My son was picking at a blue puff of cotton candy when he first saw the lights of the Ferris-wheel blinking in the dusk
“That one,” Keegan said.
“What about the tea cups?” I asked.
He glanced at the cups rotating around a kettle. Empty seats. Circus music.
“Up there,” he said.
He took another bite and pointed to the Ferris-wheel. I soon learned my son didn’t inherit my fear of heights as we made our way to the line. Aside from his button-rounded nose and glasses and early obstinacy, he was all his mother, full of Livy’s chase for thrill and adventure. At six months, he had already begun to walk, and now, at four, his favorite thing was sitting on Mommy’s shoulders while she roller-skated around the block, yelling back, “It’s okay, Daddy. Stay there. We’ll be right back.”
In line, Keegan waved the cloudy candy to people getting off the ride, the pods shaped like old-fashioned carria
“Welcome back,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
The passengers—mostly older children and other parents—waved back and gave me their how-cute smiles. Quite the extrovert. Again, his mother, not me. We waited, the line so sluggish it barely moved, and I began searching for Livy in the nearby crowds, trying to keep my eyes and mind off the height of the wheel.
Our town ended summer with a weekend festival of food trucks, carnival games, and amusement rides, an annual tradition that started long before my own childhood. It was something I had always appreciated. My friends and I would ride our bikes here for the games and shows, and, as we got older, for the groups of girls we’d be too nervous to approach unless one of us knew for sure that so-and-so really, definitely, without doubt liked you. Sharing a ride with a girl on the rollercoaster or the Ferris-wheel meant serious, meant steady, but I never got on one. Their rattles and rumbles conjured up disaster accidents in my head. I imagined the Ferris-wheel somehow rolling away and crashing into the bleachers of the football stadium across the street, a terrible and terrific Hollywood explosion.
“Mommy’s a tiger!”
Livy appeared out from the crowd carrying a stuffed shark she had won at a ring toss game. She loved a good surprise. Tonight it was face-paint.
“Rawr!”
“Don’t eat Daddy!”
Keegan swung the cotton candy like a club and beat Livy away from me. She bit off a huge piece and shook her head like a dog and glanced at the Ferris-wheel. Years ago, we met at a vending machine in the lunch room at work. My bag of pretzels got stuck.
“Pretzels?” she had said. “Boring.”
She hugged the machine and rocked it, and I pictured it crushing her, blood on the floor.
“Isn’t that unsafe?”
“Got ‘em!” she said when the bag fell free. She pulled out the bag, handed it over. “Wanna Reese’s Cup? I only eat one of them.”
I sometimes leave tiny buttercups on her work desk.
“Going up?” she asked me now.
“I was saving the spot for you,” I said. “Let’s switch places, shall we?”
“No,” Keegan said. “Daddy has to. You have to.”
“I have to?”
“Yes.”
The line moved. We were near the front. Up close, looking all the way to the top, I thought the wheel seemed taller. Red and blue lights flash upon the great, high spokes. The pods rocked and creaked on every turn. A balding, bearded man checked seatbelts.
“You sure?” Livy said.
“He has to,” Keegan said.
I sucked in deep breaths, but my chest had tightened—a vise was clamping down on my lungs—and I didn’t realize how loud I was breathing until Livy touched my shoulder and said my name. A blue stain had smeared one corner of her lips.
“It’s okay,” Keegan said. ‘We’ll be right back.”
I was not the kind of dad to Keegan that my dad had been to me. My dad took me hunting until I shot my rifle on accident. Fortunately, Dad was standing on the other side, away from my gun. Before he died, he liked sledding with Keegan, and when he was younger, he snowboarded with Livy while I drank hot chocolate in a ski resort.
Keegan took my hand again and led me into our puke-green carriage. Rust covered the safety bar and the seat. Popcorn had fallen on the floor. My knee bobbed up and down so much it rattled the pod.
“Enjoy the ride,” the man said.
Soon we were rising, slowly, the wheel turning, and when we reached the top, I saw early stars in the bit of black sky. They were tiny and dull, like crumbs of popcorn. The school and the football field had darkened, and the stadium lights were silhouettes in the dimming sky.
Keegan positioned the cotton candy near his eye, held it like a telescope, a spyglass, as he looked at the few stars. My knee stopped jumping and the vise in my chest loosened its grip, and I felt I could inhale the sky and keep the stars in me before sending them back, one by one, into the night, a long release of air.
“What do you see?” I said, my voice very soft.
“Look,” he whispered.
I lowered my face beside him and felt his breath on my ear. Warm. Faint. He placed the white paper cone before my eye.
“Up there,” he said.
I pretended to peer through the cotton candy, one eye shut. The stars seemed closer and our pod had floated off the wheel like a balloon and we rose into the silence of the stars and the cool dark of the sky and the last night of summer.
END