Joyland

she told me the story “Like she was asking for help.”
    “You already know this stuff from Mrs. Shoplaw,” I said. “Isn’t that right? Tell us, we won’t be mad. Will we, Erin?”
    “No, uh-uh.”
    But Tom shook his head. “I’m just telling you what I saw. Neither of you saw her?”
    We had not, and said so.
    “Why me?” Tom asked plaintively. “Once we were inside, I wasn’t even thinking of her. I was just having fun. So why me?”

    Erin tried to get more details while I drove us back to Heaven’s Bay in my heap. Tom answered the first two or three of her questions, then said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore in an abrupt tone I’d never heard him use with Erin before. I don’t think she had, either, because she was quiet as a mouse for the rest of the ride. Maybe they talked about it some more between themselves, but I can tell you that he never spoke of it again to me until about a month before he died, and then only briefly. It was near the end of a phone conversation that had been painful because of his halting, nasal voice and the way he sometimes got confused.
    “At least . . . I know . . . there’s something, ” he said. “I saw . . . for myself . . . that summer. In the Hasty Hut.” I didn’t bother to correct him; I knew what he meant. “Do you . . . remember?”
    “I remember,” I said.
    “But I don’t know . . . the something . . . if it’s good . . . or bad.” His dying voice filled with horror. “The way she . . . Dev, the way she held out her hands . . .”
    Yes.
    The way she held out her hands.

    The next time I had a full day off, it was nearly the middle of August, and the tide of conies was ebbing. I no longer had to jink and juke my way up Joyland Avenue to the Carolina Spin . . . and to Madame Fortuna’s shy, which stood in its revolving shadow.
    Lane and Fortuna—she was all Fortuna today, in full gypsy kit—were talking together by the Spin’s control station. Lane saw me and tipped his derby widdershins, which was his way of acknowledging me.
    “Look what the cat drug in,” he said. “How ya be, Jonesy?”
    “Fine,” I said, although this wasn’t strictly true. The sleepless nights had come back now that I was only wearing the fur four or five times a day. I lay in my bed waiting for the small hours to get bigger, window open so I could hear the incoming surf, thinking about Wendy and her new boyfriend. Also thinking about the girl Tom had seen standing beside the tracks in Horror House, in the fake brick tunnel between the Dungeon and the Chamber of Torture.
    I turned to Fortuna. “Can I talk to you?”
    She didn’t ask why, just led me to her shy, swept aside the purple curtain that hung in the doorway, and ushered me in. There was a round table covered with a rose-pink cloth. On it was Fortuna’s crystal, now draped. Two simple folding chairs were positioned so that seer and supplicant faced each other over the crystal (which, I happened to know, was underlit by a small bulb Madame Fortuna could operate with her foot). On the back wall was a giant silk-screened hand, fingers spread and palm out. On it, neatly labeled, were the Seven: lifeline, heartline, headline, loveline (also known as the Girdle of Venus), sunline, fateline, healthline.
    Madame Fortuna gathered her skirts and seated herself. She motioned for me to do the same. She did not undrape her crystal, nor did she invite me to cross her palm with silver so that I might know the future.
    “Ask what you came to ask,” she said.
    “I want to know if the little girl was just an informed guess or if you really knew something. Saw something.”
    She looked at me, long and steadily. In Madame Fortuna’s place of business, there was a faint smell of incense instead of popcorn and fried dough. The walls were flimsy, but the music, the chatter of the conies, and the rumble of the rides all seemed very far away. I wanted to look down, but managed not to.
    “Actually, you want to know if I’m a fraud. Isn’t that so?”
    “I . . . ma’am, I honestly don’t know what I want.”
    At that she smiled. It was a good one—as if I had passed some sort of test. “You’re a sweet boy, Jonesy, but like so many sweet boys, you’re a punk liar.”
    I started to reply; she hushed me with a wave of her ring-heavy right hand. She reached beneath her table and brought out her cashbox. Madame Fortuna’s readings were free—all part of your admission fee, ladies and gentlemen, boys and