“Things . . .” I say, smiling.
“Well, I have to return the keys to Bernard and then . . . well, there’s Cassie.”
“There is Cassie,” I say, tilting my head and watching his face.
“Hey,” he says, sliding his hand around my waist and pulling me to him. “Who did I just spend the last four hours kissing?”
“Anyone I know?”
He bends down and kisses me again, and again I feel it all the way through me, so that instead of just kissing my mouth, it feels like he’s kissing all of my cells at the same time. And again when he stops, it feels like I’ve been spinning around and around in the teacups with my eyes closed because I have to hold on to him to keep from falling over.
“So, listen,” he says. “I’ll meet you. Breakfast. Okay?” I just nod and lean against him. “And don’t be late,” he tells me. “No sleeping in. I almost missed out on you completely. I don’t want to miss another minute.”
“No,” I say. “Neither do I.”
16
Luke
My head is so blurry with no sleep that a shower doesn’t even help much. When Robin Hood has had another long, bad night, he wakes himself up by dunking three tea bags into a cup of black coffee and gulping it down. But I’m not hungover, I’m drunk. Drunk on Ella, on the night, on her kisses and touches. It’s all I can think about as I walk across the park, the way I fell into kissing her, in a way I never have. I mean, sure, I have always liked kissing—who doesn’t? But this was different. Like usually, even with Cassie, it feels like I’m kissing her and she’s kissing me, and there’s that sense of the two of us, separate. Not with Ella. With her it was like there was one kiss, made by one mouth, and the kiss was a space we both fell into, falling and falling into each other, and the air she breathed out was the same air I breathed in. I didn’t ever want it to end, and even when we left this morning, as we moved away from each other my fingers held hers, letting go by degrees until my little finger was holding her little finger, and even in that smallest of touches, we were one. And nothing in my life ever felt so right.
I guess I should feel worse about Cassie, but after the double date it’s hard to. I mean, maybe she was just jealous, but I didn’t like that, being treated like that. Along the midway I see these guys at the ringtoss game or tossing softballs into bushel baskets, and they’re determined to win the giant Goofy for their kids. So determined that they get pissed, red-faced, plunking down another twenty bucks on a stuffed toy that’s worth about two bucks, slapping the money down and saying, Give me the damn things, and their kid is crying and doesn’t’ even want the giant Goofy anymore. That’s how it felt with Cassie the last few days, like she doesn’t even really want me, doesn’t even like me all that much, but she’s determined to have me, to have our night together at the Old Key West, to win.
I’m thinking this while I move through the park before it opens, watching all the maintenance people in their pastel T-shirts, some of them having snow cones for breakfast, some just coffee and cigarettes. There are a few families straggling around even though we aren’t open yet, probably people there on some kind of special pass, or maybe just friends of someone. They look a little lost without a crowd to blend into, and sometimes it’s easy to make fun of them with their matching mouse ears and cartoon maps and their desperate attention to character autograph lists. But this morning I’m in the mood to just let them be, even inside my head, because mornings in Florida are the best the place can be, before the day heats up, and because I can still feel Ella’s fingers in my hair or cupping my face, and because there is every chance in the world that I’m in love with her.
I duck into the stand of scrub pines just past the end of the trolley track, on my way to Bernard’s trailer. His keys are heavy, jingling in my hand as I walk, and I wonder how he did it, how he managed to steal or copy keys for thirty years without ever getting caught. Early this morning Ella and I curled up under a blanket together and looked at the list of keys, shaking our heads over and over. He had keys to Pleasure Island nightclub; to the planetarium controls in Epcot; to every store along Main Street, including ones that didn’t exist anymore; to the Atlanta Braves lockers in Disney’s Sports Complex; to the engine of the steamboat on the River Cruise. He could hijack the whole park if he wanted to.
“Maybe he will someday,” I said. “Just take over, rename it Bernard Laurant World.”
Ella smiled, then used one of the keys to lightly poke my thigh. “Nah,” she said. “He would have made his move years ago. And obviously he’s not a thief, the way he lives.”
“Then why?” I said.
She thought a minute, twisting her pretty mouth. “I think he likes possibility.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, he can go anywhere. Nothing is closed to him. He doesn’t have to go into those places, but he
can
. He can do anything he wants.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything. We sat in the quiet, the keys flashing a little in the light.
Ella poked me again. “Nothing is closed to you, either,” she said. I looked at her, wanting nothing more in the world than to believe that. I looked into her green eyes, at the way a faint blush rose across her cheeks, and I touched her mouth, and just then it felt like everything that had held me boxed in just fell away. If I could have
her
, if this perfect, oddball girl could find a way to love me, then anything seemed possible, and each moment would be a fistful of keys in a world of doors.
“Cinderella and Dale,” I whispered. “That’s going to be a pretty weird movie.”
She nodded. “Weird in the best way. The story’s full of surprises, so you have to stick around and see how it turns out.”
“Will you?” I said. “Stick around?”
And even now—as I walk in the early light in the shadow of the castle, as the park slowly stirs itself to life—I can see her nodding, smiling as she leaned forward to kiss me again, whispering yes against my mouth.
There are two police cars parked outside Bernard’s trailer, and a line of police tape runs from the stand of pines to the clothesline in his side yard to his front door. And it’s not the tape they use inside the park if a bench breaks or someone throws up on a ride, the kind with the pink and blue Mickeys running across it. No, this is the real thing, yellow with black stripes, and all I can think is what Mark told us, that the security guys are actually real police. And then I think,
It’s the keys.
I move closer to the trailer, to the female cop who stands against her squad car talking into the mike on her shoulder, and all that’s running in my head is that somehow they know that Ella and me were in Walt’s apartment last night, and that somehow it’s Bernard’s fault for giving us thirty years’ worth of keys. I grip them in my hand, then reach down and slip them into the side pocket on my cargo shorts—carefully, so they don’t jingle. And I have the impulse to just keep walking, but if he’s in trouble because of us, I need to go in and narc on myself and get Bernard out of trouble, if I can.
I walk up to the woman officer, who ignores me while she looks over a clipboard, then talks to her shoulder in code. Like all the cops in the park, she’s wearing the friendly looking white uniform with shorts. They always look like some obscure scout troop.
“May I help you?” she says.
“Well, yeah. Listen,” I say. “I mean, what’s going on?”
She looks up at me finally, her face sunburned, her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. “Your name?”
“Luke,” I tell her. “Luke Krause.”
“And Luke, are you related to the deceased?”
I blink, look at her while something hardens deep in my stomach. “Deceased?”
She consults her clipboard. “One Bernard F. Laurant, park employee, white male, age fifty-seven.”
“What do you mean?” I say as a blackness slowly closes around my vision.
“Son, maybe you should move along. The ambulance will be here any second.”
“Ambulance . . .” For half a second I let myself think that ambulance must mean he’s just sick, just needs to go to the hospital, and then I think how Bernard told me about the utilidors the first time we talked and how I would never actually see an ambulance in the park, and for half a strange second I have the impulse to wait around and see it just so I can tell him that I did.
I look again at her. “Bernard is dead?” I say.
She nods. “Coroner says natural causes. A little unusual given his age, so we’re running it, anyway. Just routine.”
Routine in the real world,
I think, but I’m not really thinking it, because I find myself moving, just moving.
Away
is all my brain can say, over and over, and I run out along the rest of the trolley track, where it’s just broken pieces of rail and rusting pieces cut off with a torch, and then around the back side of the lagoon, breaking through the trees and brush, and all I can hear is the sound of the pumps and the sound of my breathing, all ragged and choked and mingled together like it’s not my breathing at all, and my hand keeps automatically slipping down to the keys in my side pocket, keeping them quiet as if they will still get us in trouble. And only one clear thought repeats in my brain—
He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.
The first person to find me is Cassie, and she’s not even looking. For half an hour I’ve been sitting under a tree at the back of the lagoon, trying to get my head around all of it, trying to remember the last time I saw Bernard when he was in costume, trying to remember the last thing he said to me. And then I wonder why it’s so important to remember that way, and while I’m thinking about that I remember that he was going to teach me how to eat lunch without taking off my character head, a skill he said I would thank him for later, though I doubted it, wondering if
that
was the last thing he said to me. And then I keep circling around to thinking that this is silly, sitting here feeling so upset, and that I will just go over to Bernard’s trailer and ask him, and then I remember all over again, like my brain keeps forgetting in three-minute cycles. My hands are shaking, and as I wipe my face with my T-shirt I hear a snap in the branches of the trees and look up, and there is Cassie.
“Hey,” I say.
“This so much sucks,” she says, and I nod.
“It does,” I tell her. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I mean, Mark can’t find a stupid garden hose?” She gathers up her hair for a moment and fans herself with her hand. “We’re in Florida, and there are, like, a million plants around this idiot place, and he can’t find
one
hose?”
“Oh, yeah. Well . . .” I say, and let the sentence trail off.
Finally she notices me. “What’s your problem?”
“Bernard. He’s dead . . . he died.”
She twists up her mouth. “Is that that guy on TV?”
I take a breath. “No, it’s that guy who was my friend? I visited him at his trailer? Ate lunch with him? Foulfellow?”
“Oh, yeah . . . him.” She moves toward me and sits on the pine needles beside me, where I’m slumped against the tree. “Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “I know how close you were to him.”
“I just don’t get it. I never understood ‘natural causes,’ anyway. You don’t just stop.”
“Yes,” she says, “you do. My granddad died at sixty, same thing. And then my grammy eight months after that. People
do
just stop, Luke.” I look over at her, surprised to see actual tears in her eyes. Maybe the first real emotion from her.
I shake my head. “It sucks. I mean . . . it just sucks.”
“And it’s so pathetic, too,” she says, wiping her eyes with her thumb. “The way he died. Alone in that little box, and you said he liked to drink. You said he was a nice guy; he deserved better.” She keeps watching the side of my face.
“Maybe he died the way he lived, you know? Doing his own thing.” I shrug, knowing as I say it how hollow it sounds.
“You think it was his thing to die like that? He just fell through the cracks, Luke.” She leans toward me, and I try to pull away from her. I don’t want this, and if I’m having any talk with Cassie, it should be about last night, about Ella, but right now everything just seems too big, too huge. Or maybe it’s the opposite of that, maybe all my stuff seems too small compared to what happened to Bernard.
“Cassie, listen,” I say, and draw a deep breath.
“No, you listen. I don’t want that to happen to you. I don’t want you to end up like that.”
I look at her, surprised. “Me?”
“Yes, you. All this stuff about how you don’t want that great job with your dad, how you want to just bum around for a while. Life is too short for that, Luke.”
“Nice cliché. But I’d rather live by something a little more real.”
“It’s a cliché because it’s true.” She takes my hand, just holding it in her palm and looking at it as she talks. “Bernard ended up like that because he never made any other plans. He was just blown into the corner like a scrap of paper. It can happen.”
“He chose it.”
“You really believe that?” She looks at me.
I think about Bernard,
really
think about him, how in some ways his proudest accomplishment was eating nachos without taking off his character head, about his trailer full of the yellowed past and used coffee filters. Maybe Ella was wrong about the keys, I think as I feel them pressing into my thigh. Maybe they weren’t possibility to him, the chance to do anything he wanted, but more like keys to the prison—if he accumulated enough, or found the right one, he might find his way out. And of course, he never did, and never would.
“No,” I say to Cassie, “I guess not.”
She squeezes my hand, and without thinking, I squeeze back. “I know how people see me, as Miss Ambitious, or whatever. But you know what? I just want my life to be big, to be full. I want to really live it.”
“Well, I do, too,” I say.
“I know you do,” she says, watching me. “But you don’t do it by sitting back and letting life bring itself on. It might just bring a dinky trailer and a dead-end job. If you want a full life, you have to go
get
it.”