“What?” Marcus said, chewing. “No way. Why?”

“I thought you said you didn’t care.” Jane took another bite.

Marcus wiped his mouth and put his sandwich down. “I thought you said Birdie was on it the first time Preemie met her.”

“She was?” their dad said, and Jane nodded, then turned to Marcus. “I repeat,” she said. “I thought you didn’t care.”

“Children,” their father said. He had already devoured his own sandwich and was picking at a salad Jane had made.

“Harvey gave me a black eye,” Marcus said, then he popped the last bit of his bread into his mouth.

“You neighed at him,” Jane said between bites.

“Have they been bothering you again, Jane?” her father asked. “Is that what’s going on?”

“No, actually.” They’d stopped—right after she talked to their father and grandfather. She almost hadn’t realized it at the time. “But I’ve been thinking.” She glanced into the living room again. “It just doesn’t belong here.”

“But it was beloved by your beloved grandparents,” Marcus said with a hand to his heart for drama.

“Yeah,” Jane said. “And they’re gone.”

“Keep talking,” her father said.

Jane wiped her own mouth and hands with a napkin. “Well, I mean it had sentimental value to them but now they’re not here anymore, and it has sentimental value to me but I’m not sure the value I have trumps the value that Grandpa Claverack has.”

“But he’s going to sell it,” her brother said.

“And that’s his prerogative.”

“But that means it has no sentimental value to him, so none is less than whatever you have,” Marcus said.

“Yeah, but I don’t know. Maybe he’ll be sentimental once he has it. Maybe he’ll get it and then realize he doesn’t even want to sell it. Anyway, it’s just dumb for us to keep it.” She was about to say, “We’re mothballing,” but instead she just looked at her father and said, “We have no good reason to keep it is all.”

“This seems like an unexpected change of opinion.”

“I don’t know,” Jane said. “Maybe I’m just sick of looking at it there, sick of thinking about it. Call it, I don’t know”—a cool breeze tickled the kitchen curtains—“Call it spring cleaning. You said we had to clean out the house, Dad, and we haven’t even really started.”

“Well, now that you’ve brought it up”—he put his plate in the sink, then came back to the table—“I think we should talk about what my job means for us, for the house. Because if all goes well this week with the presentation, the Tsunami will be built. Which means I’d want to be here. I’d need to be here. I just wanted to see how you felt about that.”

Marcus said, “Whatever you want, Dad.”

“Well, that’s easy for you to say,” he replied. “You’re going away to college.”

Marcus had just that week started obsessively checking the mailbox hanging on the porch. Letters of acceptance—and Jane was sure they’d mostly be acceptances—were due to start arriving any day.

Their father said, “Jane, what about you?”

“When is the house officially mine and Marcus’s?” she asked, surprising herself. But all the talk of real estate this year made her realize that stuff like this was important. They hadn’t actually spoken in months about the fact that the fate of the house was really up to Jane and her brother, not their dad.

He rubbed his eyes and then looked at her. “The easiest thing would be to stay here until you’re both eighteen and entitled to proceeds. And then sell it and divide the money down the middle. Earlier than that and the money will go into a trust.”

“You want to stay until I’m eighteen?” Jane asked. In July she was going to be seventeen. That meant staying another year and a half or more. It meant graduating.

Her father shrugged. “Well, it depends on what happens with this vote.”

“I think I’m okay with that,” she said, though she wished this moment could have ended up being more joyful. The idea of spending more than one year somewhere—anywhere—was enough to make her want to cry with happiness, but things with Leo were complicated enough now that fleeing had its appeal, too. But it was better to be here on the wrong side of things than to be right but be gone. Wasn’t it?

“What about it?” He knelt and surveyed the radiator, the chain.

“I was just thinking about how when they built this other roller coaster, the Thunderbolt, they ran the beams and stuff through the hotel that was in the way, so that they didn’t have to close it down.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Honey, I know it’s your friend’s father’s place, but you don’t know the whole story.”

“Well then, tell me.” She turned away from the horse.

“Okay,” he said. “Apparently, your friend’s father owes thousands of dollars in back rent because one day he just decided to stop paying.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jane said, but her father just kept talking.

“They’ve been cited for violations of a few safety and fire regulations, which they’ve done nothing to fix, and they have a ton of open health code violations. There are rats, mice, roaches, you name it.”

“Loki made those up. Leo told me.”

“There’s video of the rats, honey. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you,” he said. “But it’s really easy to romanticize a place like that if you get to thinking that way. It’s just not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s just not worth saving.”

“What is, then?” Jane grew suddenly angry, remembering the trash bags on the porch. “What does someone like you think is worth saving?”

Her father got up, almost sadly, and walked out of the room, and then he came back with a small wooden box in his hands. He put it down on the coffee table and opened it and pulled out a bunch of items: a ticket stub “from my first date with your mother,” a program from a play “from my second date with your mother,” a penny that had been stretched long like a funhouse mirror “from my third date with your mother.” He didn’t stop until the box was emptied of letters and trinkets and notes, leaving only a few pieces of jewelry and a photo.

“My favorite picture of her,” he said, and he handed it over. Jane saw her mom sitting on a beach chair, a bandanna on her head, drinking a cocktail out of a pineapple with a straw.

“I was saving this for you,” he said. “Her wedding band. For when you were older.”

Jane thought she was going to cry when he held out the ring toward her and said, “I guess I might as well give it to you now, though this isn’t exactly the scene I was picturing.”

“No,” she said, pushing it back. “When I’m older, whenever you think is right.”

He was still looking at the trinkets and tickets.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Jane said, and he sighed.

“I don’t want you to be sorry, honey. I want to be able to talk about stuff like this and disagree and have that be all right. And sometimes I want you to trust that I’m right.”

“But you’re not right about this.” She shook her head. “You can’t be.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to find out for yourself, then.” He started to put his mementos away. “In the meantime, come with me on Thursday, will you? To the presentation? So you can see the whole of the plan and judge for yourself. I have four tickets for VIP seating. Marcus is coming. And you can bring a friend.”

Jane nodded. “Sure, Dad. Of course.”

“Okay,” he said when Marcus came into the room. “Here goes nothing.” He lifted the lock and chain so that it rested on a block of wood he’d found and then pulled it as far away from the horse as it would go. “You’d better stand back,” he said to Jane, and she stroked the horse’s mane before she did.

“Should I pre-dial 911 right now?” Marcus asked from the couch.

The ax missed the chain entirely on their father’s first try. He swung again, and this time the sound was hot and hard but still, the chain remained strong.

After a few more useless hacks, he put the ax down and rested his hands on his hips. “Tell them if they want it they have to come get it.”

She studied the demon from Hell Gate up close for the first time, felt the chipping paint and the smooth lines of the curvature of its lips. She tried to imagine what it had been like to ride through Hell Gate, tried to understand the desire to pay hard-earned money in order to take a boat ride through a simulated hell, to confront its fiery circles, to look Satan in the eye. It seemed that people who lived all those years ago had had a hard enough time just dealing with the realities of their own world—epidemics, wars, outhouses. Did they really have to make it any worse? Any scarier? What was this fascination with the morbid and terrifying and weird? And why didn’t people have it anymore?

Or did they?

Looking around the room, Jane saw a few other things she was going to have to part with, whether her family ending up staying or not. Those “swinging” and “stationary” signs, for example. The invitation to Trump’s Demolition Party.

Those she wouldn’t miss.

But those films!

She’d grown so fond of those orphans, those diving horses, the old footage of Luna Park. They weren’t old family movies, no, but they’d started to feel that way. Apart from Is It Human? they were all she had.

But still . . .

She found a pen and paper and started to make a list of things she thought the Coney Island Museum might want. After she wrote down “Old Film: Orphans in the Surf,” she decided to watch it again, maybe for the last time, and it didn’t seem quite so horribly sad this time around. The shock of it was gone, and in its place was sadness, sure, but not nearly as much of it. When it ended, she returned to her list and wrote down, “Old film reel: ‘King’ & ‘Queen’ the Great Diving Horses.”

She had neglected to turn off the projector, and after she added a few more items to her list, new words appeared on the attic wall.

Baby Class at Lunch.

A new film started playing, tacked onto the same reel as Orphans.

It was impossible to tell for sure if it was the same toddlers. This time there were more of them, sitting on a staircase and eating sandwiches from brown bags. They were chewing and smiling and laughing and making funny faces, and even the herky-jerky grain of the film couldn’t change that fact.

They seemed . . . happy.

In the quiet of the attic, Jane let out a laugh.

Baby Class at Lunch?

The title seemed ludicrous.

Hilarious, even.

And the laugh turned into a giggle as she watched these orphans chew and mug for the camera. She couldn’t stop.

That’s what they’d called it?

Baby Class at Lunch?

Because if they’d called the first one Baby Class at the Beach instead, she would have been spared an awful lot of heartache.

When the film was done, just a minute after it started, Jane took the reel off the projector and put it in a box with the others. It was time.