The Giant Dipper

Once a month, all of us foster kids share pizza, and spend most of our weekly good behavior allowance, if any, down on the Santa Cruz boardwalk. After we eat, our hired parents allow us an hour to visit the seaside shops and explore. 

Half-brother Timmy and I share the same mother. We’ve been told, “You’re the lucky ones, still together.” Tell that to Timmy. He still blames me for breaking up mother’s love affair with Oxy. 

After we were taken for keeps, Timmy knuckled me in the stomach. He said, “You told the social worker about mother’s abuse and neglect.” After our short hospital stay, we were told Timmy’s malnutrition could have been fatal. He’s become superstitious now, worries his beads that he will die fat and motherless. Ms. Yvonne, with the county of Santa Cruz, keeps an eye on our emotional wounds and healing.

Robin is our black magic sister from Sea Side Foster Care, an estrogen twin of mine who likes making things disappear from the Boardwalk Magic shop. She’s never been caught snatching, not even a black hat or a white rabbit. She conjures her secret, “It’s in the art of distraction.”  Whatever she takes, she breaks on the sandy sea salt planks on the esplanade. She cries, because she can’t disappear. 

As for Timmy and I, our favorite shop is O’Neill’s Surf. The waxed boards smell comforting, like the candles on mantels in the American Dream. 

The old hippy owner, Marty O’Neill, tells us fantastical stories that are hard to believe. Like when our baby daddies say they love us and don’t. Marty’s surfed Kona, “Waves the size of the Chrysler Building. You know, that Art Deco beauty that washed up in Midtown Manhattan.” 

I think to myself, wherever in the damned Poseidon is that? It’s Marty that gives us hope. 

~~~

The Giant Dipper was completed in 1924. Now it’s a rare vintage 20th century wooden roller coaster. They say way back then, at the top of the loop, you could see clean out into space. It was a surreal time. If you were high enough, you could see into the future. I have my doubts. 

Once at the top, I glimpsed the Kraken or maybe a mermaid, way out in the golden scaled Pacific. Timmy pleaded, “Amanda, do you think it could have been mother?” I lied. Now he frets there is no one to save us.

Without the boardwalk, I would be empty, without all the lost boys and girls and our enchanted roller coaster. We’ve gotten used to all the ups and downs, the in-between’s, where you lose your breath and stomach. There is an unforgettable hollowness in falling, all that emptiness in the middle, where you can’t quite see where you’ve been. And then there is that long climb up that seems just out of reach. 

But Timmy and I never give up hope. After all, in four weeks we’ll chance the Giant Dipper all over again.