and collapse in the front office, the only interior space with a functioning AC, too sick with heat to care that my underwear is visible to Donna, while Heather removes her parrot costume and paces the room, cursing the weather and fanning out her underarms, wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of Spanx.
It’s too hot to eat. It’s too hot to smile. And still the people come: rushing, pouring, tumbling through the park gates, a flood of kids and parents and grandparents, teen girls wearing bikini tops and cutoffs, and their boyfriends, shirtless, shorts slung low over bathing suits, pretending to be bored.
By the time two thirty rolls around, I can barely keep a smile on my face. Sweat is dripping between my boobs, behind my knees, in places I didn’t even know you could sweat. The sun is relentless, like a gigantic magnifying glass, and I feel like an ant sizzling underneath it. The audience is nothing but a blur of color.
Heather mimes her attack by the sock puppet. At that exact moment, the strangest thing happens: all the sound in the world clicks off. I can see the audience laughing, can see a thousand dark cavernous mouths, but it’s like someone has severed the feedback to my ears. There’s nothing but a dull rushing sound in my ears, as if I’m on a plane several thousand feet in the air.
I want to say something—I know I should say something. But this is my time to stand up, to try and intervene, to save Heather from the dog, and I can’t remember how to speak, either, just like I can’t remember how to hear. I push myself to my feet.
At least, I think I get to my feet. Suddenly I’m on the ground again, not face forward, as I usually fall, but on my back, and Rogers’s face appears above me, red and bloated. He’s shouting something—I can see his mouth moving, wide and urgent, while Heather’s face appears next to him, minus the bird head, hair plastered damply to her forehead—and then I’m weightless, floating across an expanse of blue sky, or rocking like a baby in my dad’s arms.
It takes me a minute to work out that Rogers is carrying me, the way he does before a performance. I’m too tired to protest. Mermaids don’t walk.
Then his voice, gruff in my ear, popping through the static silence in my brain: “Take a deep breath now.”
Before I can ask why, his arms release me and I’m falling. There’s a shock, electric and freezing, as I hit water. It’s a hard reboot: suddenly every feeling powers back on. Chlorine stings my nose and eyes. Underwater, the tail is impossibly heavy, clinging to my skin like a tight casing of seaweed. The pool is absolutely packed with kids and rafts, little legs churning the water to foam and bodies passing above me, momentarily blocking the light. It takes me about a second to realize that Rogers has just thrown me, costume and everything, straight into the wave pool.
I kick off the bottom of the pool. Just before I resurface, I see her: briefly submerged, eyes wide and blond hair extending, halo-like, from her head; briefly visible in between legs scissoring to stay afloat and kids diving beneath the crashing of the waves.
Madeline Snow.
Forgetting I’m underwater, I open my mouth to shout, and just then I break the surface and come out heaving, spitting up water, chlorine burning the back of my throat. The sound has powered back on, along with everything else; the air is filled with shrieking and laughter and the crash of man-made waves against concrete.
I flounder toward the shallows, try and turn around, scanning the crowd for Madeline. There must be sixty kids in the wave pool, maybe more. The sun is dazzling. There are blondes everywhere—ducking, popping up grinning, spouting water from their mouths like fountains, all of them more or less identical-looking. Where did she go?
“You all right?” Rogers is squatting at the edge of the pool, still wearing his pirate hat. “Feeling better?”
Just then I spot her again, struggling to pull herself onto the deck on arms as skinny as rail spikes. I slosh toward her, tripping on the stupid tail, going face forward down into the water and then dog-paddling the rest of the way. Someone is calling my name. But I have to get to her.
“Madeline.” I get a hand around her arm and she thuds back into the water, letting out a surprised cry. As soon as she turns around, I see it isn’t Madeline after all. This girl is maybe eleven or twelve, with a bad overbite and bangs cut blunt across her forehead.