Nightmare Carnival

“Sometimes I think we — that something happened that first time in the Tunnel,” he said then, looking where it had been. “That there was a surge or a storm or a solar flare or lightning, something perfect and terrible,” he went on. “And it like trapped us there, right? And we’re still there, and this is all a dream. This is all what might have been. But it doesn’t have to be. We can still get to the end of the ride, go on to the next one.”

I looked over to him.

“Or just leave the carnival altogether, I mean,” he said, “go home,” and licked his top lip fast, like I wasn’t supposed to see.

“I—” I said, and the reason I didn’t get the rest out was that Garret’s mouth was on mine, my face in his hands.

He was crying as he kissed me.

He was trying to bring us back, he was trying to start us over.

I pushed him away hard enough that he fell, and then, after twenty-five years of watching each other’s backs, of keeping each other’s secrets and believing each other’s lies, I left him there.

Tina said maybe when I brought her my grandmother’s wedding band for the second time in our lives.

Maybe.

It was good enough.

I stayed that night, not the next, not the next either, and then for two days in a row woke up in what had been my own bed, once upon a time. Inside of two months, I’d moved back in.

The first thing I did was take Josh’s closet door off, and nail his window shut.

Tina watched from the doorway.

I hated myself for saying it, but I said it anyway, that I was doing this because there were men out there like Josh’s grandpa had been.

Tina couldn’t argue.

The crochet blanket on my chair wasn’t bad, either.

Me and Tina, we were kids again, edging around each other to the bathroom, barely getting to know each other. Twice I woke to her watching me from her side of the bed, her head propped up on an elbow.

“What are you doing?” I said, my voice creaky.

“This is us,” she said back.

It was.

A week later, Josh threw up into his eggs.

It was chocolate, like syrup.

I pushed back from the table and stood all at once, my chair skittering into the refrigerator.

Tina looked at me like I was insane. And maybe I was. But Josh’s eyes when he was throwing up, they never left mine.

After he’d left for school, I checked his window.

The two nails were there on the sill, neatly extracted, the heads not even bent into taco shells like a claw hammer should do. It was like they’d been pushed up from the inside, somehow. Guided out, deposited there, not even hidden.

I called Garret. The phone rang and rang.

Instead of telling Tina anything, I made up a dream I hadn’t had. It was of finding a dead clown on the lawn. Only, when I started rubbing the makeup from its face, it was my dad under there.

It was my way of telling her what we’d done out at Garret’s dad’s old barn.

She was supposed to tell me it was all right, it was nothing.

What she did was just watch me.

“You all right?” I asked her.

“You?” she said.

“I’ve got you,” I told her.

“The carnival’s coming back,” she said.

I could feel my heart beating against my ribs.

“Already?” I said, not sure a year could have passed.

It couldn’t have, could it?

“I think it’s a different one,” Tina said, leafing through the mail. “Or maybe one of their trucks broke, and we’re just on their way home. Doesn’t matter, right? Carnival’s a carnival.”

She looked up to me but I couldn’t make words right then.

“Last time you had to pick Josh up to take him,” Tina said, like charting how far we’d come. “I told you not to let him ride any of the fast—”

“Dick didn’t like the carnival,” I said all at once, talking all over what she was trying to say.

“Dick,” she said, tasting the name. Rolling it around in her mouth. Considering whether the likes and dislikes of a suicide should have any bearing on us.

But she didn’t call me on it.

I stayed up after her that night. Listening for the soft whoosh of clown feet on hardwood.

In the morning there was a new chocolate bar on the seat of my truck, the old-fashioned kind like from the midway of the carnival I knew.

I took Tina’s car to work.

Because I really did have a pump call from Deacon Banta, one nearly all the way over to Idalou, I wasn’t there to keep Tina from taking Josh back to the carnival at the last moment, on a whim. The note on the refrigerator told me where they were. My ticket was under the magnet. She’d got them free at work, surprise.

Like always, she’d scratched a happy face at the bottom of the note.

I fell to my knees in the kitchen, had to hold onto the counter.

What I was seeing was Dick — Rich — watching them under the unsteady lights of the carnival. Halfway hiding behind a turnstile. His teeth sharp, shiny with saliva.

But no.

He’ll keep them safe, I told myself. That’s why he’s there. He’s their guardian angel, scurrying through the shadows, a dark little chaperone.

If he remembered who he was.

If he could remember.

I went out to my truck, opened the glove compartment, ate the melted and re-formed and melted and re-formed chocolate bar.