Everything Conveys

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The claw machine had been eating quarters since 1994, and on the last Thursday in February, the day of the closing, Megan Hollis decided it was going to stop.

Hollis's Arcade sat on the boardwalk at Point Pleasant Beach between a shuttered frozen-custard stand and a taffy place that had been for sale for three winters. In August the arcade was a wall of noise: Skee-Ball thunder, the Pac-Man death warble, children screaming at their fathers for more tokens. In February it was nineteen degrees inside and smelled of cold carpet and machine oil, and the only sound was the wind finding the gap under the boardwalk doors.

Megan wore her mother's old Hollis's Arcade fleece over her coat. It still said LINDA on the breast in white thread. She hadn't decided yet whether that was a comfort.

The claw was the old kind, a Smart Industries cabinet with a wooden base and a glass box on top, a pile of plush in a pit of fake grass. The claw would drop, close, rise, and then open by itself about four inches off the pile, every time, whatever you did. Her father said that was the claw strength setting. Her mother used to say it was the machine's personality.

The buyer was coming at four for the final walkthrough. The contract said all fixtures, machines and contents conveyed. Megan wanted at least one machine in the building to be honest when it did.

She unlocked the service door at the back of the cabinet with the small round key, got down on her knees on the frozen carpet, and pointed her phone's flashlight up into the guts.

The claw assembly was fine. The gantry was fine. The problem, as far as she could tell, was that nothing had been cleaned since the Clinton administration. She reached up to wipe the dust off the strength board, and her knuckles hit something taped to the underside of the prize floor.

A sandwich bag. Old, the plastic gone yellow and stiff, held up with brown packing tape that had dried into something like bark.

She peeled it down. Inside was a strip of white plastic, curled in a ring the size of a napkin ring. Small. Very small.

Megan knew what it was before she flattened it against her knee, because she had seen one exactly like it nine days ago, on a website her doctor had told her not to read, under the heading What to Expect at Delivery.

A hospital bracelet. Infant size. The typed insert had faded to the brown of weak tea, but it was legible.

DeMARCO, GIRL
MOTHER: DeMARCO, ANGELA
01/08/91 0412
MONMOUTH BAY MED CTR

She read it twice. Then she sat back on her heels on the cold carpet and read it a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into a name she didn't know.

They didn't. She knew it.

---

Everyone on the boardwalk had known the DeMarcos. Sal DeMarco ran the bait-and-tackle on Channel Drive, and his daughter Tess spent every summer of her childhood in this arcade. Megan was a year younger, so she remembered Tess the way you remember older kids: from below. A ponytail pulled through the back of a Yankees cap. Sunburned shoulders. A girl who could roll a nine-ball Skee-Ball game for four hundred and fifty without looking.

And Megan's mother, behind the prize counter, sliding Tess an extra strip of tickets every time.

Why does she get extra?

Because she's a good customer, Meggie.

Megan had hated Tess DeMarco from roughly 1997 to 2003, with the steady, satisfying hatred of a ten-year-old who has watched her own mother hand someone else the good prizes.

Tess DeMarco was Tess Albrecht now. Married, two boys, a laid-off insurance adjuster from Freehold. And at four o'clock this afternoon she was going to be given the keys to Hollis's Arcade, the building and the business together, for three hundred and forty thousand dollars.

The broker Megan had called in December, without telling her father, had put the value at somewhere north of a million one.

"It's my arcade," Walt Hollis had said, when she showed him the broker's email. "I'll sell it for a dollar if I want."

"Dad, she's practically a stranger."

"She's not a stranger. She grew up here."

"So did half of Ocean County."

"Megan." Her father was six-four and had been a good-looking man, and there was still a lot of him, but since her mother died in October he had stopped filling it. "Let me do this one thing."

She had let him. She had told herself he was grieving and sentimental and that it wasn't her money. That last part was true. It also wasn't how she felt, eleven weeks pregnant and not yet having told him, with her husband Sam's hours cut at the plant and a two-bedroom in Neptune that already felt small.

She looked at the bracelet again. 01/08/91.

She took off her glove and typed into her phone, thumb stiff with cold. Monmouth Bay Medical Center 1991 baby.

The first result was a Press archive page, the ones you could read three of for free before the paywall came down. January 11, 1991.

NEWBORN TAKEN FROM MONMOUTH BAY MATERNITY WARD

A woman dressed as a nurse removed a two-day-old girl from her mother's room early Thursday, telling the mother the baby needed a hearing test, police said. The infant, the daughter of Salvatore and Angela DeMarco of Point Pleasant Beach, has not been found. Hospital staff described the woman as white, in her twenties or thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair...

She clicked the second.

January 13, 1991.

BABY FOUND SAFE IN CHURCH VESTIBULE

The infant taken from Monmouth Bay Medical Center was found unharmed early Saturday in the vestibule of St. Brendan's Church in Sea Girt, wrapped in a blanket in a laundry basket, by a sexton opening the church for 7 a.m. Mass. Police said the child was cold but healthy. The woman who took her has not been identified. "Somebody brought her back," Angela DeMarco said. "I'll pray for that person the rest of my life."

There was a third article, from a year later. No Arrest in Hospital Abduction. Megan didn't open it. She had used up her free articles anyway.

Her mother had had shoulder-length brown hair in 1991. Megan had seen it in the wedding album a hundred times.

Her mother had also, Megan knew, lost a baby before her. A girl, stillborn, just before Christmas. Linda had told her once, when Megan was in college and drinking wine with her at this prize counter after closing, and then had never mentioned it again. A year and a bit later, her mother had said, you came, and you were perfect. Megan had been born in March of 1992.

December 1990.

At Monmouth Bay. It was the only hospital within twenty minutes.

Megan put her hand flat on her stomach. She hadn't meant to. It was a thing her hand had started doing on its own, sometime in the last month.

Behind her, the front door rattled, and the bell her mother had hung over it in 1986 rang twice.

---

Her father came in stamping his boots, carrying a bag from the hardware store on Arnold Avenue. Two rolls of packing tape and a box of contractor bags.

"It's freezing in here," he said. "Why didn't you turn on the heaters?"

"The heaters are sold, Dad. Everything conveys."

He laughed at that, a small one, and then he saw what she was holding and stopped laughing.

She watched him look at the bracelet. She watched him look at the open service door of the claw machine. She watched him put the hardware bag down on the air hockey table, slowly, the way you put down something that might go off.

"Where did you find that?"

"Where you put it."

He didn't argue. That was the worst part. Megan had prepared, in the forty seconds it took him to walk from the door, for a fight. For I don't know what that is. For your mother's things got everywhere. Walt Hollis had never been able to lie to her, and she realized now, with a sick drop under her ribs, that he had never needed to. He had just never said anything at all.

"Tell me she didn't," Megan said.

He looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain up there shaped like Florida that had been there her whole life.

"I came up the back stairs," he said. "That's all I knew. I'd been in Lakewood all day picking up a Galaga machine. I came up the back stairs to the apartment and your mother was sitting in the rocking chair she'd bought for the baby, and there was a baby."

"Dad."

"You wanted to know." He still wasn't looking at her. "It was on the radio in the truck on the way home. I'd heard it. I knew. I knew the second I saw her." He meant the baby. Megan could tell from the way he said it. "Your mother said, Look, Walt. Look, they let me bring her home. She said it like that. Like it was true. She'd been different since December. She'd been driving up to the hospital, did you know that? Most days. Driving up in the cold and sitting in the lobby. I thought it was grief. I thought it was a thing you had to let a person do."

"And you didn't call the police."

"I called nobody."

"For three days."

"For two." He finally looked at her. His eyes were red, but they'd been red a lot since October. "The first night I sat up with them. Your mother slept with her. I mean she slept, actually slept, for the first time since Christmas. I sat in the kitchen and I listened to the radio, and every hour they said the name. DeMarco. I knew Sal. I sold him the van."

"Dad—"

"The second night I told her the baby had to go back. She screamed at me. She said I was the one who was sick. And then about four in the morning she just stopped. She dressed the baby. She put on the little hat. She wrapped her in the yellow blanket from our crib, and she cut the bracelet off with the kitchen scissors, and she handed me the baby and went into the bathroom and locked the door."

The wind came under the boardwalk doors and lifted a dead ticket off the carpet and dropped it again.

"I drove to Sea Girt," her father said. "I didn't want to do it in town. I put the basket inside the inner doors where it was warmer. I sat in the truck across the street with the engine running and I watched till the sexton came at six-thirty. He picked her up. He looked both ways down the street like somebody was going to come back for her." Walt shook his head. "Then I drove home and I knocked on the bathroom door till she let me in."

"And then you just—" Megan's voice broke and she hated it. "You just lived? For thirty-five years? You let Mom stand behind that counter every summer and—"

She stopped.

Why does she get extra?

"She knew," Megan said. "Every summer. She knew who Tess was."

"She knew."

"And you let Tess come in here."

"How was I going to stop her? She was a kid. She loved Skee-Ball." His mouth did something terrible. "Your mother used to watch her through the window from upstairs. When Tess was little. Watch her coming down the boardwalk with Sal."

"Why didn't you throw it away?" Megan held up the bracelet. Her hand was shaking, and only partly from the cold. "Why would you keep the one thing that could put her in prison?"

"It wasn't hers to throw away," her father said. "Or mine."

Someone knocked on the glass of the front door.

Both of them turned. Through the frosted glass Megan could see a shape in a long red parka, one gloved hand up to shield her eyes, peering in. Then the hand waved.

"She's early," Walt said.

It was 3:22.

---

Megan pushed the bracelet into the pocket of her mother's fleece.

Her father opened the door. Tess Albrecht came in on a gust of wind, laughing and red-cheeked, pulling off a knit hat that said JERSEY SHORE STRONG. She was thirty-five and looked it in a good way, a strong face and a hard handshake, a woman who had done a lot of things by herself.

"I know, I know, I'm early, I couldn't sit in the car anymore. I've been parked out on Ocean for twenty minutes. My husband says I'm going to have a heart attack before I even get the keys." She turned. "Oh my God. Megan? Meggie Hollis?"

"Hi, Tess."

Tess hugged her. Megan stood inside the hug like a coat rack.

"I was so sorry about your mom," Tess said into her shoulder. "Truly. I couldn't make the service, my youngest had croup. I sent a card."

"I got it," Megan said. She had. She'd put it in the pile with the others without reading the name.

Tess stepped back and looked around the arcade, at the dead machines under their drop cloths and the dark marquee of the Skee-Ball lanes, and her eyes filled up, and she laughed at herself and wiped them with the back of her glove.

"Sorry. It's stupid. I spent every summer here till I was fifteen. I used to tell people this was my real house." She shook her head. "My mom always said this place was lucky for our family. I never knew why. She'd just say it, every time we walked past. That's a lucky building."

Megan didn't look at her father. She could feel him beside her the way you feel a wall in the dark.

"Shall we start upstairs?" Walt said. "The apartment. The boiler's the main thing. I'll show you the boiler."

"Sure. Yes. Lead on." Tess turned to Megan. "Are you coming?"

"I'll finish down here," Megan said. "There's a machine I'm fixing."

She waited until she heard their feet on the back stairs, Tess's voice going up ahead of her, Oh, I always wondered what was up here, and her father's low answers, and the door at the top.

Then she took the bracelet out of her pocket.

It weighed about as much as a strip of tickets.

She could keep it. She could take it home to Neptune, put it in a drawer, put it in the trash at the Wawa on Route 35 on the way, and no one alive but her father would ever know. Her mother was in the ground at St. Gabriel's. Her father was sixty-nine and had sold the only thing he owned for a third of its value to a woman who would never know why. That was a debt being paid. Maybe it was enough. Maybe that was how you paid this kind of thing, quietly, in installments, at a prize counter, a strip of tickets at a time.

Or she could walk up those stairs right now and put it in Tess's hand.

I'll pray for that person the rest of my life.

Which person, Megan thought. Which one.

She thought about her own daughter, if it was a daughter. Eleven weeks. The size of a lime, the website said. She thought about someone in scrubs coming into her room at four in the morning, saying hearing test, and her own arms empty for two days and two nights. Then she thought about her mother asleep, really asleep, for one night, with a baby in the crook of her arm.

She hated that she could see both of them.

Upstairs, Tess laughed at something. The radiator pipes knocked.

Megan got down on her knees in front of the claw machine. She tore a length of packing tape from the roll her father had bought, the new tape, clear and strong. She put the bracelet back in its yellowed bag, pressed it flat against the underside of the prize floor, exactly where it had been, and taped it there, three strips across and one along the edge. She ran her thumb over the tape until there were no bubbles left.

Then she closed the service door and locked it, and took the small round key off her mother's ring.

---

They did the rest of the walkthrough together. The fire extinguishers. The breaker panel. The roll-down gates, which stuck in a northeast wind and had to be coaxed. The Skee-Ball lanes, which Tess touched one at a time, the way you'd touch a horse.

At the prize counter, Walt laid out the keys on the glass in a row, and named each one. Front. Back. Gates. Apartment. Office. Change machine.

"And this one," Megan said, and set the small round key at the end of the row. "That's for the back of the claw machine. The lock sticks. And the claw's always been weak. You'll want to open it up yourself sometime and look."

Tess picked up the key and held it to the light. "This is going to sound crazy," she said, "but that was always my favorite machine. I never won a single thing out of it. Not once. Twelve summers."

"Nobody does," Walt said. His voice was nearly gone.

Tess grinned. She dug in her parka pocket, came up with a quarter, and fed it into the slot. The old machine woke up with a whir and its lights came on, pink and yellow, the only lit thing in the building.

She worked the joystick with her tongue between her teeth, the way she had when she was nine, and Megan watched the claw travel slowly over the pile of plush, over the bears and the bananas and the faded Tweety Birds, over everything that was in there and everything that was underneath it, and stop.

Tess hit the button. The claw went down.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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