"I think I know a place."
"I bet you do," I said, and let her go. On every side of us, at all times, at least one person was laughing.
"Change?" said the rollergirl, gliding past, but she executed a perfect stop even before Rebecca got her hand to her pocket. She took my wife's dollar, nodded. Her turtleneck clung tight to her, and there were tiny beads of sweat along the mouth of it like a string of transparent pearls. The tingle that sizzled through me then was more charged than any I'd felt since adolescence, but sadder and therefore sexier still, and I had to bend over until it passed. Whether it was for my wife, the rollergirl, or just the evening, I had no idea.
When I next looked up, Rebecca and Ash were side by side, both bent over their individual metal machines, fingers pushing and pumping while the lights on the metal board flashed and the rollergirl rolled and the ocean breathed, in and out. Not wanting to distract them — and also, for some reason, not wanting to play — I stepped just close enough to see how the game worked.
Inside each machine was a ball chute and a simple, inclined wooden playing board, with metallic mushrooms sprouting out of the center and impeding or — if you were skilled enough — directing the path of the ball. Across the top of the playing board were ball-sized holes numbered one to ten in plain black lettering. The object was to sink one ball in each of the holes corresponding with the flashing numbers on the big board. When you dropped a ball in the correct hole, your machine dinged and the number lit up. First person to light up every required number got a visit from the rollergirl and a red chip dropped at his or her feet as the quarter antes were collected for the next round. Then, with no pause, no stretch-break, no breath, the big board flashed again and the game resumed.
I settled into my spot between Rebecca and Ash, close enough to touch both but a step back. I was watching my wife's frame rattle as she bounced up and down in her big black shoes, leaned left and then right, and I thought of the new, permanently puffy space on her stomach where her scar was, and where, she said, she could no longer feel anything, which for some reason always made me want to put my hand there. To feel the dead space, where the life inside her had been. I watched her watch Ash between games, heard her gleeful-competitive murmurs.
"Feel that, Ash? That would be my breath on your neck. That's me passing you by. Again."
Ash kept shaking his head, staring into his machine and seeming to drag it closer to him with those outsized, outstretched arms. "Not this time," he kept saying. "Not tonight."
And I found that I knew — that I'd always known — that Rebecca was in love with him, too. That I was merely the post she and Ash circled, eyeing one another from either side of me but never getting closer than they already were. The knowledge felt strange, heavy in my chest, horrible but also old. As though I hadn't discovered but remembered it. Also, I knew she loved me, in the permanent way she'd loved her mother, who she'd stayed with, after all. Not that she'd had a choice.
In the back, the man in the flag shirt lit his line, closed his eyes, and slapped the sides of his machine with the heels of his palms. Then the kid in the headphones won again, did his dance. Occasionally, one of the poodle-skirt women won, but mostly they didn't, and their laughs punctuated each round, regardless. Rebecca bobbed, swore, taunted Ash. Ash leaned over farther, grim-faced, muttering, the machine bumping and dinging against him, almost attached to him now like an iron lung. Between and amongst them, the rollergirl skated, collecting quarters, strewing victory chips. At one point, tears developed in my eyes, and I wiped them away fast and thought of the perpetual sprinkles of dried milk that dotted the corners of my daughter's lips like fairy dust. The stuff that brought her to life.
It was the poker chips, I think, that finally alerted me to how long we'd been standing there. My eyes kept following the rollergirl on her sweeps, tracing her long fingers on their circumscribed, perfectly circular path from machine-top to black change-purse at her waist, white tips of her hair barely caressing the slope of her shoulders. And at last my gaze followed one of those chips as it fell to the floor amidst maybe a thousand others strewn around the ankles of the flag-shirt man like rose petals after a rainstorm.
My head jerked as though I'd been slapped.
"Change?" the rollergirl said as she breezed past me on her path through the players. Had she said that to me every time? Had I answered? And where was the music coming from? I could hear it, faintly. I was moving to it, a little. So was Ash. A gently bouncing fairground whirl, from an organ somewhere not too near. Under the dock? On shore?
Inside me? Because I appeared to be singing it. Sort of. Breathing it, so it was barely audible. We all were, I thought. It was everywhere, floating in the air of this makeshift room like a sea breeze trapped when the curtains dropped. Dazed, I watched Rebecca fish ten dollars out of her jeans pocket without looking up. The rollergirl took it and stood a bankroll of quarters, wrapped tight in red paper like a stick of dynamite, on the rim of Rebecca's machine. Both of them humming.
"Rebecca?" I said, then said it again, because my voice sounded funny, slurred and slow, as though I were speaking under water.
"Just a sec," she told me.
"Rebecca, come on."
"Might as well," Ash murmured. "I'm almost there. No hope for you."
My wife glanced up — slowly, smoothly — and caught my eye. "Hear that? You'd think he'd beaten me all his life. Or ever. At anything."
"I think we should go," I said, as Rebecca's head sank down over the metal tabletop again and her hands drifted to the ball-lever and buttons. I said it again, and my words got tangled up in that tune, and I was almost singing them, and then I smashed my jaws together so hard I felt my two top front teeth pop in their sockets. "Rebecca," I snapped.
And just like that, as though I'd doused her with ice water, my wife shivered upright, and there were shudders rippling all the way down her body. Her skin seemed to have come loose. I could almost see it billowing around her. Then she was weeping. "Fuck him, Elliot," she said. "Oh, fuck him so fucking much. God, I miss my mom."
For one moment more, I stood paralyzed, this time by the sight of my weeping wife, though I could feel that tune bubbling up again in the back of my mouth, as though my insides were boiling, threatening to stream out of me like steam. Finally, Rebecca's fingers found mine. They felt reassuringly bony and hard. Familiar.
"Let's go," she whispered, still weeping.
"Come on come on come on Yah!" Ash screeched, started to hurl his arms over his head and stopped, scowling as the board flashed the number of the winner and the American flag man closed his eyes and popped the sides of his machine with his palms once more. "I had it," said Ash, already hunching forward. "I really thought I had it."
"Time to go, bud," I told him, pushing my fingers against Rebecca's so both of us could feel the joints grinding together. She was still shuddering, head down, and the rollergirl glided up and swept a new quarter from Ash's machine and reached for the top one on Rebecca's stack and Rebecca swatted the whole roll to the floor. The rollergirl didn't look up or break her hum as she passed.
"Right now," Rebecca said, looking up, letting the tears stream down. "It's got to be now, Elliot."
"Come on, Ash," I said. "Let's go get tapas."
"What are you talking about?" he said, and the big board flashed, and he was playing again. The kid in the headphones won in a matter of seconds.
"Ash. We need to leave."
"Almost there," he said. "Don't you want to see what you win?"
"Elliot," Rebecca said, voice tight, fingers like talons ripping at my wrist.