www.FindMadeline.tumblr.com
HELP US FIND MADELINE! JOIN THE SEARCH.
Hi all,
Thank you for all of the outpouring of support you’ve shown to the site, the Snows, and to Madeline in the past few days. It means the world to us.
Many of you have been asking how you can help. We are not currently accepting donations. But please join our search party July 22 at 4 p.m.! We will assemble in the parking lot at Big Scoop Ice Cream & Candy, 66598 Route 101, East Norwalk.
Please help spread the word to friends, families, and neighbors, and remember to follow @FindMadelineSnow on Twitter for the latest updates.
Let’s bring Madeline home safely.
I’ll be there!!!!!
posted by: allegoryrules at 11:05 a.m.
Me too. ┎
posted by: katywinnfever at 11:33 a.m.
>>>>comment deleted by admin<<<<
JULY 21
Nick
There’s a fundamental rule of the universe that goes like this: if you’re running late, you will miss your bus. You’ll also miss your bus if it’s raining or if you have somewhere really important to go, like the SATs or a driver’s test. Dara and I have a word for that kind of luck: crapdiment. Just crap smeared on top of more crap.
My morning is already full of crapdiment.
By the time I get to FanLand, I’m nearly twenty-five minutes late. The traffic was bad along the shore. It was announced that Madeline Snow vanished from her sister’s car two days ago outside Big Scoop Ice Cream & Candy, and the news has blown up across the entire state. Even more tourists are flooding the beach than usual. Sick how people like tragedies—maybe it makes them feel better about the crapdiment of their own lives.
The front gate is hanging open, even though the park won’t officially open for another half hour, but there’s no one in the front office, no sound except for the gentle whir of the refrigerator that contains all of Donna’s precious Diet Cokes. I grab my red shirt from my assigned cubby—yes, I get a cubby, like in kindergarten—and do a quick armpit sniff. Not bad, but I’ll definitely have to wash it after today. Already the parrot-shaped thermometer registers ninety-three degrees.
I reemerge, blinking, into the sun. Still no one. I take the path that winds down past the big public bathrooms, toward the Lagoon—also known informally as the Martini, the Cesspool, and the Piss ’N’ Play—where all the water rides are. The wind rustles the leaves, both plastic and real, lining the path, and I have a memory of watching Dara, knock-kneed and skinny as a stick, running ahead of me, laughing. Then I turn the corner and see the park employees, all of them, sitting in a semicircle in the sunken outdoor amphitheater the park uses for birthday parties and special performances. Mr. Wilcox is standing on an overturned wooden crate, like a crazy man spouting off about religion. Fifty pairs of eyes turn to me simultaneously.
Funny that even in a crowd, it’s Parker I see first.
“Warren, so nice of you to join us!” Mr. Wilcox booms. But he doesn’t sound too angry. I can’t actually picture him angry; it’s like trying to imagine a skinny Santa Claus. “Come on, cop a squat, pull up a chair.”
There are no chairs, of course. I sit cross-legged at the edge of the crowd, my face hot, wishing everyone would stop staring. I catch Parker’s eye and try to smile, but he turns away.
“We were just discussing plans for the big day,” Mr. Wilcox says, addressing me. “FanLand’s seventy-fifth-anniversary party! We’ll need all hands on deck, and we’ll be coordinating a special volunteer force, too, with some local middle school recruits. The concession stands and pavilions will be working double time, and we’re expecting more than three thousand people over the course of the day.”
Mr. Wilcox rattles on about delegating special task forces and the importance of teamwork and organization, like we’re heading out to do major battle instead of throwing a party for a bunch of pukey children and their exhausted parents. I half listen, while thinking of Dara’s birthday two years ago and how she insisted we go out to this sleazy under-eighteen club near Chippewa Beach with a Halloween theme all year long. She knew the DJ—Goose or Hawk or something—and I remember how she stood on the table to dance, her mask looped around her neck, fake blood oozing down into the hollow of her clavicle.
Dara’s always liked that kind of thing: dressing up, green on Saint Patrick’s Day, bunny ears for Easter. Any excuse to do something out of the ordinary.
If there’s one thing she’s bad at, it’s ordinary.
After the staff meeting, Mr. Wilcox instructs me to help Maude “prep” the park. Maude has a pinched face, almost as if it went through a vise; short hair, white-blond with blue streaks; and spacers in her ears. She’s dressed like a hippie from the sixties, wearing a long flowing skirt and leather sandals that make her standard red T-shirt look even more ridiculous. She looks like a Maude; it’s easy to imagine that in forty years she’ll be hand-knitting a cover for her toilet seat and cursing at all the neighborhood kids pegging her porch with baseballs. Her face is twisted into a permanent scowl.
“What’s the point of a dry run?” I ask, trying to make conversation. We’re standing in front of the Cobra, the park’s largest, and oldest, roller coaster. I shield my eyes against the sun and watch the empty cars rattle along the toothy track, eating it. From a distance, it does look like a snake.
“Gotta warm ’em up,” she says. Her voice is surprisingly deep and husky, like a smoker’s. Definitely a Maude. “Get ’em on their feet, wake ’em up, make sure there’s no glitches.”
“You’re talking about them like they’re alive,” I say, only half joking. This makes her scowl even harder.
We make the rounds, testing the Plank and the Whirling Dervish, Pirate’s Cove and Treasure Island, the Black Star and the Marauder. The sun is creeping higher in the sky and the park has officially opened; the concession stands and gamers have unshuttered their booths, and already the air is scented with fried dough. Families are streaming in, little kids trailing the paper flags we give out at the entryway, moms shouting for them to Slow down, slow down.
Mr. Wilcox is parked by the front gate, talking with two cops wearing identical mirrored sunglasses and scowls. With them is a girl who looks familiar. Her blond hair is pulled into a high ponytail, her eyes swollen like she’s been crying.
In the distance, I spot Alice and Parker painting a long canvas banner stretched between them on the pavement. I can’t make out what the banner says: just blocky red and black lettering and blue splashes that might be flowers. Parker is shirtless again, his hair hanging long over his eyes, the muscles in his back contracting every time he moves the brush. Alice catches me watching and gives me a big wave, smiling broadly. Parker looks up, too, but when I wave to him he looks down, frowning. It’s the second time today he’s avoided eye contact. Maybe he’s mad that I skipped the party.
“All done,” Maude says, after we send the line of interconnected boats through the Haunted Ship and watch them emerge, passenger-less, on the other side. Faint screams and roars emanate from inside: a scream track, Alice told me yesterday, to get everyone into the right mood.
“What about that one?” I point to a ride that looks like a single metal finger, pointed to the sky. GATEWAY TO HEAVEN is painted on the side of a grounded sixteen-seater cart, which, given the name, presumably shoots up into the sky before dropping.
“That one’s closed,” she says, already turning away from me.
As soon as she says it, I can see that she’s right; the Gateway looks as if it hasn’t been used in ages. The paint is flaking from the metal, and the whole thing has the sad, disused look of an abandoned toy. “How come?”
Maude whirls around, barely suppressing a sigh. “It’s been closed forever.”
For some reason, I don’t want to let it drop. “But why?”
“Some girl fell out of the chair, like, ten years ago,” Maude says flatly, as if she’s reading off the world’s most boring grocery list.
Even though we’re standing in the sun and it must be one hundred degrees, a tiny shiver snakes up my spine. “Did she die?”
Maude squints at me. “No, she lived happily ever after,” she says, and then shakes her head, snorting. “Of course she died. That thing is, like, one hundred and fifty feet high. She fell from the very top. Straight to the pavement. Splat.”
“Why don’t they tear it down?” I ask. Suddenly the Gateway looks not sad, but ominous: a finger raised not to get attention but as a warning.
“Wilcox won’t. He still wants to get it running again. It was the girl’s fault, anyway. They proved it. She wasn’t wearing her harness correctly. She unlocked it as a joke.” Maude shrugs. “Now they’re all automated. The harnesses, I mean.”
I have a sudden image of Dara, unbelted, falling through space, her arms pinwheeling through empty air, her screams swallowed by wind and the sound of children laughing. And the accident: a brief photo explosion in my head, the sound of screaming, a jagged face of rock lit up by the headlights and the wheel jerking out of my hands.
I close my eyes, swallow, will away the image. Breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, ticking off long seconds, like Dr. Lichme taught me to do—the only useful thing he taught me. Where were we coming from? Why was I driving so fast? How did I lose control?
The accident has been clipped from my memory, just clean lifted away, as though surgically excised. Even the days before the accident are lost in murk, submerged in deep, sticky strangeness: every so often a new image or picture gets spit out, like something surfacing from the mud. The doctors told my mom it may have had something to do with the concussion, that memory would return to me slowly. Dr. Lichme said, Trauma takes time.
“Sometimes her dad still comes to the park and just, like, stands there, staring up at the sky. Like he’s still waiting for her to fall down. If you see him, just get Alice. She’s the only one he’ll talk to.” Maude curls her upper lip, revealing teeth that are surprisingly small, like a child’s. “He once told her she reminded him of his daughter. Creepy, right?”
“It’s sad,” I say. But Maude doesn’t hear. She’s already walking away, skirt swishing.