Missing Pieces

by Carly Anne West

  I peek around the corner to make sure my parents are still busy talking to the donors before slipping downstairs. The science library didn’t have much in the way of city records, but I’m hopeful the main library will offer more. With my parents distracted, maybe I’ll actually have a chance to read a full article this time.

  The stacks are piled with newspapers dating back twenty years, when the Raven Brooks Banner was simply the Bulletin. I learn that Mrs. Bevel, who owns the creepy doll shop, actually has a degree in doll making. (I also learn that doll making is a college degree.) I discover that my street was one of the first streets developed in Raven Brooks, and that our very own not-our-own turquoise house was previously home to a Hollywood stuntwoman. Mrs. Tillman once had to recall a batch of the Surviva cocoa bars that give Aaron and me the farts because the manufacturer found a dead gopher in the chocolate vat. The former mayor of Raven Brooks was impeached for lying about his legislative experience. The llama farm indeed used to have goats.

  Overall, I learn that Raven Brooks has always been as boringly strange as it is today.

  By the time the Bulletin had become the Raven Brooks Banner, the news seems to have slowed. Store openings and closings and local weather mainly dominated the headlines. That is, until the Golden Apple factory arrived. Suddenly, Raven Brooks was booming with activity, and the outskirts of town transformed from farmland to houses to serve the needs of the factory workers and their families. And the town grew even more with the explosion in popularity of the Golden Apples, which at first was only a local candy.

  “Who would have guessed a local favorite would become a national obsession?” raved one executive of the Golden Apple Corporation in a story dated five years ago.

  “I like the chocolate ones best,” declared a kid from the same article, pictured with his mouth ringed in said chocolate.

  Pretty soon, the factory grew to a storefront, and they began giving tours. Interactive exhibits became lures for out-of-towners, and a new hotel sprung up on Market Street. Then the announcement came—the Golden Apple Corporation would be building a multimillion-dollar theme park right here in Raven Brooks, where it all began.

  Every week, at least one story above the fold boasted the progress of the park’s construction. I keep reading in morbid fascination. I can’t help myself. It’s like when magazines publish pictures of Pompeii, with their homes and markets frozen in time, unaware that life would come to a sudden stop.

  I thumb through page after page of pictures featuring different parts of the park. It’s like there was no other news in town for two years.

  I flip the page of one newspaper dated September 14, 1991, which features a crew unwrapping a shiny new carousel, its glitter and bright blues and reds stark against the dirt ground and surrounding trees they hadn’t yet cleared.

  I set the paper aside and pick up another from the following week. Predictably, there’s another Golden Apple Amusement Park story, this one featuring the half-constructed front entrance. There are at least a dozen workers in their safety vests hauling a sign into place. The next week’s paper captures a cement mixer pouring concrete, and this time, several small kids gather around the scene, oversized hard hats obscuring all their faces. The next week’s article pictures the unraveling of a tarp decorated with shiny gold apples and men and women in suits smiling down at the design.

  Finally, I come to the week of August 7, 1992, the headline reading in all capital letters GOLDEN APPLE AMUSEMENT PARK SET TO OPEN. A massive crowd of businesspeople in suits and construction workers in coveralls and photographers in vests and local proprietors in red-and-gold polo shirts lines the entrance of the park four rows deep. Each one holds in their extended hand a palm-sized golden apple. Each one smiles brightly, the possibility of the park’s success alive in their imaginations. Only one person doesn’t hold an apple. Instead, he holds an almost comically large pair of golden scissors over a red ribbon. He wears a black suit with a red-and-gold tie, but I recognize him even out of his argyle sweater.

  Mr. Peterson.

  It’s the caption of the picture, though, that forms a hard pit in my stomach.

  Park designed by local engineer Theodore Masters Peterson.

  I read it five more times to be sure, but even without the caption, there’s no mistaking the mustached face of Aaron’s dad.

  The following week’s paper is almost entirely dedicated to the glory of Golden Apple Amusement Park. The front-page lead story tells of opening-day successes, punctuated by a collage of smiling parents and ecstatic kids, balloons in hand and cotton candy webbed between their fingers.

  Above the fold is a dapper-looking headshot of Mr. Peterson, his carnival mustache twirled at the ends in perfect theme-park-designer character.

  Mr. Peterson was—is—a sort of genius. A physics whiz, he engineered some of the world’s most innovative attractions, bringing new technology and gimmicks to nearly every new park he’s designed. There was the vacuum-powered food delivery system at the Alberta Avalanche Park.

  “It flies through a tube, just like the tellers use at a bank!” one patron marveled.

  There were the robotic vendors at Tokyo’s Cherry Blossom Grove.

  “I didn’t have to wait in line for hours just to buy a key chain!” said another parkgoer.

  And as his reputation as an engineer grew, so did his ambitions for his parks. Only instead of looking for business innovations, it seems like Mr. Peterson became more interested in the rides themselves.

  At Berlin’s Spannend Spaβ Park, he was the first engineer to create a perpetual-motion boomerang ride. Ride operators admitted it could only be stopped by a kill switch on a hidden console.

  “I thought I was gonna barf,” remarked one rider, whose laughing face betrayed a hint of panic in his picture.

  And then there was the Golden Apple Amusement Park, his crowning achievement as an engineer of the world’s most exciting attractions.

  One could only imagine it had to be spectacular.

  The profile reads: With the park’s unprecedented opening-day crowds, we’re left wondering what Mr. Peterson has up his sleeve for the big surprise we’ve come to expect from his parks.

  “You’ll just have to wait and see next week,” Mr. Peterson is quoted as saying. “I’ll give you a hint, though. Have you noticed there’s no roller coaster in this park?”

  The article ends with a reference to the off-limits end of the park, a tarp several stories high, and a showstopping ride that was sure to put Raven Brooks on the map.

  I’m not sure if I set the article down so much as push it away under the shelf, appalled at its ignorance of what’s to come. I want to scream at the reporter, the smiling patrons in the pictures, and the gleeful, reckless Mr. Peterson, who set such an unimaginable tragedy in motion.

  “There you are. Jay, I found him!”

  Mom thunders down the stairs looking mostly mad but a little relieved.

  I act without thinking, ripping the first few articles from each of the following weeks’ newspapers and shoving them into my pocket before tossing the papers to the side.

  “You made me sweat all over my favorite dress,” she says as she sits down next to the pile of papers I’ve amassed.

  “I got bored,” I say as an apology, and the cool thing about Mom is that’s all she needs.

  “What’s all this?” she says, sliding the papers around a little.

  “I don’t know,” I say, which is maybe the most honest thing I’ve said to my mom in weeks.

  She lifts a few of the pictures to the light, and her mouth becomes a thin line. Then, without saying all the obvious stuff about how sad it is to see what everyone thought the park was going to be, she looks at me and says, “I think this move has been the hardest one yet.”

  There, in the dim light of the library basement in her purple dress, with its little dark rings forming in the armpits, Mom becomes my new favorite person. It’s the first time she’s ever said what I’ve never figured ou
t how to say—that after a while, calling so many places “home” just dilutes the word. And she doesn’t like it, either.

  Dad descends the stairs just as Mom and I are coming back up.

  “Hey, Narf,” he says, an apology on his face even though he wasn’t there for what Mom said. Sometimes, Dad just knows. “I smuggled out some cheesecake for you.”

  I eat dessert in the car while Mom and Dad rehash the night and laugh about the boring people. I stare out the window at the weird little town of Raven Brooks and realize that its definition of “home” probably changed that awful day at the park a week after it opened. I wonder how many people still feel like they did twenty years ago, or thirty or fifty. Before the day Lucy Yi died.

  I wonder how much Aaron thinks his dad is to blame for that.

  When I get home, I practically tear off my suit and get into my pajamas, but sleep won’t come easily; I have more reading to do.

  I pull the crumpled articles from my suit pocket and smooth them across the floorboards of my bedroom.

  The first article appears in an issue published a week after the tragedy. It’s Mr. Peterson, but his perfectly waxed mustache is less spritely, more … pointy. And the picture isn’t the only thing unflattering about the new profile in the Raven Brooks Banner.

  What began as a prayer vigil for young Lucy Yi—the seven-year-old victim of Golden Apple Amusement Park’s daredevil roller coaster Rotten Core—ended in a fire that devastated the already infamous attraction. Now investigators are demanding to know why the dangerous roller coaster was allowed to operate before passing certain critical inspections, and angry investors have uncovered troubling details about the man responsible for the park’s design.

  A knock at my door startles me from the story, and I slide the paper under my bed just in time for Dad to pop his head in to say good night.

  “How ’bout that cheesecake, huh?” he says, wiggling his eyebrows.

  “It was pretty epic,” I say, trying to recall even tasting it.

  “Find anything interesting in the library?”

  Yes.

  “No,” I say, shrugging.

  “Want me to leave you alone?” he says, a hint of a smile creeping through.

  “Kinda.”

  “Wish I’d just go to bed?” he says, determined to make me crack.

  “Well …”

  “Trying to figure out how to tell me nicely to buzz off?”

  “Dad!”

  He won. He broke me. He laughs.

  “G’night, Narf.”

  I wait until I hear my parents’ bedroom door close before retrieving the article from under my bed.

  A resurfaced investigation has raised concerns over the reputation of the world-renowned engineer after reporters unearthed details of a 1987 accident in one of the designer’s parks in Melbourne, Australia. What was first thought to be an electrical fire due to faulty wiring in Wallaby Wonderland’s Tasmanian Tunnels was later determined to be an accident caused by a critical flaw in the attraction’s breaking fail-safe. The accident occurred when an empty car jumped the track, sparking a fire that ignited an exposed patch of insulation, killing four teens, ages thirteen to seventeen.

  While investors were found legally responsible, that finding remains disputed as several questions remain about the safety inspections the park failed to undergo prior to its opening.

  Said one inspector, “As far as I can tell, no one from my team checked that ride. Not a chance anyone would have given it passing marks without an emergency brake.”

  The inspector joins a small chorus of objectors—some of them investors accused of trying to deflect blame. But one investor lodged an especially disturbing claim against T. M. Peterson, the park’s engineer and mastermind:

  “He told me about the mechanics once, about his frustration with its limitation. He said safety features tamped the excitement down. He said emergency brakes put a drag on the speed. The man specifically mentioned emergency brakes!”

  But with little evidence and a tragedy half a world away, the Raven Brooks engineer continued his work, bringing what many believe are increasingly unsafe and possibly illegal practices to his park designs—designs that may just be to blame for Lucy Yi’s death.

  The other front page I borrowed from the library’s archives—the issue from two weeks after the accident—avoids the name T. M. Peterson altogether. Instead, it features a window into the life of Lucy Yi, about how she loved her hamster Gerard and played the violin and wanted to be an inventor like Leonardo da Vinci when she grew up.

  The picture at the bottom of the article shows Lucy, her fringe of bangs doing little to hide the exuberance in her smile. She’s cheek-to-cheek with two other smiling girls, their arms interlocked like sisters, and with a start, I realize that I recognize the face mashed against Lucy’s on one side.

  It’s Mya Peterson.

  And like sisters, all three girls in the picture have matching bracelets with little gold charms in the shape of an apple. The picture is captioned: Mya, Lucy, and Maritza, members of the Golden Apple Young Inventors Club.

  I pull the bracelet that I found beneath the trellis from my desk drawer and hold it up to one of the bracelets pictured on the girls’ wrists. It’s a perfect match.

  I throw a pair of pajamas into my backpack and forgo my toothbrush to make space for the audio manipulator. It’s built, and all we need now is to add the prerecorded audio. I survey my bag’s contents and decide that pretty much covers all I’ll need.

  Downstairs, as I slip on my shoes, Dad and Mom watch me a little too closely.

  “Excited for your big sleepover?” Dad asks.

  “Dad,” I say, wincing.

  “Sorry, your super grown-up, totally not-a-big-deal hangout where you might wear pajamas and might not sleep.”

  “That’s not better,” I say.

  “Just remember to brush your teeth,” Mom says, and I swear to the Aliens she can see straight through my backpack to my missing toothbrush.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And say thank you,” she says. She’s still irked that the Petersons haven’t bothered to come by, but to her, “please” and “thank you” are holy words.

  “I will,” I say.

  “And solve the mysteries of the universe,” Dad says, and Mom gives him a look.

  “What?”

  “Are you implying that manners and hygiene are impossible requests of our son?”

  “Lu, he’s twelve. He’s barely human at this age.”

  I decide to end things before they get ugly. “I’ll say thank you,” I tell my mom, and she smiles like she’s won. “And I’ll ponder the meaning of life,” I tell Dad, and he gives me a dorky thumbs-up.

  As I cross the street, I do ponder, but not about life’s meaning. I wonder how in the world I’m going to ask Aaron about everything I read in the old newspapers about Golden Apple Amusement Park, about his dad and Mya. Because there’s not even a sliver of a chance that I’ll be able to stop myself from asking.

  * * *

  Mrs. Peterson glides into the room like she’s on wheels. I don’t even hear her until she’s right behind me, a pile of sheets stacked on top of a pillow cradled in her arms. I don’t mean to jump; it’s just that she surprised me.

  “Wow. I know I forgot to put on lipstick today, but exactly how frightening do I look?”

  “No, you don’t at all. I mean, I just—”

  “Nicky, I’m kidding, honey. I have a light step.”

  “Mom’s a teacher, but she danced ballet when she was in college,” Mya says as she plunks down on Aaron’s bottom bunk. “She even danced at one of Dad’s park openings.”

  “No one invited you, Pariah,” Aaron says, nudging Mya off his bed.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Peterson,” I say, taking the linens from her.

  “Hmmm?” she says, her eyes glazed over like she’s distracted. “Oh, you can call me Diane, honey,” she says, focusing on me long enough to lightly tousle my hair.
>
  “I said stop calling me that,” Mya says, shoving Aaron’s leg when he pokes her with his toe. “Ow! Your toenails are like knives!”

  “Mya Pariah eats farts and papaya,” Aaron sings, still poking her.

  “Mom!”

  Mrs. Peterson—Diane—spreads the sheets across the bottom bunk of Aaron’s bed.

  “Stop calling your sister a pariah,” she says, clearly lost in more pleasant thoughts. She’s humming quietly to herself, somehow blocking out the escalating brawl between Aaron and his sister.

  “So if you eat farts, does that mean you burp farts, too? Is that why you always smell so bad?”

  Mya flushes pink and glances at me.

  “I do not smell bad! Mom!”

  But Diane is already on her way out the door. She’s moving slowly, though, almost like she’s forgotten where the door is. All at once, Aaron and Mya stop arguing, and a sudden silence blankets the room. In that quiet, I can hear the faint song Mrs. Peterson has been humming to herself. Only now, she’s practically whispering it, like she’s afraid to scare away the memory attached to the tune.

  Mya follows her, still glowing crimson, but she lands a final solid punch on Aaron’s bicep on her way out. I watch her leave. Ever since I saw the photo of her, Lucy, and that other girl wearing the golden apple bracelet in the newspaper article, I’ve been trying to understand what it would mean that the bracelet would find its way into my front yard. I still don’t know, but I have a feeling Mya does, which means I’ll probably never figure it out. Mya’s even less of a sharer than Aaron, if that’s possible.

  As soon as Mya reaches the stairs at the end of the hall, Aaron closes the bedroom door and waves me to his desk.

  He pulls a drawer open, and rather than take anything out of it, he reaches his hand all the way inside until he’s shoulder-deep and still reaching. I look at his desk, and it doesn’t take me long to determine that what I’m seeing is impossible. Flush against the wall, his desk can’t stick out more than a foot and a half.