There was, in Sissy’s estimation, a sudden disruption at the Morrises’ house, after Mrs. Schultz arrived, her face blotchy, her pretty hairdo smashed against her thin face from running, and her hand resting on her chest. A distress rose in the neighbors and there was, subsequently a whispered conversation as the adults gathered in a circle, away from the children. Sissy strained to hear until Eva—Eva who was included in the conversation, who stood opposite their father—caught Sissy by her bony shoulder. Seeing Eva’s expression—suddenly blank, palpably shaken—Sissy became nervous, her foot tapping the ground. She scanned the circle and the empty tables. She ran around the house and searched for her mother. Then, breathless and more than a little beside herself, she pulled on Eva’s T-shirt.

“Eva,” she started, her voice quivering.

“Go. Go play” Her tone was like their mother’s was on that day she was in no mood, that day she left them all.

Within minutes the picnic ended, the men and women cleaned up, and a somber air seemed to settle over the once festive activity. The quoit game ceased, the hose was wrapped up. Broken pieces of balloons were collected and thrown into the trash, along with the empty beer cans and paper plates. On the walk home, both her father and Eva were oddly quiet. Eva teetered on the edge of the curb in a fine line, her mind elsewhere, her head down. Inexplicably, she held Sissy’s hand the entire way home, gripping it tightly. Sissy should have felt overwhelmed with newly found happiness when her father announced later that he was taking them to the circus that night, the outing itself that, in light of the picnic, she had all but given up on, and yet the entire arrangement had a conspiratorial air, the longed-for event no longer what it was the day before. It reminded her of the day she was sent to Mrs. Morris— exiled suddenly, cast off—even though she didn’t want to go there, even though she sensed something was very wrong.

Now in the car, her father keeps his eyes on the road, and Eva, her body turned toward the door, watches the shops that go by on the square. Sissy, alone in the backseat, finds the silence unbearable. Her mind unravels possibilities, all of which end up in calamitous ruin. “Eva,” she says again, frowning.

Eva looks back, tilting her head slightly, studying Sissy. “What?”

“She didn’t leave again, did she?”

“Who?” For a moment she pauses, her mouth open, as if she might say more.

“Mom?”

“For Christ’s sake, Sissy, no,” her father snaps, though Sissy doesn’t know what she’s done or said to make him out of sorts. She doesn’t know why he’s been brooding the entire drive, the vein in his neck throbbing. His voice sets her back against the seat again, and she knows enough to be quiet. The passing lights illuminate her arms and legs in strange, eerie ways, making her feel like a ghost. She watches her father, not knowing what he thinks—how his mind at this very moment is going over all the things that might happen to a girl, how violence can be inflicted on the flesh. She does not know that, thinking about all this, he wants to kill the sonofabitch who would do something like that, whoever would hurt a child in that way. He wants to pummel the sonofabitch with blinding fists. Sissy only senses his fury—palpable, the energy of it shooting in all directions around the car, ricocheting off the windows, piercing into her heart. This, coupled with Eva’s lack of any further response, only confirms for her that she is accurate in her perceptions, that her mother is gone again, that what unfolds now is a lie constructed by everyone and meant only to appease. In the distance, she catches sight of the taunting big top, yellow-white against the darkening sky, a red flag flapping in the evening breeze. The Ferris wheel makes its spiraling descent, mocking her with idiotic motion, each chair outlined in lights and swaying when the ride is started and stopped again. Yesterday such a scene would have filled her with awe and wonder. Whatever oddities she found in the day would have dwindled against the bright musicality of the night. But now, for whatever splendor there is in front of her, the air is also tinged with something else. She will hear only a tenor of sadness against the music, and the contrast will make the world seem strange, inverted, everything hinting of something Sissy can’t quite see or touch. Is it always to be this way? Sadness lurking behind laughter? Something amiss in the appearance of perfection?

Frank scans the parking lot for a pay phone, eager to call Natalia and find out the news. His eyes follow the rows of cars in the parking lot, then move to the booths lined with banners and clicking turnstiles, the crowd of people funneling into the gates, the sudden noise.

“Come on, Sissy,” Eva says. She grabs her hand so that Sissy can feel the pulse in the space between Eva’s thumb and finger.

Their father walks behind them. He tucks his shirt into his shorts. He pays at the turnstiles and ushers in the girls. The smells assault them: buttery popcorn, steaming hot dogs, oil from funnel cakes. Around Sissy there are gleaming faces, bright with perspiration, some of whom she knows. Foreheads shimmer under the strings of light that are thread unevenly from stand to stand. Children, hoisted on their fathers’ shoulders, peer over the crowd, strings of balloons trailing behind them, bumping against one another gently. In the distance Sissy sees two balloons drift above the faces and heads, above the lights, carried westward by the breezes.

“Stay close,” Eva tells her. “You hear me?”

“Is Mom coming later, then?” Sissy yells this above the din, but Eva says nothing, and it’s impossible to guess whether Eva hears her and chooses to ignore the question or whether Eva hasn’t heard Sissy at all.

Frank watches Sissy, her startling silver suit catching every bright bulb, reflecting them like a prism. Even this angers him tonight and makes him think that this is exactly the type of thing the eye is drawn to—the play of light—this is exactly what makes a girl stand out and makes her suddenly vulnerable. He imagines Vicki that day in the park, how appealing a lonely girl might have seemed to whatever sonofabitch who watched and waited and sensed an opportunity in the quiet, placid day. He looks from side to side, past the faces, past the rides. His face pinches. He already has it in mind that, in this mood, he won’t be able to stand this for long—the blaring noise, the flashing lights, the screams from children, people packed like sardines, the smells of their bodies intermingling: sweat and perfume, grease and dirt. The more he dwells on events of the evening, the more he thinks of the things that could happen. (A man attacking a girl, forcing her down. My God, he thinks, what if she were kept alive? What if her death were slow, spanning across days, or weeks?) When he first heard the news at the Morrises’, his mind went utterly blank. He felt numb and distanced from everything, pushed back into a void that contained only oceans of dumb silence. But now he is slightly dizzy, hot in the crowd. His body tenses.

“Hold up!” he yells.

To his surprise, Eva obeys. She turns and waits, still gripping Sissy’s hand. Frank pulls out his wallet and gives her the last of his money. Eva releases Sissy. She counts the bills and shoves them into her shorts pocket. Eva and Frank’s eyes meet. And there is something that is shared between them—doubt, guilt, regret. Something seems to register in her face for a moment—he imagines forgiveness—but then it disappears entirely. “The ticket booth is over there,” he says, pointing. “Take Sissy on what rides she wants; get something to eat, too. I’ll be back; I’ll find you.”

“Where are you going?” Eva says.

“I want to see if your mother is home. I need to find out what happened.”

Sissy takes this in, a panic rising in her again. It is true, she realizes. What is gone and comes back is surely destined to go again. All her thoughts, all her worries. She grabs Eva’s hand and squeezes, but Eva doesn’t look down to reassure her.

“I’ll find you. If an hour passes, meet me right here,” he says, pointing to the ground. “And Eva, you watch Sissy, do you hear me? You keep your eye on your sister.”

With that, Frank leaves the girls to weave through the disorienting crowd. As they walk, they bump elbows and push against people, and the ground changes from a paved surface to dusty grass, worn thin from traffic. The air is tight, stale. Concession stands and game stands lined with red-and-white canopies are to the left of them, the prizes—stuffed animals and plastic blow-up toys and dolls—strung along the tops, hanging precariously by arms and legs. The shooting gallery. The ring-toss. The water guns. The hoops. Lights flash, like a disco, pulsing in time with the loud music. They pass the big top, where a wiry-looking man takes tickets from the line of spectators. The woman on the wire; the wolf boy; the bearded lady; the woman balancing plates—they were all true, Sissy realizes. All of them. Away from this, a carousel turns in circles, like Eva’s dancer in her music box turns—slowly, with a measure of caution. Creamy horses lope up and down on their poles; the pipe organ in the center plays by itself, the keys pressed down by a phantom. A house of glass spins on a metal platform lit with green lights. To the right, a fun house lined with mirrors towers up, a painted figure—a monstrous woman with beer steins in her hands and Heidi braids—looks curiously though absently down on the crowd. Behind this structure is a petting zoo, metal pens with llamas and horses and goats, and then the field, the parked tractors and RVs, and the stationary train, the boxcars emptied, the flatbeds vacant.

A pulse, a beat. Music. A hum.

All the people. What do they wish for?

Eva pulls Sissy as she might a piece of hesitant thread, walking toward the ticket stand. Sissy glances up and sees a man high above her, as tall as the woman with the Heidi braids, but thinner and in animated movement, a stick man dressed in long blue pants, a white-and-red-striped jacket, a top hat. He looks down at her and waves happily. Sissy squeezes Eva’s hand tighter and looks away. She searches the crowd of Gypsies.

The lines snake from the booths, uneven, noisy. A pale girl about seven or eight passes alone and seems to float along with the crowd. Above her head, she holds a large crimson flower—delicate, airy, made of tissue paper pulled apart from a tight center. As she moves, the flower inches up higher, as if it is bouncing along the faces before being swallowed up entirely.

Not noticing any of this, Eva unclenches Sissy’s sweaty hand and lets it slip away. Her mind is elsewhere entirely. For the first time she allows herself to think that in one regard, her mother was right, that she’s been negligent, that Sissy was left by herself all summer, even on that day when Vicki Anderson disappeared and something terrible happened. Sissy was left to do as she wished while Eva met Peter in his van, while they talked about silly things and fucked on the floor, Peter undressing her slowly, peeling off her clothes, lifting her skirt and rump, putting his mouth to her, his smooth hands running over her thighs, his moist lips on her waiting skin. Sissy was left to everything, and Eva didn’t even think to ask about her day, about what might have happened. The nagging sense of what if consumes her now, and her mind mulls out possibilities that leave her feeling sullen and slightly ill. To think she wished it might be Sissy who’d disappeared, Sissy and not the Anderson girl—that she actually had that thought of coming home to find herself blissfully alone—that she could be so self-centered, so cruel. And how she tried to scare Sissy with tales of death, not caring if they were true, all without really thinking it might have been Sissy who was grabbed, sending a shock wave through the world. She shudders to think of this, yet it hits her forcefully like a fist. Her remorse cuts to the bone.

“I could win you a prize,” Eva says. She tousles Sissy’s hair. “We have some money.”

Sissy follows Eva to a stand where dolls are left hanging, one after the other, blondes and brunettes and redheads all in pretty blue dresses with too much frill. “I don’t want those,” Sissy says, folding her arms. “I thought you didn’t want to come, to the picnic or here.”

“I didn’t,” Eva tells her. “But I wasn’t going to leave you alone.”

“Dad’s mad.”

Eva stands on tiptoes and glances around. “All the more reason,” she says, “to not be alone.”

“Why’s Dad mad?”

Eva says nothing.

“Mom left, didn’t she?”

Eva looks down at her. “No.”

“Are you tricking me? Are you lying?”

Eva bends over and untwists the strap of Sissy’s swimsuit. She straightens Sissy’s shorts, pulling them up to her belly button. “I wouldn’t lie to you,” she says. Her face remains serious and somber.

Sissy registers a doubt. Why else would her father be so angry, why would he suddenly go off and leave the two of them if not to search for their mother, if not to try to bring her home? She gnaws at her cheek, the soft flesh. All the clues make perfect sense. Lost in the haze of the day, the confusion of noise and hoopla, Sissy thinks all this makes sense about the world and more. She remembers that this is the place of Gypsies, that this is the world of a doomed people. And after the Gypsies have taken what they want, they will recede into the woods again and disappear in the darkness. They will vanish into the mists, taking with them a few unsuspecting children. She sees her mother there, too, with all of them—a woman lost and disenchanted, running wildly in the night, telling stories of how she knows only strangers—and Sissy sees Eva and her alone again, tending to themselves, living off scraps of bread.

“I’ll get you a balloon, then,” Eva says, righting herself

Sissy stares, waiting for something else entirely. Hot tears come too quickly, again.

“What is it?”

Involuntarily, she moves from foot to foot as if she might pee. “You’re lying,” she says in a desperate whisper.

Eva pulls Sissy away from the crowd, to the side of a nearby tent. Inside there are men’s voices, a faint smell of cigars. The air settles. In the distance, traffic whizzes past and lights spot the road.

“Listen,” Eva says, in a way that makes Sissy’s head pop up. “It’s not mom. Mom hasn’t gone anywhere except with Mrs. Anderson to the police station. I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise to be okay, do you understand?” Eva holds Sissy’s waist tightly, in a way that makes her wince. Her bathing suit scratches against her skin, making it raw. Above them another balloon drifts into the air. “Sissy?”

Sissy feels it, a jolt that shoots through her limbs, making her want to run.

“It’s Vicki. It’s Vicki Anderson,” Eva says.

Confused, Sissy grimaces and readjusts. She pulls away, though not entirely. She hasn’t thought about Vicki Anderson in what seems like days. She hasn’t conjured her since putting her image in its proper place, one that satisfied Sissy and left the world unscathed: Vicki, her best friend who magically grew wings, Vicki the girl who flew away, happily, into another place altogether.

Eva’s voice calls her back to the reality of the moment. “They found her,” she says. “She’s dead.”

“Here?”

“You don’t understand.” Eva pulls her close and holds her tightly again. Sissy tenses as she hears the word she has never understood, a word that hangs lifeless in the air: Dead. Dead, dead, dead. This, finally, is what cements the moment—the thud of the word in Eva’s mouth, the finality of it on Eva’s tongue. She pulls, wrenching as Eva tries to hold her. She steps back over the wire cables, over discarded wrappers, sticky with caramel. She sees only her blurry sneakers, the dirty ground. Nearby a generator roars to life, the belts moving suddenly, making her jump. Sissy calls Eva a liar—she yells this, saying Eva is an outright lying liar—and then she pulls away farther, out of Eva’s reach. A space widens between them, filled with the word that Eva said, and in that space the word grows and becomes frighteningly forceful, with its own sound, a low dead hum. She runs. As the crowd moves, she moves with it, away from Eva, away from everything that confuses her and everything that hurts. She follows the lights. She heads toward music that grows louder. She darts through the mass of people. She turns at the corner of a concession stand.

Exhausted, her breath spent, she stops at the carousel, sees a smoky gray stallion with its front legs raised in a gallop, its empty saddle adorned with grape leaves. As it glides by, its rump changes, not a horse but a mermaid’s tail. A white mare raises her left hoof, prancing, and on her sides, suddenly, green scales. Above the murals, gilded mirrors breeze by, and she sees only repetitions of herself

She runs over ground covered with sawdust and peers into the big top: the suspended lights, the interplay of shadows. People perched in the bleachers roar with laughter and clap and cheer. Against the canvas wall, a man with a pockmarked face stands, his skin tight and eyes sharp and small. A cigarette hangs from his fingers, which he then extinguishes under the heel of his boot. When he turns toward Sissy, she notices a bird perched on his shoulder. The bird bobs its head up and down. It flashes its wings and they open in a taunting way.

Sissy’s heart races. “Do you work here?” she whispers.

“Today I do,” the man says, looking away, back to the rings. “Maybe not tomorrow if I make a woman angry tonight.”

She thinks to tell him she’s lost but doesn’t. She doesn’t want to go back to Eva. She doesn’t want to hear Eva say that awful word again, and not simply to say it but to say it in a way that made it seem all too true. Sissy inhales the sawdust, the deep musky scent of animals and dung. She listens as the man with a top hat bellows into the microphone: “Everything is a wonder here. Everything is a spectacle!” The magnetic pull of his voice, the magician’s look about him, willing the crowd’s gaze, directing it above him to where the lights suddenly flash on. Exuberant, in motion, a woman in pink tights flies into the air only to be caught by a man who falls backward, his hands grabbing hers. The crowd claps. Clowns weave through the bleachers with their wide-painted grins, their masses of bright red hair. They hold buckets, swaying them unpredictably. A drum roll sounds. And then not water but a burst of confetti, thrown high into the air, floating down like snow. Shrieking, wild laughter. In the ring, a poodle with a tutu walks on its hind legs. In the center ring a lion roars. Suspended above the animal, twenty feet in the air, a woman spins on a rope, a twirl of rhinestones, crimson peacock feathers. Sissy’s heart races to see a woman dangling above the lion’s mouth.

She feels the bird’s eye on her. “Have you seen a little girl?” she asks the man. “Have you seen my Gypsy mother?”

“Seen lots of girls,” the man says, keeping his eye on the woman, the waiting lion. The drum roll sounds harder. “Seen some Gypsy women, too.”

Confused, Sissy squints. “Where are the Gypsies, then, the ones who take children?”

“Oh, those,” he tells her. He grins and produces from his pocket a kernel of corn. The bird takes it gently in its long beak, flaps its black wings again. “I’m one of those. But they’re all over, Gypsies. Take your pick.”

“Is he your pet?”

“Him?” The man pets the bird’s feathers, and under his fingers they turn black-emerald, black-blue. “Found him when he was young, practically dead on the road. Never heard a damn peep out the bird, doesn’t ever sing. Doesn’t fly off.”

“I’m running off,” she says. “I’m running away. Tonight.”

“Suit yourself,” he tells her. “Doesn’t bother me.”

Her chest restricts. She cannot keep up with the motion in the tent, the changing circles, the spaces that are emptied and filled again. She thinks of Vicki, how Vicki wanted to be a performer. What is dead, anyway? Not to shift shape but to be gone, gone and never seen, gone forever, with no hope of coming home.

Outside, Sissy runs, mulling over Eva’s words, over the word “dead” and Eva’s expression as she told Sissy this. How the worry held Eva’s face. She wants to believe that her sister is a liar. In that moment she ran away, she did believe it. Still what Eva said was different from the stories of the summer; her delivery of the news serious, her hands pinching Sissy’s sides as if she wanted to hold her there, to keep her from running. The way Eva spoke the words, the cadence of her voice, matched the lines of worry in her face, as if she didn’t want to hurt Sissy at all.

She moves toward the field. Better the Gypsies, then, she thinks. Better the Gypsies who steal away children than children who go missing and then later are found dead.

Amy marvels as she surveys the crowd. She sways, almost hypnotically, as she strains to see past the entry booths to the attractions. After her mother came over to babysit Sophie, Amy surprised Peter by dressing up for the evening in new pants and a blouse that fell just off her shoulders. He takes this as a good sign, one that’s hopeful despite everything. She’s asked about Eva several times—mostly when they are in bed, when the lights are out and her mind wanders—and he knows she hasn’t let go, that she is still playing out possibilities, doubting his explanations. Eva is no longer the girl who delighted him, the girl who made him feel new. Instead she is that girl with the crush, a girl out of hand, a girl with a problem. As he tells Amy this again and again, as he reinvents Eva, the story shapes itself as true; they both begin to believe it. His betrayal lessens. Through comforting lies they grow closer because—it occurs to Peter—neither of them entirely wishes for the stark, deliberate clarity of truth. The girl could hardly be trusted to tell the truth. If she didn’t believe him, she could talk to the other teachers. She could talk to the teachers and they would tell her the same damn thing.

To soothe Amy, he’s also planned an impromptu vacation before the start of school, away from the house, away from everything. He’s spoken to her of white sands, skeletal strands of the barrier reefs, a house on the ocean where, at night, with the windows open, they would hear only the sound of water, the swelling tides. Amy agreed to this, wanting, he thought, to believe. “We need it, don’t we?” she asked him, her voice straining.

Only sometimes when he is alone, after Amy has drifted off to sleep and he is there in that same darkness, do his lies hit him with a force and weight. In those moments a murmur escapes from him, a regret, a sigh, something absent of words altogether, something that, in the next moment, to survive, to keep what he loves close, he dismisses again altogether.

He watches Amy now as she takes in the crowd, her eyes never lingering on anything too long. Her body moves with the music and he sees her again as the girl on the quad, dancing from building to building, light, free. “What should we do first?” he asks, looping his arm around her.

“I don’t know,” Amy says, still looking. “I haven’t been to a circus in years. I used to love them when I was a kid.”

Peter agrees, though, in truth, he doesn’t view things the way she views them. What he sees is a gathering place for the bizarre and for the slightly idiotic, the warped sense of everything—the fat, bloated woman who looks as though she’s spent years taking up water; the man with snakes coiling around his neck; the booths that promise the greatest spectacles on earth and then, when you step behind the curtains, when you squeeze into the small, cramped spaces, reveal only a mirror, a distorted vision of yourself. He says, “Did you see that guy at the tilt-a-whirl? Some poor bastard turned bright red, and the guy just smiled and kept cranking the machine. They probably take bets on who they can get to vomit.”

“Maybe,” Amy says, still looking around. “It wouldn’t surprise me. My cousin got sick on that ride once. She and I used to go to the circus every summer. There was one that came through, and it was all we could talk about for days. My poor mother, she couldn’t keep up with us. We had to go on everything at least once, some rides we’d go on repeatedly, like we knew the minute the circus left we wouldn’t remember the feeling, so we had to cram it all in, whatever we could, or we’d miss it.” Amy’s voice trails off

Peter pulls her closer. He breathes deeply, glad to be in the night air, perhaps a bit giddy himself, to be following strings of lights that seem to ask nothing of him. He thinks again of his family, of all of them away at the beach, the newly rented house. He kisses her hair.

“The older I get, the more I have to look back on,” Amy says. She pauses, looks around, for what, Peter doesn’t know. “And the less I want to lose, I suppose.”

She eyes him now, and he feels a tinge of discomfort, a question in her starting to form again. “The older I get,” he tells her, “the less in my life I remember.”

Her face changes again, and he shifts uncomfortably, promising himself he’ll do better. He promises himself he will be better for Amy for the baby. He will never be so foolish as to let a girl come between them. Eva. (He allows himself to say her name, though thinking about her fills him with a quiet embarrassment.) He tells himself a girl like Eva is bound to bounce back, a girl like Eva has so many options.

Amy climbs into a carousel carriage and watches as Peter mounts a camel with a long golden beard and black eyes. He snaps a photo of her as she leans forward, her hand resting on the scrolled artwork, a quixotic look on her face, the stuffed dinosaur he won for Sophie next to her. A metal arm extends from the edge of the canopy, with a series of rings.

“Let me,” Amy says, taking the camera. “Grab one when we go past,” she tells him. “It’s supposed to be good luck.”

The music cranks, and each time they whirl by the rings, Peter lunges forward, his fingers straining right to their tips. They slip by his hand, the cool metal taunting him. On his fifth try he snags one that releases with a ping.

“For you,” he says, giving it to her. He holds it up. “I thought it was supposed to be brass?”

“Brass rings?” Amy laughs again, and he cannot tell what she’s thinking. She snaps a photograph, hiding her face. “That’s just something they tell kids, Peter. The rings are all steel, didn’t you know that? It’s just a story.”

Away from everything, Sissy moves swiftly, to the field next to the fire-house. She doesn’t know how she got here exactly, only that her feet moved and that her body, driven by the day, followed, and that it didn’t matter to her that her father would be angry, or that Eva might be searching for her frantically, desperately. She stops, not yet aware that she is moving toward the train. Next to a darkened RV, two horses graze behind a makeshift fence. A bay gelding noses the remnants of molasses on the ground. A buckskin looks up inquisitively as Sissy climbs the first metal rail and feels the structure wobble. She isn’t supposed to be here; she isn’t supposed to be alone. She makes a click-click noise with her tongue and the buckskin reaches with its muzzle, toward her outstretched fingers. She feels velvet and coarse hair, a nibbling at her palm. She smells the urine-drenched straw. “I’m leaving,” she says to the horse. Flies buzz around the buckskin’s eyes and back. It lashes its tail from side to side and stomps the ground.

She looks back, toward the lights. Everything happens at a quickened pace, a blur. She sprints along the darkening sky, a flash of glittery silver, a girl. At the tracks, she jumps over the many zigzagging rails and onto the rocky surface between the ties. She works her way past the long cars and flatbeds that smell of tar and diesel. She runs her hand over the rough surface, still warm from the sun. One flatbed, two flatbeds, three flatbeds, empty. She looks under the cars as she might have once looked under the bed for monsters. She passes a closed boxcar. Sissy jumps, but she cannot reach the lever to slide the door along the metal runner. She passes another boxcar made from old barn wood, the shapes of plywood uneven and rickety. The car stands open, wide like a terrifying mouth— tempting tonight, such darkness. Her hands touch the wooden surface. She feels the prick of a splinter as it lodges itself under her flesh, deep, penetrating. She stands on tiptoes to peer in, debating. Here she might wait until she feels the train in motion beneath her, and then she will be gone, gone from everyone in this confusing summer, gone from death itself, gone to be with those faces who once frightened her, the waiting Gypsies who have always called her name.

Resolved, she hoists herself up as she might in gym class. Her legs dangle for a moment; her feet scratch the gravel, disrupting it. Her body strains. She peers in. Using all her strength, she lifts herself higher until her knees scrape along the surface of the car. She crawls and disturbs the resting flies. The air closes around her. She can see only shapes and shadows, and, frightened, she turns toward the distant lights again, the muffled sounds of music and people. She moves along the wall, inching along, groping the wooden boards. She moves cautiously, the hairs on her neck on end. She holds her breath and eases deeper into the car, the straw crunching beneath her feet. She squints, trying to bring shadows into view, and can sense it there—precise, raw—the presence of something waiting to devour her, to take her, finally.

Something hits the top of the roof, an acorn, maybe, or knocking fingers. This isn’t the world of the swimming hole, she reminds herself. This is another world entirely—the world of the missing and of the dead, the mothers and fathers and children, turned here, to this waiting place, the caravan of Gypsies, the train. Her arms stretch forward, along the uneven surface. Scratches, which she imagines belong to all the children who are dead, who are taken away in cars that must be, she imagines, exactly like this: the air tight and musty. They claw to get to the light, she thinks. How awful.

She closes her eyes and imagines Vicki Anderson that day at the park, how a man was there waiting for her, how he enticed her to the woods. Perhaps he told Vicki he’d lost someone, or perhaps he told her his dog had run off. Perhaps he, like the strange man in the tent, had a pet bird that flew off, and she followed it unknowingly, trying to reclaim it and bring it back. Perhaps he took her by the arm and yanked her away when no one was watching. In the woods, the man, a shadow of a man, came toward Vicki. He loomed over her until Vicki was in darkness. And, like the man so long ago, on that day when Sissy and Vicki were together, the man who exposed himself, the shadow man did the same, the shadow man grabbed her, the shadow man laced his hands around her neck. He left her there, dead—dead, dead, dead—the dirt caked under her fingers, the dirt staining her knees and elbows.

Sissy breathes hard thinking on all this. She says something, inaudible even to herself, her voice small and hollow.

A pause. Outside, she hears footsteps, rushed, and then sees a shadow moving across the door. Sissy’s heart races. She stays still, her palms sweating against the wood. The shadow stops, looks in, moves toward her. The shadow lifts itself up into the boxcar. If she runs, there is death. If she doesn’t run, there is death. If she moves toward the shadow man, she will die. If she breathes, she might die. If she can’t breathe, she will die. If she screams, the shadow might come in and grab her, silencing her forever.

Dead.

She crouches down, whimpers.

“Sissy?” the voice says. Her father’s voice, raspy, grumbling.

She doubts, waits for the voice to sound again, this time angrier. The voice bristles, irritable, inflamed. Still, she waits, unsure. A third time, the voice booming now.

She steps forward slowly. “Dad?” she says. The word in the hollow car echoes.

He reaches forward and catches her shoulder, his thumb pressing into her flesh, biting, his fingers biting, too, sending a shock, a wave of pain through her. She winces. He yanks her into the warm night air. Dumbfounded, she moves. He jerks her arm again and marches across the rails and stones and into the dim field, pulling Sissy behind him, the pressure of his grip descending down her arm like a clamp, sending up numbness, pins and needles.

“Where is Eva?” he demands. Without waiting for her answer, he stops, turns her, and his hand goes back wide, hitting her bottom, hard, flat, the bone beneath the flesh already stinging, and then more tears, more hurt, the deadened ache. She hears a horse snort and whinny. A light in a nearby RV goes on but no one is really watching. Anything might happen.

“If I hadn’t seen you in the light,” Frank yells. “Do you hear me?” He shakes her, brings her toward him. She can smell the faint aroma of beer on him from the picnic. “Do you ever listen? Where is Eva?”

Sissy grows mute. If she tells the truth, she will be in more trouble—could she say she ran away?—and if she says nothing, her father will only growl more, but if she lies to save herself, she betrays Eva, Eva who on this night has been nice to her, Eva who offered to win her a doll, Eva who has done nothing wrong except speak of death, speak the truth, Eva who is, finally, in this unfolding moment, loved by Sissy best.

“Well?” he demands.

She blubbers. She chokes back sobs.

Her father lets go a barrage of curses, each worse than the one before. He smacks her bottom again, harder, sending another wave of pain through her, from the bottom up, jolting her spine. “Don’t cry,” he yells.

“I w-was in line,” she begins, stammering. “I turned and she left. She’s left all summer long with that man.”

“Who?” Frank demands, yanking her, pulling her closer again. “What man?”

Sissy bites her lip hard. She studies the ground. “I went looking for her. I was looking for her and the man—you’re hurting my arm.”

Her father’s jaw clenches, but he lessens his grip. “Don’t you know, don’t you goddamn know, that if you’re lost, you find someone who works here and tell them you’re lost?”

Dumbstruck, Sissy nods. He pulls her forward again. Her free hand rubs her bottom as she moves. She doesn’t look back, at the boxcar with its giant mouth, nor does she look up, to the stars. She looks down at the ground to her feet. Disembodied, they move across the trampled grass.

Children. She realizes she would never be able to deal with them—she could never be able to have one of her own. Eva believed she was making things better by speaking the truth. She thought the truth would assuage Sissy’s panic, soothe her questions, and yet then, how suddenly her sister became more troubled, her fears amplified. How she wrenched away, a flash of silver lost suddenly in the crowd. Eva ran. She ran after Sissy. She weaved through people, eyed the stands, looked in the tents, peered into the bleachers. She glanced up at the swings, to the dangling feet. She ignored those she saw from Watson High, when they called to her. She scanned the Ferris wheel, waiting until the wheel made one rotation. She thought: If something should happen to Sissy in this place. She passed rides and saw the eyes of men watching her. She shuddered. She thought of someone pulling Sissy into darkness, attacking her.

She tried the fun house and swallowed hard—the heat finally hitting her, her stomach assailed by the need to rid itself of the food she’d eaten at the Morrises’, the food that, after her mother had left, she’d downed ravenously. As she passed the mirrors, she suddenly turned short and fat, her legs mere stubs that could belong to a midget, her hair flat and wide. Her shape elongated, and then compressed. She called for Sissy as she ran down corridors. A train horn sounded, stopping her with a blare of sudden light. She burst out into the night air. Her stomach wrenched. Saliva coated her mouth, and then something acrid rose from her stomach. She ran to a trash can, beads of sweat dripping from her forehead. She threw up, in the discarded cardboard cups of french fries and half-eaten corn dogs, their smell making her stomach wrench again. She looked to see if anyone noticed.

It is not Sissy she sees now, but Peter and Amy. She stops immediately, dumbstruck, catching herself. The two of them walk away from the carousel, holding hands—holding hands! she thinks to herself—Peter leaning into his wife. Eva stands, momentarily paralyzed, watching him kiss his wife’s cheek, the way his mouth touches her, not with ardent desire but the tenderness of years. How this action disaffirms everything Peter said during their times together, when he voiced his complaints about marriage, about his wife. She imagined them in separate rooms. She imagined an absence of conversation, and yet it was she and Peter in separate rooms, she and Peter with infrequent contact, their voices speaking over wires, their bodies occasionally slapping together. Always behind this was Amy. She was always present in the background. It doesn’t matter what he said. He and his wife were together. Like her mother and like her father, they were together and alone sometimes, maybe, but still together nonetheless. She doesn’t understand how he could still be like this, touching his wife, kissing her, after the times Peter and she were together in his van, their bodies slick with sweat, naked, entwined. The force of the thought sends her back.

Peter places an arm around Amy, the camera dangling from his wrist. He doesn’t see Eva standing by them now, her crushed expression, her intent stare. It is only Amy who glances toward her, and then stops, recognizing her immediately.

“Peter,” Eva says loudly, so that it registers with his wife, the informality of a first name, the implied intimacy. She starts to make out the words that Peter whispers in Amy’s ear.

“I don’t want a scene, Eva,” Peter says, his tone overly teacherly and academic, quelling any arguments or disruption. Eva, however, wants to make a scene. She wants to unleash herself, to claw at his eyes and pull at his hair. She wants to rip the glasses from his face and crush them under her feet. She wants to scream, to scream about all the lies, all the betrayals.

“Eva,” he says again, warning, making it seem as though she is a foolish girl.

“My husband explained everything,” Amy says.

A wave of embarrassment comes over Eva, the same that she suffers through when the boys at school look past her or when they talk about her at their lockers, calling her a whore behind her back. “Did he explain? Did he really?” She shifts her weight, stares at Peter.

“There are people to talk to who are your own age,” Amy says, her defensiveness registering. “But you can’t just go around following adults and pining after them. Did you come here tonight looking for Peter? Are you trying to cause problems?”

Her words, her accusations, level Eva. What untruths has Peter told, what things has he said that portray Eva this way, in this light?

“You’re a liar,” Eva tells him, but her voice shrinks in the noise, and she realizes she has only mouthed the words and not said them at all. A useless anger drains in her and is replaced by something stony. She stands up straighter, still waiting for him to take everything back. Heat travels through her, cutting deep—her embarrassment in the moment, her useless rage. She sees him like a boy, childish, foolhardy, accusing. He would lie so that he might keep together what life he has. He would lie about everything.

Somewhere behind her now, another voice calls, and she turns abruptly and sees her father coming through the crowd, Sissy being pulled along. Sissy’s cheeks are blotchy, her lower lip protruding.

Frank looks over to Peter. He is quick to assess the situation at hand: Eva’s En glish teacher standing there with a guilty, useless expression; Eva’s own look that betrays her—amorous, longing, angry. “What are you doing?” he says. He lets go of Sissy’s wrist and watches as she scrambles closer to Eva. “What the hell is going on?”

Eva presses her lips together. She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

“You’re supposed to be watching your sister. Instead you’re here, with him?” His voice startles her. Around them, a few people pause and look over before walking on again. Frank turns his attention to Peter, his neck twisting in provocation. “And you, what the hell are you doing with my kid?”

“I’m not doing anything with your kid,” Peter says. “Your kid’s been following me around all summer long. Your kid’s been getting ideas in her head.”

Frank debates, weighing the tension, the strained looks passing between Eva and Peter, and holding these against Sissy’s proclamation in the field, her mention of a man, of being left alone throughout the long days. His hands clench at the lingering knowledge that he’s been made a fool of by Eva—his own daughter—and her lies. He’s been made a fool of by this man who stands in front of him with his self-important look.

Frank’s movements are deliberate and quick. He thunders past Eva, and delivers a punch that knocks Peter back and sends Amy into hysterics. The men wrangle on the ground, Frank’s anger erupting from some deep place inside him. There is an explosion, a pummeling force, and then strangers finally intervening, breaking the men up, pulling them apart. The last Frank sees of Peter is him righting his glasses, stumbling away, his wife calling after him.

In the parking lot, Frank opens the door and screams at his girls to get in. His blood feels as though it’s on fire, and then, in the car, there is a smack, hard across Eva’s face from Frank, a blow. Eva’s shock, her hand against her cheek. Momentarily, she is speechless. Then her hand comes down, revealing a shine, a blush, a few broken vessels. The flare of nostrils. And there is a sense that this is bad, that this is very bad, that everything is different now, bone hitting bone, Eva’s nose disjointed, odd-looking. Frightened, Sissy leans back hard against the cushioned seat.

Blood, dark like the color of cherries. Blood on Eva’s forearm from where she wipes: a thin smear that makes the dark hairs more pronounced. Eva cups her hand to her nose. The blood drips down, red, the taste of iron, and a wheeze then: blood in the nostril, the air pushing out. If Frank has seen what he’s done, if he regrets the blow at all, the blood, the impulsive action, it hardly matters now. There’s no stopping the evening.