Andrew

WE LEAVE DAPHNE WHERE SHE FELL, JUST for the night. We cover her with a blanket and spend the evening trying to console the kids. Most of them fall asleep pretty quickly once they get the tears out. But some—Taylor and the Kid especially—can’t sleep.

In the morning, Jamie wakes me up and right away I realize it’s not early. The kids are all awake and it looks like I’m the last one up.

“What time is it?” I ask, still feeling groggy. My eyes burn with exhaustion, and it’s started to rain harder.

“A little after ten.”

“Why did you let me sleep so late?”

“Because you needed to. What time did you even fall asleep?”

I have no idea, but it was probably very late. I get up and go check on Kelly. With Daphne gone, all these kids have lost another parental figure. Now it’s just the two of us on Team Orphan.

“We have to do something with her,” Kelly says, looking over my shoulder at the soaking-wet blanket lying over Daphne’s body. “The kids can’t keep looking over and seeing her.”

I nod. “I’ll ask the Nomads if they have a shovel. Maybe we can find a nice place nearby to bury her. Do you think the kids will like that? I mean, not like it. But I mean, do you think it will help?”

“I do. A lot of them didn’t get funerals when their parents died, and we never got to have one for Liz and the other kids, so it might be a way to get closure.”

True.

I go over to Niki because she’s the one we have the best relationship with. She shakes her head.

“I asked yesterday when I heard, but they only have garden spades for . . . you know.”

I nod. We have some, too. And I’m not about to bury Daphne with the shit trowel.

“I’m really sorry,” she says.

“Thanks.”

I start toward the camp but the heaviness presses down on my chest. It’s almost hard to breathe. Jamie must see it because he says something to Cara and jogs across the parking lot to me.

“You okay?”

I shake my head. Taylor is looking at me now. The Kid, too. And a few of the others. I fake a sad smile and try to hide behind Jamie’s torso.

“I need to go have a mental breakdown away from the kids.”

Jamie nods and looks out over the parking lot. Then he takes my good hand and squeezes it gently. “C’mon.”

I let him lead me away as silent tears stream down my face. He takes me around the side of the amusement park to the staff entrance.

“We need to get in there,” Jamie tells the three Nomads guarding it. “We’re trying to keep up a front around the kids, but he needs somewhere away from them to grieve for a bit.”

One of them, a woman with curly auburn hair and a freckled nose, nods and pushes open the door for us. “Go ahead. We’re sorry for your loss.” The lock has been broken and lies in pieces on the other side of the door.

As soon as it shuts behind us we take several long strides into the park. I turn abruptly and wrap my good arm around Jamie’s neck. He hugs me gently against him, careful about my injured arm. It hurts. Everything does. I bury my face against his chest and sob again.

“I know,” he says. It’s raining and we’re both soaked, but I don’t care. I just needed to break down. To let this all out without the kids seeing.

I know the Keys Committee put me with Daphne because she requested it after I got kicked off the boat. I also know she requested it because she saw me as one of those orphans, too. She pretended that I was the “helper” and, yes, I did help. But all along, she was watching after me, too.

And now she’s gone.

“Come on,” Jamie says when my cries start to slow. “Let’s get out of the rain.”

I let him lead me past silent, broken-down rides. A carousel, a drop tower, bumper cars, a two-story slide. He’s heading toward a covered concession area when I stop him.

To our right is a red, pink, and purple building. Above it, a dark sign lined with heart-shaped lights reads “Jingle Jaguar’s Tunnel of Love.” A cartoon jaguar wearing a raspberry beret winks suggestively at us from the corner of the sign.

Jamie smirks and shakes his head but lets me lead him to the ride entrance, a covered platform that shelters us from the rain. The ride track before us looks like it used to be filled with water. But there are only small puddles left beneath the red-and-pink heart-shaped boats. The track that steered the boats is rusted.

There’s a red plexiglass-covered control booth to our left. I push gently on the door, expecting it to be locked, but it swings open. I step inside and Jamie follows me. There are four dark monitors, no doubt used to make sure nothing untoward was happening in the tunnel of love—or maybe to watch the untowardness. The controls are simple start and stop buttons, clearly labeled and colored green and red.

I press the green button, but of course nothing happens.

Under the control panel is a first aid kit. I open it. It’s full and hasn’t been used.

“See?” I say. “My emotional breakdowns can be extremely useful to us.”

“Sure.”

I look for anything else that might help us out, but all that’s there is a giant Maglite flashlight. I pick it up and already know we aren’t bringing it with us. For one, it needs batteries, and who has the time to stop for those when we have the hand-crank flashlights? Also, it weighs about twenty pounds.

Still, I click the button and it turns on.

Oh, I have a terrible idea. I hand the flashlight to Jamie and take his other hand, pulling him back out onto the platform.

“Come on, love,” I say. “Jingle Jaguar built this tunnel just for us.”

Jamie pulls back on my hand gently. “I don’t like our history with tunnels.” But he’s talking about the Fort McHenry Tunnel outside Baltimore, which flooded and had cars full of dead bodies—very much not a tunnel of love.

“Then let’s change it. Come on, there’s no bodies in there. The amusement park was closed down just like all the movie theaters and sports arenas. And it’s not flooded because look.” I point to the evaporated troughs that acted as the river.

“What about animals that have made it a nest?”

“We’ll run from them. Please?”

Jamie frowns, but he hops down into the empty river between two of the boats, then turns and holds out his hands to help me. I crouch at the edge of the platform as he grabs my hips and effortlessly lifts me down without jostling my bad arm.

Then he lets me guide him around the boats toward the plywood entrance, which is heart-shaped and painted pink. The words Tunnel of Love were supposed to light up, but they’re dark now. Torn red metallic fringe hangs down from the top of the heart, but the elements have pulled most of the plastic strips down.

As we pass under, into the darkness, Jamie clicks on the flashlight.

The first room is a letdown. It’s just a white tunnel. I put my hand out to touch it and the wall gives. It’s fabric.

“There must have been a projection or something,” I say. “On the other side of the fabric.”

“If it’s all like this, it’s going to be a boring trip in the love tunnel.”

“Title of your sex tape.”

I turn to see if he’s blushing. He is. I give him a playful peck on the cheek and continue to the next room.

This one is much prettier. The sides of the tunnel are filled to the ceiling with brightly colored fake rosebushes. String lights loop across the curving roof above us. There’s another curtain of pink fringe ahead that we push through.

“Wow,” Jamie says, pointing his flashlight around the next set piece. It’s a long, straight tunnel that’s painted to look like the outside. In the ceiling and to our left are little lights in the shape of stars. To our right is a small-town street lined with a dock. Animatronic heterosexual couples sit on wooden benches—the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulder—or hold hands in the street or share a milkshake with two heart-shaped straws at the Fountain d’Amour ice cream shop. All the animatronics are dressed in ragtime-era clothes and the streetlights are shaped like hearts as well.

“And you were worried,” I say.

“I still am. These animatronics are creepy.” He shines the light on the guy in the background of the Fountain d’Amour shop. He’s smiling wide and holds an ice-cream cone while watching the couple in his storefront window share their milkshake. Jamie has a point—some of them are very creepy.

The next winding tunnel is a repeat of the rose room—this time with an emergency exit hidden at the end with a dark exit sign above it—and then we reach the biggest set piece. If my sense of direction is still good in the dark, we should be in the center of the ride.

It’s another place painted to look like the outside sky. The ceiling is pitch-black but I can see where they’ve attempted to put pin lights in the shape of some constellations. We’re in a garden filled with topiary hearts, dogs, and a unicorn. More fake rosebushes line the wall, breaking the horizon’s line of sight so it looks like the garden could go on forever.

In the center is a waterfall that’s gone dry. Next to that is a fake moss-covered island with stone pavers placed in the shape of a heart. At the top center of the heart is a large, fake willow tree. And if you look close enough, the leaves are all shaped like hearts, too. Smaller rosebushes dot the island.

“Is it weird that I love how tacky this is?” I ask.

“No, I think that’s about right for you.”

I laugh. But whatever happiness I feel is gone just as quickly as it came because I’m thinking of Daphne again. How she used to tell me some of the more sordid storylines she’d written in her romance novels. Before we left the Keys, I had been planning to ask her for a copy of her most Hallmark Channel Original Movie-ish book to give to Jamie for Christmas.

I don’t know why I thought going into a tunnel of love would give me time to not grieve her. In fact, she would have loved this place. The tackiness, yes, but also because of all the different ways she’d say she could use it in a book. Either in a near-drowning meet-cute or a big love confession climax. Then it clicks for me. How perfect this place is.

“Oh my God.”

“What’s wrong?” Jamie asks.

“I know what we can do. Come on.”

I pull him back to the second rose room, heading for the emergency exit.

An hour later, we’re back in the Tunnel of Love. Only now we have seventeen others with us. And Daphne.

Jamie, Rocky Horror, Cal, and another Nomad named Jim carry Daphne’s body—wrapped in a white blanket—onto the island next to the dried-up waterfall. Because of my arm, I can’t help, so I stay back with the Kid, who holds tightly to my good hand. They place her gently beneath the fake willow tree with heart-shaped leaves.

Taylor is crying and laying her head on Jamar’s shoulder. Behind him, Niki holds a candle in her hand. The adults hold the younger kids so they can watch—their flashlights pointing up at the ceiling to diffuse the light a bit more.

We decided that Amy would lead the ceremony since she knew Daphne the longest. She hands Henri-Two over to me and I tuck her against my right side, away from my injured arm. Jamie looks down at the Kid, then crouches and asks him something I can’t hear.

The Kid looks up at everyone else, then nods. Jamie turns around and the Kid wraps his arms—and Bobo, his arm still bandaged just like mine—around Jamie’s neck. Jamie grabs his legs and stands so the Kid is piggyback and can see everything going on. My heart flutters just a bit.

“I met Daphne ten years ago,” Amy says. “It was the week after I opened the shop, and she came in asking if I had any Daphne De Silva novels. Thankfully I already had several of her books on the shelves. She promptly took out a Sharpie and started signing them. I thought she was some disgruntled fan.” Everyone gives a chuckle. “Her picture in the back of the book was from years ago, and she was all done up and . . . well, here was this woman just scribbling in my books. So I snatched one right out of her hand, yelling at her. Messed up the signature. She just laughed and said, ‘You can have that one, sweetie.’ Like they weren’t all my books since I bought them!”

More quiet laughter; this time some of the kids understand the joke and they laugh, too.

“I think that’s the thing I’m going to miss the most about her. Her laugh was so warm—you knew she was never laughing at you, but always with you. And she absolutely would have gotten a kick out of a Tunnel of Love being her mausoleum.”

Everyone laughs again, but it’s the kind of laughter that comes from nervousness. Like they aren’t sure if putting Daphne’s body here is rude or something she’d want. I’m glad Amy is on the same page. I can even hear Daphne’s warm laughter.

I’m going to miss it, too.