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Theta’s hands heated up beneath her white satin gloves.
“Isn’t this the berries?” Isaiah said, feeding a treat to Billy from the flat of his palm. The view ahead was an agitated frenzy of people and flags and color.
“Yeah. The cat’s pajamas,” Theta answered and kept waving.
Once they’d reached the fairgrounds, the roustabouts got to work, pounding stakes into the ground, spreading out the canvas tents and ropes. Up went the Big Top, the ticket booth, the sideshow tents and medicine wagon, the nickelodeon stargazer—“Peer into the Infinite and See Your Fate!” Enterprising local folks set up the many food stalls that bordered the long road into the circus grounds. It was a symphony of intoxicating smells—popcorn and caramel apples, cotton candy and fried chicken to make the mouth water. People had lined up ten deep, money in hand and eyes wide, eager for every bit of the culinary splendor. Out by itself on the edge of the fairgrounds was Zarilda’s fortune-telling wagon. “I like to give it that air of mystery so’s when folks come in, they feel like they’re entering another world,” she explained with a wink.
Evie gagged as she and Sam passed the elephants’ cage, where the boys were busy mucking out mounds of manure. “When you imagine the glamour of the circus, you never think about the potency of the elephant dung.”
Sam shrugged. “You get accustomed to the smell.”
Evie waved her hand in front of her nose. “I never want to get accustomed to this smell. If I do, my life has taken a terrible turn.”
“You got me, didn’t ya? Couldn’t’a gone too wrong,” Sam said and kissed her.
Evie laughed. “Now you’ve got greasepaint on your mouth.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Wish I’d known that before I kissed you.”
People streamed into the fairgrounds by the thousands with their Cracker Jack and souvenir flags and programs, and Evie started to believe that Zarilda’s sign about marvels and miracles wasn’t just a line. It was true that everybody was looking for just a little bit of magic to believe in. So why was it so hard to believe in Diviners?
In the Big Top, Evie felt just as wowed by the circus as did the paying customers. She and Isaiah watched as the ringmaster, Mr. Sarkassian, held up a succession of rings and trained dogs jumped through them, then balanced on their hind legs like ballerinas. Between acts, Theta came out and danced the Charleston and some soft-shoe with a couple of other dancers, and even though it wasn’t the Follies stage, Theta still shone brightly. When it was time for the trapeze, Evie held her breath as Hasan swung by his knees and caught Flora, the elegant trapeze artist who just happened to have the mouth of a longshoreman. On the ride out from Cooperstown, Evie had learned a lot of new words from Flora that she could never say in polite company. The tumblers were on next. Sam executed three flips in a row before locking hands with Hasan and leaping into a handstand position above the other man’s shoulders. Evie was amazed by his surefootedness and agility. Sam was sensitive about being small, she knew, but here, that was to his advantage.
She looked out into the stands at the faces. They all wore the same expression of awe. But Evie knew from reading objects that some of those people were sad. Or they felt that nothing good would ever happen again. They worried about their children, or about the cost of heating the house. They tried not to think about what that cough they couldn’t get rid of meant, if it meant anything at all. Some of them were in love with people they could never have. Some of them had to hide who they really were from the people who were supposed to love them the most. But you wouldn’t know that just from watching them now, or from passing them on the fairgrounds. Once you did know it, though, you saw them differently. No longer as separate from you. Some of them had big dreams, and these were the people Evie felt the greatest kinship with—those, and the ones who were lonesome for something they couldn’t quite put their fingers on. Something just out of reach that kept them restless and a little scared that they would always feel this way.
The people watched the circus and Evie watched the people. Can’t you see? she thought. You are the whole circus.
Johnny rushed over to Evie. “Zarilda sent me! She said to get a wiggle on.”
“Here goes nothing,” Evie said, securing her ratty clown hat on her red wig.
A line of eager hopefuls had formed outside Zarilda’s fortune-telling wagon. “Step right up, folks! Don’t be shy. What you desire to know will be known. The spirits will see to it!” Zaril
da said. She looked the part for sure, in her emerald-green satin dress topped by a flowing flower-print silk coat of purple and gold, a rhinestone headband sitting pretty on top of her red hair. She was a carnival queen.
Evie went inside Zarilda’s wagon. “You ready for our act?” Zarilda asked Evie as she set up her table with tarot cards and a crystal ball that cast prisms around the wagon.
“What do you do with that?” Evie asked.
“Talk to the spirits, of course.”
“You can communicate with the dead?”
“Mm-hmm. Sometimes, yes. I ain’t sayin’ I’m a real Diviner. I’m what you might call more of an Interpreter. But I do all right. And what I don’t know I fake.”
“Well, how do you do it?” Evie pressed.
“Darlin’, I’d love to talk about the dead all day long, but we got a show to do, and paying customers. You know what you need to do?”
Evie nodded. “I clown around with somebody’s scarf or hat, get a read, then come back and feed you the information.”
“That’s the ticket!”
Outside, Evie waddled up to a man and offered her paper flower for him to sniff. While he did, she stole his hat and placed it on her wigged head. It was tricky having to grab information so quickly, but she didn’t have much choice. She pressed into the hatband. Bingo! The man’s name was Donald. He was a schoolteacher from Erie, and he was hoping to buy a small house for his family back home on Poplar Street. Evie returned the hat and helped herself to a few more trinkets—a glove, another hat, an umbrella—all of them carrying memories and emotions and wants. At last, Evie threaded a woman’s scarf around her neck and pranced about like royalty, making everyone laugh. The woman’s name was Emily, and she was lonely. Evie blushed to know this. It felt wrong. Emily had come to the circus as a last outing. She planned to drink poison when she got home.
Evie hurried back to Zarilda. “You have to stop the woman in the scarf. She plans to kill herself.”
