“A few guys playing basketball. Except not. They’re just shooting. Not enough people for a game.”
“Maybe we should go play.”
“They need more people,” said Maria. “Not another ball.”
“Har har har,” Ethan said, and she laughed. “Can you pull the bag down more? I can’t see anything past Franklin’s knees.”
“So you can draw attention to yourself and get me arrested? Nice try.”
“And just how would getting you arrested help me? I’d end up rolling back and forth on a morgue slab. I’ve just... never seen this park before.”
Maria sighed. Begrudgingly, she tugged the bag closer to her hip—not that he was going anywhere—and pressed the fabric lower so Ethan could see the grass, and the early daffodils on the opposite side past the basketball court.
“It’ll be dark soon,” she said. “So I guess I can let you look around more then. Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t actually know this city all that well. I was just passing through when it happened.”
“There’s not that much to see.”
“You only feel that way because you grew up here. I’m sure there’s a lot, if we just walk around and find it.”
Maria smiled a little as the breeze ruffled the collar of her jacket. She could still feel the wind. It didn’t feel cool, or warm, but it still felt like something. And there was a very good spot to watch the sunset not far from where they were.
She looked down at Ethan. His brown hair was mussed and he was tilted weird in the bag. But he looked good. Calm. Blue eyes moving over everything in the park. It was his last night. Not his last night alive, exactly, but his last night to be anything. When the sun came up, those eyes would go empty, and that yammering mouth would stop midsentence. So okay.
She gathered him up and held him under her arm, tucking the canvas down to keep him out of sight while leaving a space to see through.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just walking.”
They left the park and crossed underneath the Montrose Bridge overpass, skirting the river so they could pass through the artwalk, where new sculptures went up every six months and bright, lurid murals stretched across the buildings. Artists came out every sunny afternoon and created landscapes in sidewalk chalk.
“Can you tilt me down?” Ethan asked. “There’s one I like coming up—right across from the sculpture of the mother spider.”
“This one?” She angled the bag down over a psychedelic still life of blue and pink chalk, all different shades.
“That one,” he said, and she felt him try to nod. “The green with the hills. And the carousel.”
“Oh yeah.Mary Poppins.” That’s what she called it when she’d seen it a few nights ago. The chalk never lasted long. In the spring it washed away with every rain and was lucky to last a week. Odd to think that they had both found this one, and liked it.
“Mary Poppins,” Ethan said. “Exactly.” They looked down at it, the perfect pink-and-yellow carousel set into the rolling hills of green chalk. The very scene from the movie.
“If only we could jump in. If only things like that were real.”
“Maybe they are, somewhere.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said.
“It’s not stupid. There are things in the world that we have no idea about. And I feel pretty confident saying that as a talking head.”
“You being a talking head doesn’t surprise me,” said Maria. “The terrible things never surprise me. Nightmare magic? Real.Mary Poppinsmagic?” She lifted her foot to smudge away the bright green hills.
“Don’t!” Ethan exclaimed. “Don’t you dare.”
She froze with her foot suspended in the air and smiled down at him in the bag. “What are you going to do to stop me?”
“I’ll scream,” he said, and smiled back. “I’ll scream so loud that you have to run out of here with a screaming head under your arm.”