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fucking ride,” she hissed, hating herself for letting Tommy get a rise out of her
.
    He pretended to be shocked. “Mommy used a bad word
.”
    Rachel held Tommy’s hand triumphantly. They headed together toward the ride, and then Rachel looked back. She called out, as if it were a wonderful joke, “Fuck you, Mommy
.”
    Emily took two steps closer, swinging her hand back, ready to strike her. She wanted so badly to slap her daughter’s face. But she froze, holding back. She began sobbing. She watched them wander away, paying no attention to her as she cried, drawing stares from the people passing by. She wiped her cheeks, then pushed through the crowd toward the spectator area near the Ejection Seat. She would do what she had done all along. Cheer for them. For the husband who made her feel like an insect, and for the daughter he had taught to hate her
.
    As they strapped Tommy and Rachel into the Ejection Seat, a spotlight hit them, and Emily could see their faces clearly
.
    Rachel was beaming, fearless as ever
.
    But Tommy was pale, his face bone white, sweat pouring down his forehead
.
    A horrifying awareness began to dawn on Emily, as she realized that Tommy’s condition had nothing to do with the fair and nothing to do with a pulled muscle. Instead, it had everything to do with his father, who had dropped dead at thirty-seven, and his grandfather, who had only made it to age thirty before ending up in the ground
.
    “Don’t ask me to grow up, Emily,”
he had said to her once in a sober moment
.
    “
Wait!” Emily shouted, but no one heard her
.
    The sensations of the night became a blur. The din of music and voices thumped in her head. Lights blinked and whirled around her. She smelled burnt grease, powerful enough to suffocate her
.
    “
He’s having a heart attack!” she screamed, as loudly as she could
.
    The people around her laughed. It was a joke. It was funny
.
    Ping.
The cable released. The Ejection Seat shot upward like an arrow. The towers rattled and swayed. The microphone in the chair caught Rachel’s squeals of delight. Her excitement at being shot weightless into the air was almost sexual. The giggling laughter poured out of her and washed over the crowd
.
    Tommy never said a word
.
    Up and down the chair went, bouncing and wobbling like a jack-in-the-box for thirty seconds that lasted a lifetime. Then Emily heard murmurs among the people around her. She saw people start to point. Rachel’s squeals subsided
.
    “
Daddy
?”
    Emily could see her husband clearly now, his head lolling to one side, his eyes rolled up into his skull like two hard-boiled eggs, his tongue hanging limply out of his mouth. Rachel saw it, too, and screamed
.
    “Daddy. Wake up, Daddy.”
    Emily clambered over the fence that kept the spectators back. The ride workers managed to snag the chair and pull it back to the ground. As Emily ran toward them, they undid the straps from Rachel, who clung to her father and cried hysterically. They undid the straps from Tommy, too, but he simply slid from the chair and crumpled in a pile on the ground, with Rachel still hanging on him and calling his name
.
     
     
    Emily knew at that moment she had passed a crossroads in her life. Part of her secret soul believed it would be a road to something better. In many ways, living with Tommy dead was easier than living with Tommy alive. She had always been the one holding a steady job and paying the bills. During the next few years, she began to pull them slowly out of debt.
    But in the most important way, in her daughter’s mind, Tommy never died. He became frozen in Rachel’s memory.
    It began the day after the fair, as they drove in cold silence back to Duluth. The tears on Rachel’s face had dried, and her grief had turned with amazing swiftness to malevolence. At one point on the highway, the little girl turned to Emily, her eyes on fire, and said with a terrifying passion, “You did this.”
    Emily tried to explain. She tried to