The First Fall Read online

  “I know.” Juniper kept walking, and her grip was like steel. “I am so sorry for your loss, baby girl. My daughter hasn’t shown up yet—she’s three years and a drunken night in Bar Harbor away from here, and I wouldn’t hurry her if I could—but that doesn’t mean that I can’t ache for you, and for what you’ve paid to live the life you’ve had. You always knew there would be costs.”

  “No one told me they were going to be this high,” mumbled Fran.

  “You get what you pay for,” Juniper replied.

  The scenery changed around them, going from the painted flats and cleaning supplies of the carnival’s veiled “backstage” area to the first simple trailers of the bone yard. No one moved there. Everyone was either at work or sleeping the last few hours before their shift began. Juniper’s pace remained steady, unhurried by anything around her—not even the increasingly shaky woman she was holding by the arm.

  “Why did you come here, Fran?” asked Juniper. “What did you hope we could give to you?”

  “I wanted…” Fran stopped. Finishing the sentence felt like opening a box that she would never be able to close. She looked at Juniper hopelessly, and shook her head.

  “We’re your family, and you’re always welcome here,” Juniper said. “No matter what happens out there in the rest of the world, we keep the doors open for you. We keep them open for everyone who leaves us. And if you ever come to stay, well, we’ll be happy to have you. But you’re not here to stay, Fran. Not today. Maybe not ever.”

  “I don’t want to go back to just being sad all the time. I don’t think my heart can bear it.”

  Juniper stopped in front of the sleek silver trailer that had been Fran’s, seven years and a lifetime before. “That’s good,” she said, letting go of Fran’s arm and reaching up to open the door. “No one ever gets to go back to anything they’ve left behind. Now come in, if you’re coming, and we can answer the things you didn’t want to ask me under someone else’s stars.”

  Juniper climbed the two short steps into the trailer, vanishing with a swish of her skirts. Fran hesitated for a long moment, her feet grounded in the dirt, the Ohio sky spread out above her like an admonition.

  Then she nodded to herself, and followed Juniper inside.

  The trailer walls were a maze of words. Pages cut from books and magazines were pasted in crazy quilt blocks, overlapping until it was difficult to tell where one line ended and the next began. Carnival posters, flyers, even theater playbills were all mixed into the design, turning the walls into a ghost trap capable of catching and keeping even the strongest of spirits. Fran looked at the layers and judged them to have come in twenty deep, near doubled from the last time she’d been inside this trailer. She looked to Juniper, who shrugged.

  “We’re getting a reputation in certain circles,” she said. “Some people say our freaks are too realistic, that our rides don’t break down often enough, and they send a few little friends of their own to have a look at the operation. I don’t like it when the dead look in on me without being invited. It’s rude, and you know I can’t abide rudeness.”

  “I do,” said Fran, with the flicker of a smile. She moved to take a seat at the chipped oak table that took up more than half the front of the trailer. The motion made her stomach twinge, and she touched it, wincing a little. The last time she’d been here, she’d been nine months pregnant with Daniel. She’d settled herself in that same chair, and she’d waited to hear her fortune…

  Nausea washed over her. She heard the clatter of a chair hitting the floor, and then Juniper’s hands were locked around her wrists. Fran looked up, eyes wide and haunted, to find Junie no more than two feet away, holding her tight.

  “Calm down, sugar,” Juniper said. “You came here for a reason. There are no ghosts here. You are not being haunted. Now I need you to tell me what it was. Until you tell me, I can’t help.”

  Fran stared into the face of her oldest friend, her eyes slowly filling with tears. Finally, in a small, wounded voice, she said, “He died, Junie. How can that be real? He was so little. We tried so hard to keep him safe. We never took him anywhere that might be dangerous. He wasn’t even old enough to hold a knife. But he died all the same, because of who we are. Because of what we do. He died.”

  “It happens to the best of us,” said Juniper, letting go of Fran’s hands before moving to pick up the chair that had been knocked over when Fran jumped back to her feet. “Death is what comes when the show finally can’t keep going any longer. Some people just get more encores than others.”

  “Daniel should have had all the encores,” said Fran, sinking down into the righted chair and looking sadly up at Juniper. “He was…he was the best boy, Junie. I was going to bring him to meet you in a year or two, when he was old enough not to be frightened by all the things he didn’t recognize. I just knew you were going to love him. Everybody loved him.”

  “How could he not be the best boy? He was yours.” Juniper moved to sit at the other side of the table. She moved her hands, and was suddenly holding a deck of slightly oversized cards. They were hand-painted poster board, irregularly cut and slightly water damaged by the painting process. “I always knew you’d have wonderful children, Fran. You were made to be a mother. It’s just that not every child can stay, no matter how much we want them to.”

  Fran dropped her head, her hair falling into her face. “But did we do this? The thing that killed him…it would never have come to the house if it weren’t for me and Johnny. What we do with our lives. Did we kill our baby?”

  “Oh, Fran.” Juniper began to shuffle the cards, her hands moving with the smooth ease of long practice. “No. You didn’t kill him; no. What you and Johnny do with yourselves…you save lives every day. Human lives and inhuman lives. Parents and children. You make the world a better place.”

  “A monster came into my home and killed my little boy,” said Fran. “How does that make the world a better place?”

  “It doesn’t,” said Juniper simply. “It was a tragedy. You’ll carry it with you for the rest of your life, and no matter how often you try to put it down, it’s always going to be there, waiting for you. But you’ve got a life to get through. Tragedy or no, you’re still here.”

  “Johnny…”

  “Is grieving, just like you are. His grief is no better or worse than yours. It’s not worth more. But it’s not worth less, either.”

  Fran sighed. “I just don’t…this time last week, I was somebody’s mama. How do you move on from that?”

  “You don’t.” Juniper stopped talking, although she continued to shuffle the cards, which made soft paper sounds as they rubbed together. After a time, Fran raised her head. Juniper met her eyes and said, calmly, “Why did you come here, Fran? You didn’t ride all this way to give me some of your grieving, although you know I’d take it if I could. Why did you come?”

  “The dead…they follow you.”

  Juniper nodded. “Yes. They always have. Poor, lost things that they are.”

  “Is my Danny…” Fran stopped, swallowing, and took a moment to compose herself before she asked, “Is my Daniel here? Is he following you, or is he resting peaceful, like he should have been resting that night when the bogeyman came and took his life? I need to know, Junie. I can’t…I can’t let him go until I know he’s really gone.”

  Juniper stopped shuffling. Without saying a word, she flipped over the top card, putting it face-up on the table. The painting showed a small boy, snugly nestled in his bed. “Rock-a-bye baby,” she said. “He’s not here, Frannie. I never got to meet him, in this world or the next. I can’t promise you that he’s resting peacefully—no one can promise that about anyone—but I can swear that wherever he’s resting, it’s not here with me. He’s moved on.”

  Fran looked at her, eyes wide and wounded, before bursting into tears. Juniper put the cards aside and stood, walking around the table to her friend. Then she knelt, and held her, and together, the two women cried the evening dry.
/>   The sound of the trailer door opening was not enough to wake Jonathan: Juniper’s tea had been stronger than he’d expected, and he’d fallen asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Even the soft swish of clothes hitting the floor and the rattle of weapons being placed atop the dresser was not enough to pull him from the sweet arms of his dreaming.

  But then a body slid into the bed beside him, and the sweet smell of Fran’s shampoo was tickling his nostrils, so like a dream in its welcome closeness. Jonathan opened his eyes enough to squint through his eyelashes as he rolled over. Fran was there, her own eyes still open, and still filled with the fathomless sadness that had been shining there for the better part of the past week.

  “Go to sleep, city boy,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

  Jonathan blinked. And then, deciding that if this was a dream, it was a dream he was perfectly happy to encourage, he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  He woke up alone.

  Surprise was followed quickly by crushing disappointment. Jonathan pushed himself into a sitting position, and frowned when he saw that the dresser drawers were open and, more importantly, empty. He was about to start questing for his trousers when the trailer door banged open to reveal Fran, fully dressed and holding a plate of what smelled like bacon and scrambled eggs.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Brought breakfast. Junie wants to say goodbye before we go, but I figure that if we leave by noon, we’ll be home before your folks have time to send out a search party.”

  Jonathan blinked. “Are we leaving, then?”

  “I think so.” Fran sat down on the edge of the bed, offering him the plate. Still blinking and bemused, he took it. “It was nice to see everyone again, and I always feel better when I talk to Junie. But I think I want to go home.”

  “Is it still home?” he asked, and the ocean of hurt in his words was enough to make her wince.

  “As long as you’re there, it will be,” she said quietly. “Going to be a sad home for a while. Going to be a bit of a haunted one, even if there aren’t any ghosts there. And I’m going to count on your father to figure out who paid that bastard to come after us, because there’s a lot of repaying wants done. But my home is where you are, and I’d miss Buckley if I went away forever.”

  “Did Juniper give you the answers that you wanted?”

  Fran nodded. “She did. He’s resting, most like. And I’m still holding you to your word—this never happens again. I couldn’t come back from this a second time. But right here and right now, I think we can still get through it together. I think we can find our way back to a place where we can breathe.”

  “I see.” Jonathan reached out, putting his hand over hers, and smiled. “I would like that very much.”

  “Me, too,” said Fran, smiling back. “So eat your breakfast and get your trousers on, city boy. I want to go home.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and reached for the plate.

  Juniper stood at the very edge of the bone yard, watching Fran and Jonathan riding away. Max stood next to her, not saying a word. He didn’t know what would have been appropriate, given the circumstances.

  “Our daughters are going to be the best friends in the world you know,” Juniper said, voice as distant as her gaze. “They’ll go to school together. They’ll save each other’s lives a hundred times before things go bad. But I’m never going to see Frannie again, and it breaks my heart to know that.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Max.

  “So am I,” said Juniper, and turned, and walked back toward the midway.

  The show, as always, still needed to go on.