Prettiest Doll (12 page)

“So did your daddy get married again?”

“Yeah. To Susannah, who my dad says I'm supposed to call Mom when I write them thank-you notes. I'm not calling someone Mom when I haven't even met her.”

“That would be hard.”

“They have two kids. Liam and Abigail. Dad sends me pictures along with a check for my birthday. I think they're like ten and six. I think.”

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to learn that Daddy had another family somewhere, with kids. In Georgia, maybe, where he drove his truck so much. I wondered if I would feel like they were my family, too, and decided I wouldn't.

“They're blond,” Danny said. “They don't look like me at all.”

“Did your daddy go to your bar mitzvah?”

“He sent a check.” Danny wiped his mouth with his napkin. “He's an asshole.”

“Then why were you looking at his house?”

“Just because, okay? Just because he's an asshole doesn't mean I can't want to see where he lives.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean, your father's dead, right? But I bet he's buried somewhere and you go to the grave, right?”

“It's not a grave, exactly. It's a drawer. One of the worst fights Uncle Bread and Mama ever had was when he offered to pay for a headstone. Mama said no, even though she couldn't afford to do it herself. Uncle Bread said Mama was being pigheaded, and Mama said she had no use for college graduates who thought they were better than regular folks. Then she said, ‘Mind your own damn business,' which I always remember, because Mama almost never swears. So Daddy ended up in an urn at the columbarium in Mount Jessup.”

It was so easy to tell him things.

“Okay, well, whatever,” Danny said. “You go there, don't you? And maybe talk to him a little? Or just remember things he said, things you did together?”

“Yes. I tell him how pissed off I am that he's dead. I say that even though Mama says he wasn't drinking, I'm not so sure. Just because I'm not so sure of anything, not because he drank that much. Not that I remember, anyway. But that's what happens when your daddy dies when you're four. You don't know anything for sure.” I sighed. “If he'd lived and I'd had a normal growing up, I'd be surer about things.”

He reached over and held my hand. Like it was nothing special, like we held hands all the time. Still looking out over the water, he said, “Going to my dad's just now was like going to a grave.”

I was afraid to say anything, afraid to move. I wasn't cold anymore. I wanted us to sit like that forever.

“My mom works two jobs just so she can pay the rent,” he said.

“Danny, I—”

“Dan,” he said. “I think that would be better. I think I would like it more.”

“Dan,” I said, and just that—his new name on my tongue—made a shiver run through me.

“Come on,” he said, standing up and pulling me with him. “Let's go for a ride.”

THE amusement park on Navy Pier didn't have as many rides as the state fair in Sedalia, but I don't like to do too much spinning and whirling anyway. The only thing I really like is the Ferris wheel, and the one at Navy Pier was the biggest I'd ever seen. There was no line, so the ticket taker let us have a whole gondola to ourselves. Dan and I sat on the same side, close, me waiting for him to take my hand.

But he didn't.

The wheel started slowly and picked up speed, tossing us into the air, then holding us lightly as we fell. It took a few turns to get used to the way the earth arranged itself neatly as we rose and splattered into chaos and noise as we tumbled back down toward it. I settled into the rhythm—the magic of the up; the eyes-shut, dizzy down—and prayed in my head that even though I knew God had way more important things to do, would He please just let it go on and on, the up and down, me in this bubble with Dan forever.

Then the wheel started stopping, giving each gondola a chance at the top. “The buildings are so tall,” Dan said.

“It's like they're people in a crowd, all different shapes and sizes,” I said. “All pushing to be first. Or showing themselves off to us.”

He laughed. “That's a funny way to look at it,” he said, and I couldn't tell if he meant funny in a good way or a bad way.

When our gondola got to the top, I thought,
We found it, the one place in this whole dang city where it's finally quiet.
We just looked without talking, and it was like holding your breath: the stillness, the waiting for what would happen next.

When the wheel started to turn again, he said, “Do you think it's creepy when people who are different in age like each other?”

“I don't know,” I said, but inside I felt as though he'd shoved my heart into a wood chipper and I was watching all the chopped-up pieces shoot out the back end.

“At my school, they think it's creepy,” he said.

We didn't talk again, just sat as the wheel spun and stopped, spun and stopped, lowering us back to earth. We stepped out of the gondola, and the ticket taker looked me up and down the way some men do, probably thinking what I'd look like in a few years, or maybe even thinking about me now, which made me sick. But I smiled at him—something I never do with strange men—just to remind myself how pretty I was, how Dan was someone I didn't even know, some loser who couldn't even dream about kissing a girl like me. Just some short kid who played chess.

“We still have time for the aquarium,” he said.

I was tired from all the running around, the trains and the walking, the tall buildings, the cold. But I didn't want to go back to Uncle Bread's, where we would be alone together and it would be obvious that we were just kids who had hitched a ride on the same bus, nothing more. It was only two o'clock, and we didn't have to be back until five.

Besides, I had never seen a whole building that was an aquarium. In my neck of the woods, people aren't so much interested in looking at fish as in catching and eating them.

“Fine with me,” I said.

 

It was almost three by the time we got there. We wandered from room to room, each one walled with different tanks. I worried that the fish swam the same circles day after day and maybe missed the ocean, where they could swim straight if they wanted. But they seemed happy enough. Or maybe fish aren't happy; maybe they don't have enough brain to be happy. Maybe not being dead is good enough for them.

Asian arowana, bonnethead sharks, dwarf caimans, giant octopi. Anacondas and eels. Moon jellies. I loved the parrotfish, their colors like bolts of cloth at Turner's. We watched them for a long time in Waters of the World. They slipped past the glass, gnawing at coral, smiling their goofy, bucktoothed smiles at nothing.

“It says they poop sand,” Dan said, reading from the plaque on the wall. I didn't answer, because boys only talk about poop with other boys or girls they don't really like.

We noticed the Australian lungfish lying like a log at the bottom of the tank. Granddad, he was called, the oldest fish in any aquarium in the world, at least eighty and maybe older. Speckled and dull, with a soft-looking snout. Unmoving. I thought,
What a terrible life.
But the plaque said that he had a primitive lung, that when the water was low, he would swim to the surface and gulp air into his mouth.

“I didn't know fish breathed air,” I said.

“Only this fish,” Dan said admiringly.

Next to us, two women whose little boys had pressed to the front of the crowd were gazing at the tank. One of them shivered a little. “That lungfish gives me the creeps,” she said. “So ugly!”

“I don't like the way he just lies there,” her friend said. “Can you imagine being at the beach and putting your foot down on
that?
”

“Jason, stop licking the glass!” the first mom called to her kid. To her friend she said, “I like the parrotfish more. So pretty! And the way they look like they're always smiling.”

Dan moved on to another gallery, but I stayed watching Granddad for a while longer, trying to make up for the moms and their horrible, glass-licking children. I wanted him to know he was appreciated just for what he was, that he didn't have to swim around smiling.

 

We left the aquarium at around four. The gray afternoon was giving itself up to darkness and the cold was biting into my bones. We saw people clogging the stairs up to the train. “Maybe a bus would be better,” I said.

We were studying the map when I looked up to see a policeman walking toward us, looking right at us. He was tall, with a round belly that hung over his belt: he took up all the space in front of me.

“You kids need some help?” he asked.

Dan talked before I could. “No,” he said. “We're fine.”

The policeman stared at us for a minute. “You from out of town?”

I nodded, and Dan said, “Yeah, our folks are waiting for us. At the hotel.”

I knew the second he said it that he'd made a mistake.

“Which hotel?” the policeman asked.

Everything slowed way down; it almost seemed as though the other people on the sidewalk froze in their tracks. Then Dan grabbed me and started running.

At first I just followed, holding Dan's hand, ignoring the crowds of people we were dodging in and out of, keeping my eyes on him. I could hear the policeman behind us yelling, “Hey!
Hey!
” and I saw people noticing him and looking at us, but no one tried to stop us. I was sure I was going to get grabbed, but people just looked. Maybe it was a big-city thing. In Luthers Bridge, we would have been stopped for sure.

There were so many people. I'd never seen so many people except on television when there was a parade or a football game. Where had they come from? Then I realized they were flooding out of the buildings, that work was over and they were going home. “Come on! ” Dan called, and I urged my feet faster to keep up. One block, then another. At the third, the light was red, and he pulled me to the left, across the busy street. I heard the policeman yell, “Hey! ” again, but it seemed farther back than before.

“Run! ” Dan said.

“What do you think I'm doing?” I asked, panting, thinking the word
run
in my head over and over, as if just thinking it would be enough to keep me going.

More crowds. Thank God the policeman was so fat. It was probably harder for him to get around all the people. Most of them didn't pay any attention to us, except for a lady in a bright green hat who held my gaze and asked in a loud voice, “Is this really necessary?” and a woman with a stroller who gave us a dirty look, like because we were running we had to have done something wrong and she didn't even want us on the same sidewalk as her baby.

Another block behind us. A bus pulled up to the curb; people grumbled and sighed, trying to board. Dan looked over his shoulder, past me, and then pulled me into the ragged line. “Pull up your hood,” he whispered. My hand felt light and empty without his in it.

We climbed onto the bus and paid our fares. All the seats were taken. I held on to a pole and looked out the back window as we lurched into traffic. No policeman in sight. My heartbeat started to slow.

I looked at Dan. “Oh, my Lord,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he whispered back.

The bus stopped and started, taking on more passengers than it let off. I began to feel sick and told Dan. “We can't get off yet,” he said. “Think of something else.”

“Like what?” I asked. People who don't get carsick never understand that nothing helps except getting back on the ground again.

Just when I thought that I couldn't bear it for another minute, the bus jolted still and Dan grabbed my hand again. “Excuse us, please,” he said politely, shoving us firmly toward the back door, and then we were out on the street. It was dark now, and colder, but I didn't mind. The wind, when it blew, felt like heaven, a relief.

“Where are we going?” I asked. The crowds were still thick, and I was tired and also hungry, the way I always am after I get over being carsick.

“I don't know,” Dan said. “Maybe a movie. Someplace we can hide.”

“I have to call Uncle Bread, though,” I said. “It's almost six. He's going to be worried sick.”

“We should get back to Uncle Bread's,” I said. “It's almost six. We said we'd be back by five.” The relief of the cold air was beginning to wear off; I was shivering.

He pulled me out of the stream of people, over to the metal security gate in front of a closed locksmith shop. He put his hands high on my arms, holding me still so I would look at him.

“Look,” he said. “Your uncle thought we'd be back by five. He's probably called the police by now, which means if we go back to the apartment, he'll have to tell them we're there.”

I nodded, realizing.

“They'll send us home,” he said. “And I can't go back. There's stuff I have to do.”

I shrugged enough so he had to move his hands.

“I don't want to go back either,” I said.

We stood there, staring each other down. It was the longest I'd ever looked at anyone who was looking back. I thought maybe he was going to kiss me, and while I waited I thought how there are a few moments in your life when you are one person on one side of them and another person after you've crossed over, and how knowing that a moment like that is about to happen makes three seconds feel like three hours. I'd had only one moment like that before: the moment when Mama woke me up early one Sunday morning and held me in her arms while she told me about Daddy crashing his semi on the 475. This moment with Dan was different because I knew ahead of time that it was happening. And also because it was a happy moment, even with running away and the policeman and feeling carsick and cold, and now I was going to get to feel how I was different before and after something happy for a change.