Free Nightingale by Susan May Warren Page B

and bread.
    She ran down the deserted midway. The carnys had packed up, taking their stuffed animals, their giant lollipops, their beads and necklaces, posters of Greta Garbo. The silence seemed eerie without the music of the carousel, laughter from the haunted house, the roar from the auto races.
    The Ferris wheel’s melody lured her, but she cut past the “guess your weight” stand and left the midway, jogging now through the entrance to the camp.
    Empty.
    Where once stood a sea of canvas tents and flatbed trucks, now a field, churned to near mud, nothing but the forgotten remained—an old shoe, a roll of brown toilet paper, an empty laundry line—
    â€œMama? Hedy?”
    Daddy?
    She stood in the field, the sky again spitting upon her, and trembled.
    Why would they leave her?
    The Ferris wheel music whined behind her. Perhaps she’d climb aboard, let it take her high—Hedy told her she could see clear through to Chicago from the top. She’d find her family, call to them…
    The Ferris wheel whined in an endless, migrating circle, slow enough for her to dash up the ramp, climb aboard one of the dangling buggy seats.
    No one stepped from the booth to collect a ticket, to stop her.
    She sat in a puddle, the water saturating her jeans. It took her backwards, the world dropping away until she began to crest the top.
    Her breath caught in her chest and she tightened her hold around the slick, cold security bar. She could see—maybe to Chicago, yes. Therows of dilapidated carny stands, the muddy rivers of pathways to the pavilion, the horticulture and dairy buildings, the curved roof of the swine barn. The grassy park of the entertainment pavilion, now a yawning, dark mouth, lay like a glistening carpet in the center of the destruction. Beyond that, the tall fair entrance gates, and in the far-off distance, the shiny dome of the Iowa capitol building, like a castle among the trees.
    For a moment, she hung at the top of the world.
    Then she descended, the world shrinking, back to the mud of the midway, the whine of the machinery, the dark cables snaking through matted grass. Water dropped from the gears and trickled down the back of her jacket. She shivered, and in a moment, the platform passed beside her. She made to move, to get off, but it slipped away too quickly.
    She held on as the wheel slid her up towards the sky again. This time, she searched for Daddy’s Ford pickup, blood red. Maybe Hedy sitting on the back in her white dress, printed with the big orange flowers, holding a new hat to her head.
    At the top, the vast estate of the fairgrounds again scooped her out. And right behind it…
    Not a soul remained.
    Nothing but the melancholy drizzle, an occasional feral cat, the rank remains of too many animals confined in one space.
    â€œMama?” She didn’t exactly shout it, but to fall back to the ground without so much as a cry seemed derelict. “Hedy?”
    The platform again slid by, and she watched it drop away from her, take her stomach with it.
    She closed her eyes as the wheel cranked her up again to the sky, bit her lip as it lurched her forward to plunge again to the earth. Gatheringher breath, she inched toward the edge of the buggy, put her foot out to leap to the platform. But it moved out from her foot, and she yanked herself back, her breath hiccupping out, her fists squeezing the bar.
    She heard the sob, choked it back, refusing to let it take hold, but by the time she reached the pinnacle, her body began to rack with them. She closed her eyes, letting her tears mix with the rain, her body shivering, surrendering to her cries, muffled as they were beneath the grinding of the Ferris wheel gears.
    â€œEsther!”
    Her eyes opened with the voice, and there, on the platform, her arms outstretched, Hedy stood, dress plastered to her curves, hair stringy against her face. “Grab my hand!”
    She reached and missed it, her heart in her throat as