Being asleep when the engines stilled and the unloading began meant waking to a garden already coming into bloom, a busy hive of chaos and choices. She hated to see the fields empty, knowing they would only be full—only be fully alive—for such a little time before the carnival moved on again, and the silences returned.
“I know, baby.” Her mother reached for a cloth, wiped the tattoo, and went back to work. The carnie stretched out on her table didn’t make a sound. “Run along, now. I have a list to get through before we open.”
Technically, tattoos could be done anywhere with light and power, and Daisy had done her share of work in roadside motels or while parked at rest stops. But there was something about the carnival air that the carnies swore sped their healing, and there was no advertisement like someone walking around with a smug smile and a bandage on back or bicep. Daisy only tattooed her employees on arrival day: after that, it would be townies until they rolled out again, and that made time on her table rare and precious.
Aracely nodded. “All right, Mama. I love you.”
“Love you, too, flower,” said Daisy, and then her tall, dream-dazed daughter was gone, leaving her alone with the buzz of the needle and the man on her table, who might as well have been a corpse for all the word he offered.
“You dead there, Charlie? Because I’m not wasting any more of this ink on a dead man.”
“Just thinking, Daisy.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Aracely.”
Most men with the show, they’d said that, they would have had concern for their anatomy immediately after. Aracely was seventeen, sweet and kind and lovely as a summer morning, and her mother protected her like she was the last rose in the world. Daisy had her reasons. No one questioned that. She looked down at Charlie, thoughtful, needle in her hand shaking and ready to sting.
“What about her, Charlie?”
“She doesn’t know much outside the show, does she?”
Daisy shook her head, aware he couldn’t see her, unable to put her answer, vast and awkward as it was, into words. Born in the back of the boneyard, that was Aracely, her first breath full of popcorn and sawdust and the tinkling song of the calliope. Raised where walls were either tin or canvas, where everything could change in an afternoon—that was Aracely too, daughter of the midway, anchored to the open road. Her life was an eternal summer, bracketed by deep-dreaming winters that passed without comment, leaving her exactly as she’d been before the snow fell.
“Her daddy’s people were town,” she said finally. “We don’t go there anymore. No point to it. He didn’t want to know her when she was just getting started, he doesn’t get to know her now.”
“How’s she going to take it when she has to leave?”
Daisy sucked in a sharp breath, putting the needle down before she could do something they’d both regret. Her art was more important than her anger. A flare of temper could last a moment, but a line malformed by a hand that pressed down a bit too hard, a needle wielded in anger . . .
Those were things that would last, and they would shame her. More than anything else, Daisy was a woman who hated to be shamed.
“She never has to leave, Charlie, so you set that thought out of your head,” said Daisy, picking her needle up again. “There’s nothing in the world outside that she can’t find right here.”
Charlie, if he thought otherwise, was clever enough to keep his own counsel. The needle flashed and buzzed, and nothing more was said, and too much went unspoken.
* * *
Aracely walked the midway as it came alive, a smile on her lips and a song trapped against her tongue, filling her with the heat of its hum. She walked the whole shape of the show, learning every inch of the land, every step of what was going to become her home, transformed by the sweet alchemy of light and sound and intention into something bright, and beautiful, and temporary.
Always temporary.
She stopped at the edge of the space portioned off for their use, melancholy washing over her like a wave, so that she had to press a hand against her chest to keep her heart from beating itself free and flying away. It wasn’t fair. Everyone else had a home that was allowed to endure more than the span of a season, but her home, her place had to disappear every time the wind changed.
Was it so wrong to wish for something that could last?
A piece of unsecured rope fluttered in the breeze. She glanced toward it and went still, gazing at the distant shape of a farmhouse. No: it wasn’t a farmhouse. She’d seen plenty of those, scattered across America’s heartland like a gambler’s dice across a felted table. They possessed a certain similarity of form and function, all drawn from the same blueprints, all with their own detail and design. Farmhouses were like people. You knew them when you saw them, and every one of them was different, and every one of them was the same.
This was a mansion. This was the kind of house where movie stars lived, the kind of house that got written up in the magazines that Adam who ran the hoochie-koo show liked to read, the ones he always hid when he saw her coming. Aracely didn’t understand why: there was nothing shameful in pictures of nice houses, or interviews with the nice people who lived in them. But Adam acted like he couldn’t think of anything worse, like she had no idea there was a world outside the carnival, and so Aracely went along with it. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.
She went along with a lot of things for the sake of not making anyone else uncomfortable. She thought, sometimes, that she was uncomfortable, and then realized if she started dwelling on that, she would never do anything ever again, because the impossibility of living her life without doing harm would be too much for her narrow shoulders to carry.
This house didn’t look like it worried about doing harm. This house didn’t look like it worried about much of anything. It was tall, and every line it had was perfectly straight, except where the architect’s hand had decided it should be bent, had coaxed an angle into an arch or a corner into a curve. It was white as bone, and it was beautiful, and Aracely couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than seeing it up close.
She started to step across the line the roustabouts had chalked on the ground and stopped, overcome with indecision. She wasn’t allowed to leave the carnival. That was her mother’s first and strictest rule. She could murder a man out of boredom, she could lie and cheat and steal and howl down the heavens if that was what she needed to do, but she couldn’t leave the show. She had never left the show, not really; had been packed away with all its other pieces ever since she could remember, always traveling within the tenuous shell of “carnival.” She’d talked to townie kids who said they envied her freedom to travel the country and see the world, not confined in classrooms and expectations, but she thought maybe freedom was one of those things that looked different depending on which side of the cage door you were standing on.
Almost without thinking about it, she lifted a foot, set it down, and was standing suddenly outside the chalk, outside the carnival, outside the shell of everything she’d ever known. Aracely gasped. The wind took the sound and made it disappear.
She took another step. Then she took another step, and another after that, and she was suddenly running across the open field, that thieving wind blowing through her hair, urging her onward. The delicate spring grass bent and broke under her feet, filling the air with the smell of green, growing things, of life beginning and ending in the same careless, carefree step. She didn’t stop. She didn’t slow. She was running—for the first time in her life she was running—through a world that didn’t know her mother’s name, that didn’t know she was the flower of the midway, too precious to pluck, too delicate to—