The View from the Top (19 page)

She imagined what it must've been like for that kid to fall that far. Had he died in midair? Or when he'd hit the ground? Or had he hit something else along the way, like another basket or the fence around the ride?

Anabelle clenched her stomach as she pictured the fence impaling her in the gut.

She swiveled back around and put up her blinders, breathing heavily.

“Annie, sit tight,” her dad said, rubbing her shoulder. Then he leaned over his side of the basket and waved his arms back and forth over his head, as if he were stuck on a desert island and saw a plane passing by. “Hey, Mack!” he shouted. “Yeah, that's right! Up here!”

The couple in the basket in front of them turned and gave her dad funny looks. She hoped Tobin wasn't looking, too.

Anabelle kicked his leg. “Stop it, Dad,” she said between clenched teeth.

But he was only just getting started. “What seems to be the trouble, Mack?” he shouted.

“No, Dad.” Anabelle tugged on his arm. “Please don't.” She was already stressed out enough, without him making a spectacle.

“We need your patience, sir!” the ride operator called from below. “Mechanic's working on it!”

“I've got a daughter here!” her dad persisted. “Can't deal with heights!”

“Dad!” she said. “It's not a problem anymore—I'm over it!”

“Then why'd you bring her up there?” the operator called back.

Jeez,
Anabelle thought.
That guy must think I'm a little girl—like I didn't make the decision to go on this ride by myself.

“Could you bring a ladder or something?” her dad asked.

“Or call the fire department?”

“DAD!” Anabelle shouted, hardly caring anymore if anyone heard her; she just wanted to shut him up. There was no way Tobin wasn't catching all of this.

“Sir!” the guy shouted, sounding supremely irritated.

“We'll have this fixed before we can get a ladder!”

“Fire department's always quick!”

“Dad, would you just shut up already? Please?” Anabelle turned around to steal a glance at Tobin. She placed one hand under her eyes, to help her see only him and not the ground below.

To her horror, he was staring straight at her. Well, no, actually, not straight at
her
. Really, straight at her
dad.

But the look on his face wasn't the weirded-out expression she'd expected. There was a kind of yearning in his eyes—the way Anabelle imagined she looked when she saw a couple kissing who were obviously one hundred percent into each other. That allure of something you want but have never had before. She wondered why he could possibly be looking at her dad that way. What did it mean?

Anabelle must've been staring too long because Tobin caught her watching him. He smiled dimly and waved.

She waved back. Cool, maybe he didn't
totally
hate her guts. She remembered a night, way back in the winter, when Tobin had driven up behind her and honked out the rhythm to the first lyrics in
Cabaret—Wilkommen, bienvenue
—and Anabelle had answered with the rhythm of the next word—
Welcome
—as if they were communicating in their own secret version of Morse code. It had made her feel special and completely in tune with Tobin and she wanted to feel that way again now. Maybe whistle a phrase from something and have him whistle the next part back to her. But just as she pursed her lips, a helium balloon came floating past her head and she looked down to see where it had come from. It turned out there was a guy holding a whole colorful bunch just outside the Ferris-wheel fence, watching the balloon rise. She suddenly became nauseated again, seeing how much smaller the balloons down there were than the one up near her, and she turned back around.

“Annie,” her dad said, “I don't see why you're so upset with me. There's no harm in asking for help.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Anabelle said, facing him. She had only one blinder up, so she could talk to him easily but still keep herself from looking down. “I just wish you could keep this between you and me. I mean, they'll fix it as soon as they can. And all you're doing is embarrassing me.”

“Well, Annie. I'm sorry. Sorry I'm so
embarrassing
to you. But you know what? Soon you won't have to deal with this. With me and my big mouth. So maybe you can find a way of humoring me. Just for tonight.” Spittle flew from his mouth and a few specks landed on Anabelle's face.

She rubbed them off with an exaggerated wipe. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Do what you have to do. Call the fire department if you have to. Why not the
SWAT team
?” She regretted it as soon as she'd said it. She didn't even know what the SWAT team was, or if they had one in Normal—or even a hundred miles from Normal.

She pictured that intense expression on Tobin's face when he'd been watching her dad. Maybe he hadn't been thinking about her dad at all. Maybe he'd met a girl this summer. A tourist girl like Mary-Tyler, and she'd gone back home and he was missing her terribly. Yeah, maybe that was it.

Through the seat, Anabelle could feel her dad's gangly legs kicking back and forth. Her own legs were tucked in, and the vibrations made her stomach feel like a washing machine on high gear. She closed her eyes and listened to people from other baskets calling to the ride operator, demanding to know what was going on. Their calling just kept reminding her that they were stuck, and her urge to jump returned. Again, she imagined what the fall would feel like. Liberating, probably, at first. Like flying. But she imagined that her face would hit the ground before she could really get the hang of free-falling, and it was the thought of the impact, the sound of her neck snapping, that made her squirm the most. Each time she thought of that, she'd say, No, just loud enough for herself to hear. A couple of times she even imagined her funeral. She wondered who, if anyone, from school would show up. Would Matt, Lexi, or Jonah? Would Tobin?

Then her dad interrupted her thoughts—hit pause right in the middle of her instant replay. “What do you think of the dark?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what do I think?” Anabelle kept her eyes closed. “You mean, like, am I scared of it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Are you?”

“No, it's nice. Cozy. Time to go to sleep.” Anabelle pictured her bed and wished she was lying in it right now. “Why?” she asked. “What do you think of it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just wondering.”

Anabelle opened her eyes and looked at her dad, once again covering the sides of her face. “You don't ask a question like that because you're just wondering.”

“Just rolling things over in my head.” His Adam's apple bobbed.

“Because . . .” Anabelle widened her eyes.

He batted at the air. “You don't want to know.”

“That's why I keep asking,” Anabelle said. “Because I don't want to know.”

Her dad picked up the pace on his leg swinging. “Fine, but I've never told anyone this,” he said sternly, his heels banging into the metal footrest. “Not even your mother.”

“Oh. Are you sure you really want to tell me, then?” Anabelle asked. “Maybe I
don't
want to know.” What could it be? Was he slipping out to have affairs in the middle of the night? Did he witness a murder? Have to kill someone out of self-defense?

“No, it's okay,” he said. “But you have to promise not to laugh.”

“Mmmm ... I don't know if I can keep a promise like that,” Anabelle said, teasingly.
Not laugh? There must be something funny about it, then
, she thought, slightly relieved.

“Well, try your best. Okay?”

“Okay. I promise to try my best.” Anabelle already felt a giggle tickling the back of her throat. He sounded like a petulant little kid.

“All right,” he said, taking a deep breath and lowering his voice. “So I was thinking about us being up here, you know? And wondering if I have anything like your thing with heights.”

“Yeah?”

“And that's it,” he said, hand extended into the sky. “The dark.”

“The dark? What do you mean? What's wrong with the dark? Is it the bogeyman or something? Doesn't Mom protect you from him?” Anabelle cupped her hands over her mouth to keep from breaking her promise, then put them up against her face, blocking out the ground below.

“Yeah, yeah.” He laughed a little. With no ape this time.

“Not exactly the bogeyman. Just my own demons.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. Demons? She'd never heard him talk about demons. She still wasn't sure if he was messing with her, just trying to distract her from the fact that they were stuck.

There were two deep creases between his eyebrows. He didn't get those when he was joking around. “When I was in the orphanage,” he said. “You know, when I was a kid?”

“Sure.” She'd heard about the orphanage here and there, but her dad never talked about it much. All she knew was, her dad's dad—
her
grandfather, though she'd never met him—had left early on, and her grandmother didn't have enough money to take care of a kid by herself, so she'd put him in the orphanage from the time he was two until he was six, when she'd remarried.

“Well, my mom would come visit once in a while,” her dad continued. “She'd spend the day. Or maybe not even the day. Maybe just dinner.” His legs slowed down a bit. “And then, at the end of the day, well, she'd leave. And I'd go to bed and they'd turn the lights out. And I'd cry and cry and cry. Because I wanted her back. And I knew she wasn't coming back.” He took off his glasses and held one of the arms between his teeth while he rubbed his face. “And the darkness was just the worst. It was like there was no ceiling, no walls, no other kids. Just me and the dark.”

“Wow.” Suddenly the sky seemed infinite. Like the rising moon was within reaching distance but the universe around it was a never-ending hole. A hole you could fall down forever and ever.

“Wow what?”

“You think of that
every
time it's dark?”

“Just about. It's always in the back of my head, at least.”

“Jeez.” Anabelle waited for her dad to burst into tears. This was exactly the kind of story that would normally set him off. But his eyes remained dry. Which for some reason made Anabelle feel as though she had to cry. A few tears snuck out of her eyes, and she wiped them away quickly with the blinder on her dad's side, hoping he wouldn't notice.

He wasn't even facing her, anyway. Just kicking his feet rhythmically and staring blankly into space. She followed his gaze to the Big Dipper. Normally, he would've pointed it out to her, and how it led to the North Star, “the Earth's built-in compass,” as he liked to say. She still sometimes heard him telling her sisters about how constellations were big connect-the-dot games in the sky.

“And She Was” had just started playing—another one of Anabelle's favorite Talking Heads songs. She let her legs hang loosely out of the basket, into the open air. And just as the ride finally gave a big jolting
creak,
she started swinging her legs with the music—in time with her dad's—and they kept it up the rest of the way around.

The ground felt pleasantly still and solid when Anabelle stepped off the Ferris wheel.

“How 'bout some Bop-a-Mole?” her dad said, throwing his lanky arms in the air as he headed toward the exit.

“Yeah, sure,” Anabelle said, lagging behind him. She wished he hadn't switched back to being his loud self so quickly.

“I'll tell you what,” he shouted without turning around,

“if I win, I'll give you the prize. You can take it with you to your dorm room. Be the envy of all your new friends!” He gave an apelike laugh, and Anabelle cringed, picturing all the brightly colored prize animals she used to keep at the foot of her bed. She didn't think that would fly in the dorm.

Anabelle stopped when she got to the exit. She was hoping Tobin would catch up with her. She wasn't sure what she'd say, but she felt she couldn't leave town without having one last conversation with him. She needed to apologize for how things had gone down that night on the trampoline, to find out what he'd even been thinking when he came on to her. Was it premeditated? Or just a spur-of-the-moment attempt? The first step would be getting him someplace where they could talk alone.

She turned around to check if he was nearby, but he was nowhere in sight.
How could he have snuck out ahead of me without my noticing
? she wondered. And then she saw: he was still in his basket, talking to the ride operator. She was squinting into the flashing lightbulbs, trying to figure out what was going on, when she heard her name being called. In Tobin's voice.