Adventure Graveyard

            by Robyn Brown

 

Her scream reached out to the bay, where the sailing instructors heard it from their boats. It woke the babies sleeping in the strollers lining the fence. It made all of the children in Adventure Playground stop, turn, and stare at the little girl who was standing with her eyes clenched shut, shrieking at the top of her lungs.

The girl, Natalie, was standing on the deck of an old motorboat, which was stationed in the middle of the playground on a bed of sand, as if the bay had dried up around it. The boat was lined with dirty squares of old carpet and it was evident that it had been painted and repainted over the years. On the transparent plastic window of the vessel someone had proclaimed in broad black brush strokes, “HANNAH & SUG.” The boat had two levels, an upper deck and the lower compartment, from which Natalie had just emerged. Children poked their heads out of other old rowboats and wooden forts to see what the cause of the resounding screech was, but their interest dwindled after a moment or two. On one side of a sign reading, “Mud play zone,” sat a square metal shed, covered with colorful pictures of dragonflies, smiley faces and palm trees. In the shed were the paint containers, tools, and brushes. Gus, the staff member in charge that day, was passing out hammers to two little boys when the scream rang out.

Gus dropped the hammers in front of the boys and started off towards the direction of the earsplitting noise. He ran past numerous forts pieced together with lopsided boards that were scattered throughout the park, offering plenty of places to leave a signature with the old paintbrushes and shallow, dirty containers of watered-down paint. He rounded the huge “spider web,” a net of rope suspended between three poles. He dodged around fragments of chairs and plastic pipes big enough for children to climb into that were stuck in the ground here and there forming a one-way tunnel with a dead end. In the background he could hear the trolley, a contraption that children sat on as it whizzed down a metal cable from a tall platform, depositing them in a pile of sand twenty yards away. Natalie’s mother, Ruth, who had been chatting with other mothers by the trolley, came running as soon as she realized that the child screaming was her daughter.

“What’s the matter, honey? Did you step on a nail?” Ruth wore a look of deep concern, the kind that knows a beautiful day at the playground has just been spoiled by some unforeseen assault from the outside world. Natalie did not answer her mother, but continued to scream, a shrill, piercing note that drowned out the whimpers of the babies in the strollers parked near the entrance of the playground.

Ruth tried to calm Natalie down as Gus came barreling towards them. Gus was 24, of medium build and had short, curly, brown hair. He was wearing a shirt with bright fish on it that his aunt had brought back for him when she went to the Bahamas.

Ruth ascertained, after a quick check, that nothing was physically wrong with her daughter, although Natalie’s mousy brown hair had come partially out of its ponytail and she was paler than normal.

“Was she in the boat?” Gus questioned. “There must be something in there that frightened her. Could be a bug or maybe some kid painted a creepy picture or something. Lately we’ve been having some issues with a, uh, a trespasser vandalizing the park after hours. I’ll see what it is.”  Gus hauled himself over the side of the boat and stuck his head down below. It was a comfortable height for children, but Gus had to squat and stoop his back to get down to the lower level. However, he did not have to do much more than poke his head down because he saw what had scared Natalie immediately, and had to stifle a scream himself when he realized what he was looking at.

The body shone white even in the dim light of the boat. Gus made out a gaunt face that was turned to the side with half-open lips and dark eyes that seemed to stare at the blue-painted plastic of the wall. Black, stringy hair spread out around the head, covering the neck and shoulders. It was wearing a shirt in the shade that Natalie called “princess pink” and dark blue jeans. The bony ankles led to bare feet and Gus could see chipped blue glitter nail polish on the toes catching specks of light. The body took up more than half of the space down below the boat, but was unnaturally thin. In fact, Gus could see the shape of ribs sticking out of the pink shirt. He could tell that this person could not have been any older than he was.

He took a slow step backwards, returning into the warm air and blinding sunlight. Ruth looked up at Gus with an expectant glare on her face, clearly wanting to know what could cause her daughter so much trauma in this playground. She clutched Natalie, her fingers digging into her daughter’s shoulders. Natalie stood, silent now, her brown eyes bulging out and tears running silently down her face. “Is she still there?” Natalie asked quietly, as though the body had just been playing a trick on her and could now stand up and walk away.

“Yeah,” Gus blurted, for lack of anything better to say. It was not unheard of for homeless people to spend the night in one of the playground’s many little hideaways, but a dead body? Never. All he could do was stare at Natalie, who stared back at him, both knowing that they were the only ones who knew this terrible secret. Ruth looked back and forth between Gus and Natalie for a few seconds, waiting for someone to enlighten her.

Finally, she burst out, “I demand to know what is going on!”

Gus swallowed and realized how dry his throat was. He stepped down off of the boat and, after a few seconds of hesitation, put a hand on Ruth’s shoulder.

“I’m going to need to call the police now. I suggest that you do not look inside the boat. I’m sorry.” Gus said this without emotion, but Ruth could see his eyes brimming with tears as he turned away. Confused and angry, she grabbed Natalie by the hand and stormed towards the entrance gate, pulling Natalie along behind her. That was the last time Natalie visited Adventure Playground for twelve years.

~

“Hey Nat, give me a hand over here, would ya?” a teenage girl’s voice called out over the excited chatter of the crowd of six and seven year olds. It was Natalie’s first week as a summer camp counselor and she was in charge of seven kids. The ten counselors, the camp’s director, and seventy chattering children were gathered in a swarm on a grassy clearing at the Marina. Behind them was the nature center, which had been rebuilt twelve years ago. Now it was looking shabby and needed a new coat of paint. To the right of the grassy area was a little hill covered with low-lying trees and shrubs. On the other side of the hill was Adventure Playground, the camp’s destination for the day.

Natalie rushed over to help Katie, who was struggling to do three things at once:  hold a crate of goldfish and apple juice, separate two boys who were imitating wrestling moves on each other, and listen to a little girl tell her about her new kitten. Natalie grabbed the slipping crate from Katie’s hands and joined the group that had started walking over to the playground. Katie joined her at the entrance to the playground, a big wooden archway depicting a giant hammer and a paintbrush. They stood at the entrance, making sure all of their campers were accounted for before turning them loose on the playground.

“Wow. This place hasn’t changed at all since we were kids,” Katie remarked, as they made their way into the yard. “I used to love coming here. Me and my friends would spend hours pretending that we lived in castles and painting our names all over the walls.”

“Yeah. My favorite part was the trolley. Ooh and I remember how we used to to somersaults on the spiderweb until one of the adults made us stop ‘cause it was ‘too dangerous.’”

Katie laughed. “Man. Kids should just be allowed to have fun. Although now that I have responsibility over seven kids, I kind of get what our parents were worried about.”

“I guess. My mom was kind of uptight, though. She never let me go here after that dead body was found,” Natalie replied. She shot a quick glance at Katie.

“Yeah, I remember that. My mom was a little freaked out, too, but imagine being that little girl who found the body! That would, like, totally scar you for life. Yep, years of therapy, right there.”

Natalie blushed and cleared her throat. “Mm-hmm. Wanna know something weird? I was there when they found it. The body, I mean. Actually,” she said, “ I was the one who found it.” She silently breathed a sigh of relief. The secret had been bottled up inside her for twelve years, and it was a relief to finally let it out.

Katie was silent for a few seconds, then turned to Natalie and burst out, “No way! That must have been so creepy! Ew. No wonder your mom wouldn’t let you come back. Did you get a reward or anything?”

“No. I mean I didn’t really do anything. Someone would have found it eventually. Besides, no one even cared about the girl. The newspapers all said that it was a suicide. The girl and her boyfriend were, like, in love or something, but then he dumped her because she was totally addicted to coke.”

Before Natalie could finish her story, a little girl ran up to them, crying, with a splinter in her hand. Katie led her over to the metal shed, which still had faded paintings of suns and hearts on its side, to get the first aid kit. Natalie continued her patrol around the park, occasionally stopping to help a child hammer in a nail or climb up a lopsided ladder.

As she walked around, she met up with another counselor, Mike, who was an old friend of hers from middle school.

“What’s up, Nat?” he exclaimed, greeting her with a high five.

“Oh, not much,” she replied. “How ‘bout you? It seems like we haven’t even gotten to talk ‘cause these little kids keep us so freakin’ busy.”

“Yeah. Speaking of which, I think my officiating skills are needed,” Mike said, jogging off to oversee a game of tug-of-war, which had spontaneously begun on the south side of the park.

Natalie squatted down to join a boy who was painting on the side of a plywood fort.

“How do you spell ‘pirate’?” he asked her with a look of concentration.

She spelled it out for him and to the left of his “ben’s pirate fort,” sign she wrote her own name, surrounded by a heart. As an afterthought, she added “R.I.P” underneath the heart.

“ What does that mean?” Ben asked, jabbing his paintbrush at the “R.I.P.”

“It’s what you write when someone goes away forever and you miss them,” Natalie said, careful not to mention death directly and regretting already what she had written in a children’s playground. Ben seemed to think this explanation was satisfactory, though, and a few minutes later lost interest in painting and wandered away. Natalie hurriedly painted over everything she had written, leaving a large green blob instead. She blushed, feeling silly. She hadn’t even known the dead girl. Why should she miss her? Besides, because of the girl, she had been forbidden from going to Adventure Playground for the rest of her childhood. Even now, if her mom knew where she was, she wouldn’t approve.

Lunchtime soon arrived and all of the counselors gathered their campers and headed back to the grassy area to eat. Lunch boxes were opened and sandwiches and cookies were taken out. The children emitted squeals of laughter as they ate, talked, traded items from their lunches, played hand games, ran around, and turned somersaults. As they kept a watchful eye on the scene, Natalie and Katie continued their discourse from before.

“So, yeah. The girlfriend was a crazy coke addict who was in love with this guy,” Natalie began.

“Are you guys talking about that dead chick from, like, 10 years ago?” Mike, overhearing the conversation, joined in. “I heard that she was totally obsessed with the guy and when he dumped her she went completely nuts. Man, what a freak.”

“What did she do?” Katie asked, the two girls turning to face him. Natalie was a little dubious, but Katie looked excited.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell anyone. My dad was working on the case- ‘cause he’s a police officer, you know,” he explained to the skeptical looking girls. “But they never released all the details to the press.”

“Oh, come on!” Katie pleaded. “That case is, like a million years old. No one cares anymore. Besides, it’s not like we’re going to tell anyone.”

“Yeah,” Natalie chimed in, her curiosity getting the better of her. “And I was the one who found the body in the first place. I deserve to know.”

Mike looked at Natalie with a newfound respect. “Really? That is so cool! I mean, it’s not really, ‘cause she’s dead, but still…”

“So tell us already! Lunch is almost over. Come on, before the kids come back,” Katie demanded.

“Okay, okay. So this girl would, like, come to Adventure Playground at night and sneak in and paint shit all over the forts and pipes and tires. Shit like, ‘I love you to death,’ and ‘I’d rather be dead than not be with you,’ and ‘If you don’t love me then life has no purpose,’ and creepy stuff like that. Stuff that you wouldn’t want little kids to see. The staff had to go through and paint over everything in the morning. She would also come there during the daytime and hide in the forts and do coke and if a kid came in she would threaten to kill them if they told anyone she was there. And then one night she O.D.’d in the park.”

Katie and Natalie were silent for a moment. Then Katie said, “That is so wrong. That is beyond disgusting.” Mike nodded in agreement.

Katie asked hesitantly, “Does anyone know why she terrorized Adventure Playground of all places?”

Mike nodded again, knowingly. “’Cause that’s where her boyfriend worked. They say that when he saw her body he was scarred for life. Quit his job. Couldn’t get another one. He eventually came back to the playground. Works as a nighttime guard so that something like that never happens again. My dad knows him, says he used to be a great guy, but he’s totally overwhelmed by guilt and sadness now. I think his name is Gus.”