“Well,” Babette said. “Let’s have a look.”

Jane lifted the trash bag off, and the mermaid’s shimmering skin caught the light and nearly blinded them.

Babette studied it. “Holy crap.”

“That is awesome.” H.T. came closer to inspect the costume as Jane adjusted some of the fabric.

“Nice job!” Babette gave Jane a pat on the back of her leg.

“Thanks,” Jane said, and then Rita came over. She was carrying a heart-shaped flower arrangement with an “RIP Mermaid” sash across it and wearing an old-fashioned hat, the kind with a veil that came down in front. She lifted the black mesh off her face to say, “Cool costume.”

“And I have to say the boys did a good job on the bier,” Babette said, turning to the wagon they’d painted black and silver.

A girl walked over to them then, and Babette looked up, squinting, and said, “Can we help you?”

“It’s me,” she said. “Debbie.”

Jane saw now that she looked almost exactly the same. Just without the hair. It had been a distraction, but it had also been her main identifying trait, and it was gone. “You look the same,” Jane said. “I mean . . .”

Debbie nodded. “I know. It’s weird. I thought I’d look so different, but I’m still me. Thank God, right?” Jane hadn’t actually noticed how pretty she was, had just been too distracted by the hair.

“How’d your mother take it?” Jane asked.

“She’ll come around,” Debbie said, and Jane thought she saw the start of something in her eyes—tears—but then it was gone and replaced by a smile.

Jane changed into the costume, slipping her tail and fin on under her skirt, then ditching the skirt, then taking off her shirt to reveal the seashell top. She perched a crown of pearls on her head and turned back to take in the scene.

Sea creatures made from papier-mâché filled the air in every direction; one was long and blue with a mouth that could hold Babette. It looked like a snake but had fins that wagged in the wind. A huge gray octopus was being held in the air by nine people—one at the center and one at each of its tentacles. Another monster was green and scaly, like the beast from 20,000 fathoms, and Jane took a quick look around for a bathysphere but found Leo instead.

“Nice job,” he said.

“You think?” She felt suddenly naked.

“I think.” He smiled crookedly. “Though a true Looky Lou would’ve just come to watch.”

Jane nodded and smiled. The sun was hot right then; her skin, too. “Maybe I’m not a Looky Lou after all.”

Leo had to go round up his dirge band, and she felt a sort of tug when he walked away. But everything had changed since the bathysphere. She no longer had to doubt what was there in the space between them.

It just was.

Legs helped Jane, who was coated in sunscreen, up onto the bier, and when she lay down she was grateful that it was at least a little bit breezy, a little bit overcast. And then she was rolling and it was time for them to join the parade. Two of the school band’s trombone players started to play Leo’s dirge, and they walked down their side street and turned onto Surf Avenue.

At first, the noise of spectators was pretty scattered, but with each block the noise got thicker and thicker, and by the time they neared Nathan’s—Jane was occasionally opening her eyes for a split second to steal peeks, plus Babette was giving her updates—it was out of control. Between the noise of the subway, and the crowds, and the dirge—not to mention the buzzing in Jane’s ears coming from somewhere inside—it was almost too much. She heard a few people say, “Check out the mermaid funeral,” and she heard Leo’s dirge, which wasn’t entirely sad but somehow full of longing, and not exactly the bad kind. Like the mermaid only wished she could climb up off her funeral bier and dive back into the sea.

Over and over again, she had to fight the urge to smile, to say cheese at the cameras she knew were pointed at her.

It was a funeral, after all.

A funeral that took hours. She couldn’t believe how slowly the whole thing moved, how much time was spent hanging around, just lying there and waiting, but it was what it was.

Finally, they turned off Surf Avenue and headed toward the boardwalk down another side street packed with spectators. Jane stole a peek and saw a blur of sunglasses and cameras and baseball hats and sun hats and smiling faces and it felt like maybe it was what Coney used to be like, back in the day—and maybe would be again.

Beth turned to look at the aquarium. “It’s mermaid practice.”

Jane started to move forward.

“Big show tonight,” Beth added.

“They look great,” Jane said, then she took her mother’s journal out of her bag. “I found this,” she said. “I thought you might want to look through it.”

“Oh my gosh!” Beth took the book in her hands and then rubbed her palm over the cover. She opened to the first page. “I haven’t seen this thing in so long.” Her eyes ranged over page after page. “You sure?”

“Yeah.” Jane nodded.

“I’ve been thinking about her a lot,” Beth said. “About why she left for art school and never came back.”

Jane just waited.

“I can’t help but think it was because she wanted more. For you.” She shook her head, waved a hand dismissively. “I know it’s crazy. She hadn’t even had you yet. Hadn’t even met your father. But maybe she knew she wasn’t going to meet him here.”

“But why not?” Jane had met Leo. She’d met Leo here.

“Most of the smart ones leave.” Beth closed the journal. “You’ll do it, too.”

When she walked into the kitchen, Marcus and her father both looked up.

“Wow,” Marcus said.

Her dad came over to kiss her forehead. “Lovely.” He pulled back, holding her by her shoulders. “And that mermaid! It was spectacular!”

Jane’s father and brother were going to the ball, too, but weren’t ready yet and Jane didn’t want to wait, so she walked back up to the boardwalk, to the roller rink building, where the party was already in full swing. A disco ball was sprinkling light on the crowd, dotting people with pink and blue and green lights like raindrops. Jane saw a tuna roll dancing with a clam on a half shell and thought that maybe next year, instead of a funeral, she’d like to make a float that celebrated something instead of mourned it.

She saw the seahorse first, then the rest of Leo came into focus. The hair on the back of his head was damp with sweat, clinging to his neck in pointy curves, and when he turned, he smiled. “I’ve been looking for you!” he shouted over the music. There was a band onstage playing some snazzy burlesque song.

“Why?” Jane shouted.

“Because I’m up next.”

He disappeared into the crowd then, and the band onstage finished their number and walked off and Leo appeared in their place. He was carrying a saw in one hand and a stool in the other, and he put the stool down and sat in front of a microphone. From his back pocket, he plucked his bow and held it in his right hand at the ready. He nodded off to the right, and a man came onstage and pulled a movie screen up out of a metal tube and latched it onto a hook. Then Leo nodded to someone at the back of the room somewhere and a funnel of projection light filled the air.

Orphans in the Surf appeared in shaky black-and-white just as Leo’s saw started to sing and sway. It sounded like a woman singing a wordless song of longing, like she’d give anything to be with those children—to be able to take them in her arms and tell them they weren’t orphans after all—but couldn’t. It was wrenching and beautiful and it was coming from him. He played with his eyes closed, not even watching the way the saw bobbed and bent, and it made Jane feel like her heart might burst out of her chest. Just when she thought it was over, because the film was that short, it started again. And then again. The effect of showing the footage on a loop was heartbreaking, and Jane only wished that the children had played a game other than Ring Around the Rosie, something that would have lifted them up and not dragged them down. Leo’s saw seemed to sing ashes, ashes, each and every time.

“Something weird just happened,” she heard Babette say when Leo had left the stage. “Bend down.”

Jane complied.

“H.T. just asked me out.”

Somehow this didn’t surprise Jane at all, didn’t seem that weird. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘For real?’”

“And he said?”

Onstage Jane saw that Leo had returned with his band; the drummer clicked off a count with his sticks.

“He said, ‘For real.’ ”

H.T. appeared and took Babette’s hand and led her into the middle of the crowd, and Jane turned to watch Leo. This time it was him—and not his saw—doing the singing.

She never had answered that final question for herself or anybody else and now her mind seemed to travel to the tips of all ten of her fingers and all ten of her toes, and up to the top of the Parachute Jump and the Thunderbolt and back. It seemed to climb the Cyclone and scream out in a fiery rage and then dive back down into the bathysphere, passing mermaids and turtles on the way, even saying hello to the bird on Nellie’s hat. It shot up to the North Pole and then on up to the moon, where it was serenaded by Selenites, and back. It was searching out an answer that was right there—just not in any way she could verbalize. And then there was a memory—of a day spent shopping, of a wall of televisions, of the lights and minarets of Luna Park.

He was molding sand, but he looked up with a suspicious smirk. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.” She shrugged and returned to her own bucket, and after a moment he said, “The sound of you laughing.”

Jane’s hands were gritty and wet and Birdie’s dress was covered in clumpy sand. She wiped them off as she shot him a look.

“I mean it,” he said, shrugging and looking away like he was shy, though she knew better by now.

“Okay,” she said, feeling a warmth in her heart despite the cold wind off the ocean. “What was the last dream you had that you remember?”

“There were rats in my house. I was trying to escape.”

Jane looked up, skeptical.

“I’m serious!”

“Name one thing you want to do before you die.”

“Have a kid.”

“Wow,” she said.

Jane hadn’t ever actually imagined having a kid, but thought that yes, someday, that would be nice. Like Leo said, she could play those old games with her child, keep that memory alive.

“Too heavy?” Leo asked.

“I was thinking more along the lines of drink a cocktail out of a pineapple.” She asked him, “What’s the best thing about being you?”

“I don’t know.” He stopped and looked around. “I think it might be this. The fact that I grew up here. Makes you not take anything for granted.”

He still hadn’t built anything that looked anything at all like the Shoot the Chutes. It was dark, but the relative lack of light wasn’t the only problem.

“How in the hell did she even do this?” Leo asked as another bucket of sand fell away in a series of small landslides.

“I don’t know.” Jane was having no better luck with a Monkey Theater. “Maybe I don’t even remember it right, you know? Maybe I made it up.”

“Don’t say that,” Leo said. He was kneeling in the sand in his jeans, scooping wildly.

“No, it’s okay if I did,” Jane said. “I mean, I was really young. Who knows?”

“You could ask your brother.”

She thought about that for a second. “Nah,” she said. “It’d ruin it.”

Leo started to build the Shoot the Chutes again.

“Here.” Jane tossed him a smaller bucket. “Try this one.”

They worked quietly for a while, then Jane said, “That song you played on the saw at the party, and tonight . . . She used to sing that to me, the Dreamland song.”

“Yeah?”

“When I was little and didn’t want to go to bed because I wanted to be with her, she’d tell me that she’d meet me in Dreamland, and she’d lull me to sleep. I’m pretty sure she said it right before she died, too. That she’d see me there.”

Leo looked up, pushed some hair out of his eyes with sandy hands. “Are you trying to kill me, Jane?”

Luna, she almost said. The name’s Luna.

He wiped sand off his hands and she did, too, and they lay back on their blanket and Leo said, “I forget sometimes.”

“Forget what?”

“That it’s a beach.” He shook his head and laughed. “Seems like an awful lot of fuss over a beach.”