A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

Nate stares at me as if to say, I may be dumb but I’m not stupid.

“Okay, so where do you want to go?” I ask.

“Amusement park.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Apparently not.

At Nate’s insistence I phone the amusement park and find that due to the odd and unseasonably warm winter, they haven’t closed for the season. “The owner thought it was better to keep folks employed and have a snow day if needed — which so far hasn’t happened,” the guy says. Nate goes on ride after ride, roller coaster, Zipper, Bungee Rocket, Tower of Terror, Gravitron, which spins so fast he’s plastered to the side with an expression on his face like he’s been whipped through a wind tunnel.

“Do you think it’s weird?” he asks as we walk to the next ride.

“Who am I to judge?”

“I carry a diagnosis,” he says.

“Like what?”

“Like supposedly there’s something wrong with me.”

“What’s your point?”

“Do you think it’s true?” he asks.

“Do you?” I ask.

He shrugs.

“Do you want to go on a ride?” I ask Ashley, who at eleven is holding my hand and seeming more like six. She shakes her head no. “Are you sure? I’ll go with you.” She shrugs.

“I miss the snow,” she says, shaking her head sadly. “When I was young it used to snow in the winter.”

“It will snow again,” I say.

“When?” she asks.

“When you least expect it,” I say.

We leave Nate at the roller coaster. He seems relieved by the spinning, by hurling through the air again and again. Ashley picks out something called the Wave Swinger; it seems innocent enough.

Like the mall, the amusement park is empty. Nate and Ashley both have their own attendants, ride operators who are like mechanical tour guides. They walk with us from ride to ride, turning each one on and giving it a test spin before letting the kids board.

“Isn’t it hard to spend your days in an empty amusement park?” I ask one of the operators.

“Beats sitting home with my wife,” the guy says, shrugging like I’m the idiot.

“My mother’s in the hospital,” Ashley tells the operator as he’s turning on the chair swing. “We were sent home from school. Our father hit her in the head.”

“Rough,” the operator says, and it vaguely sounds like he’s saying “Ruff,” as in barking more than talking.

The Wave Swinger lifts gently off the ground. I am in the chair ahead of Ashley, suspended by twenty feet of galvanized chain. It makes a couple of graceful spins in a wide circle, rising higher each time, and then it takes off, spinning faster and faster. The chair swings out wide, it tilts, now we’re flying up high and then swooping down low. I am dizzy, nauseous, trying to find one thing to fix on, one thing that is not moving. I stare at the empty chairs in front of me, the blue sky overhead. I am losing my sense of balance; I fear I will pass out and somehow slip out of the chair and fall to the ground.

Nate is waiting for us when we land. I stumble getting off the ride and knock my head into the chains.

We head for the Haunted House, all hopping into our own cars, and the train bangs through the double doors and into the darkness. It’s warm inside and smells like sweat socks. Overhead there are howls and ear-piercing screeches from the dead, timbers crack, and ghosts fall from the sky, stopping inches short of our faces before being snatched away again. The mechanical soundtrack is punctuated by a frightful choking sound.

“What is that?” I ask.

“It’s Ashley,” Nate says.

“Are you choking?” I ask, unfastening my seat belt and trying to turn and look at her.

“She’s crying,” Nate says. “That’s the way she cries.”

As lightning is crashing around me and we’re climbing a hill into a dark castle, I’m turning and trying to crawl out of my car and into hers. Suddenly strobe lights are flashing and, as in some slow-motion Marx Brothers movie, I’m on my hands and knees on top of the train car. The train is heading straight for the closed door of the castle, and right before it hits, the train turns sharply and I am thrown overboard, banging into a wall, reaching out and grabbing at anything for balance, worried about landing on the third rail — if there is such a thing in a haunted house. And then it all stops. It’s pitch-dark. “Don’t move,” we hear a voice overhead. Ashley is still crying, sobbing in the dark. A minute later, the Haunted House is flooded with bright fluorescent light; every secret of the night is revealed — the lousy papier-mâché walls, the cheaply strung-together skeletons suspended on wire hangers, the yellow and purple glow-in-the-dark paint on everything.

“What the fuck,” the ride operator says, coming down the tracks.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Sorry, shmorry,” he says to me.

“The little girl was crying.”

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” the operator asks Ashley, genuinely concerned. “Is anybody injured?”

We all shake our heads. “We’re all right.”

The operator grabs a tow rope at the front of the train and pulls us all down the tracks, bending his head at the front doors, and we bang out into the daylight.

“You sure you’re all okay?”

“As okay as we can be, given the circumstances,” I say. I hand the guy twenty bucks. I’m not exactly sure why, but it feels necessary.

“Let’s go home,” I say to the children, herding them to the parking lot.

“It was all good until we got to the Haunted House,” Nate says.

“It was good,” I say.

For dinner we have Jane’s spaghetti sauce from the freezer.

“I love Mom’s spaghetti,” Ashley says.

“Great,” I say, worried that there are only two more containers in the freezer and they’re going to have to last a lifetime. I’m wondering if spaghetti sauce can be cloned. If we save a sample or take a swab of Jane’s sauce, can someone make more?

Spaghetti and frozen broccoli and cream soda and Sara Lee pound cake. You would almost think things are under control.

The cat walks by, flicking her tail at my ankles under the table. Ashley gets up and shows me the cabinet where forty cans of cat food are stacked in neat order.

“She likes the salmon the best,” Ashley says.

After dinner I take the children back to the hospital. Everything is slightly more hushed; the ICU has a dimmed glow-in-the-dark quality. The large space is divided into eight glass-walled rooms, of which six are occupied.

“Anything?” I ask the nurse.

She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

The children visit with their mother. Nathaniel has brought a paper he wrote for school. He reads it aloud to her and then asks if she thinks it needs something more. He waits for an answer. The ventilator breathes its mechanical breath. After he reads the paper, he tells her about the amusement park, he tells her about a boy at school that apparently she already knows a lot about, he tells her that he’s calculated that by the time he’s ready to start college it will cost about seventy-five thousand dollars a year and that by the time Ashley is ready to start it will be more than eighty. He tells her he loves her.

Ashley rubs her mother’s feet. “Does that feel good?” she asks, smoothing cream over her toes and up her ankles. “Maybe tomorrow I can bring polish from home and do your nails.”

Later, I walk through the house, turning out lights. It’s nearly midnight. Ashley is in her room, playing with her old toys; all the dolls from her shelves are down on the floor, and she’s in the middle.

“Time for bed,” I say.

“In a minute,” she says.

Nate is down the hall, in his parents’ room, splayed out on their bed asleep and fully clothed. Tessie is with him, her head on the pillow, filling in for Jane.