The Center of Everything Page 3

  Polly had talked to Ariel’s stepfather only at graduations and when he delivered UPS packages; since the end of the relationship with Harry, she’d talked to Ariel’s mother only when she called to track down her daughter. Now she felt queasy at the idea of seeing the family, and she’d given a little puff of relief when Harry said to wait to go by with food. Food meant death, and the Delgados still held out hope. They were bitter that people didn’t share it. How long could you make yourself believe that your child was alive and lying on a riverbank, waiting for rescue, but what was the alternative? All the hard thoughts: Had there been pain? Had Ariel known she was drowning, or had there not been enough time to think? And how on earth had someone with as much experience on rivers as Graham let it happen?

  The sheriff’s department description for the searchers, as if they’d bump into another dead girl on the river: Ariel was five feet six inches, 120 pounds, a little long-waisted, with thick orange-gold hair and gray-blue eyes. She was wearing blue shorts and orange water shoes and a white T-shirt when she went into the river. She wore a Peake’s hat, too, but there was no way it would have stayed on. She had a goofy deep giggle. She loved Tolkien and Frank Herbert, and her Subaru was coated in good-natured left-wing bumper stickers. She was tough—she’d placed second in the St. Patrick’s Day Run to the Pub ten-kilometer race that spring. She’d been a lovely girl, funny and smart and ready to give the world wonder for decades. Or not—who knew what she would have been? Dead was all the things that would never happen.

  Accidents, thought Polly, came like arrows. A plane in a shrill pirouette, the flicker of an oncoming car in the corner of the eye, the branch that took you into a final cold, wet, violent kingdom.

  Graham told Cy Merwin and his deputies that he and Ariel had let their friends go on ahead so they could make love, that they’d been seeing each other for a while but kept it secret because of her family. When they put the kayak back into the river after waiting out the storm, they’d almost made it through a fast, braided section when a branch from a submerged tree hit the kayak just right at a dip, sweeping both of them into the water. Graham said he’d seen Ariel’s face underwater, but given the opacity of the river, this was delusion. He’d crawled up a bank with water in his lungs, bleeding from cuts, and a raft of stoned college students had found him there an hour later.

  By then it was almost 7:00. After a deputy finally managed to translate what Graham—who was crying, though he would not cry again—was saying, Search and Rescue was on the river within a half hour. Ned was already in Harry’s drift boat before they understood they’d be looking for someone they knew.

  Near the solstice, at this latitude and longitude, it was light enough to try to see sky-blue shorts and white limbs until after 10:00. There’d been no time to mount a true search before dark, though flashlights glittered on the riverbank all night. When Ned came home at 11:00, Polly heard the rattle of ice, the creak of the pantry door opened for the bourbon bottle. He came up and washed his face as she watched him, telling her about how little you could see in that water and along the green willow and red dogwood shore in that light, at that speed, the boat hurtling along. They’d done two five-mile stretches downstream from the bend where Ariel disappeared, shoulders popping at the oars to slow the boat down, and at the landing Ariel’s parents had been waiting in vain.

  Ned rubbed his eyes, finished his drink, and vomited in the toilet.

  2

  Sunday, June 30, 2002

  Police cars and boat trailers had begun passing the Berrigans’ small house, just two blocks from the river, before the next morning. The helicopter started at 7:00, and a dozen boats were on the river by 8:00. At noon, volunteer Gallatin County deputies found the kayak pushed against a weir two miles from where Ariel had gone in. If she was dead—and she was almost certainly dead—her body might still be close to that point, pinned down in a pool, or it could be shooting toward the Missouri. The current was still too high and strong for divers, and grappling poles could wrench a man out of a boat. All the searchers could do was try to reach every channel, scan every bank as they hurtled past the fishing accesses: Pine Creek, Carter’s Bridge, Mayor’s Landing, the Highway 89 Bridge, and eventually farther afield—Pig Farm, Springdale, Gray Bear, Otter Creek, Pelican. Harry said most drowning victims were found before Springdale, just twenty miles east of town. He promised that they’d find Ariel, though he complained to Ned about the other searchers and about methods.

  Ned wondered if Harry—who’d gone from being a social worker to an archaeologist to a cop and back to an archaeologist—had begun to wish he were still a cop, so that he had more say in the search. The whole family bounced around between professions, but Polly, in particular, had excelled at not making up her mind. In grade school and high school, she’d wanted to be a veterinarian and a historian, a horse trainer and a botanist and an architect. She’d waitressed and worked on a grounds crew, babysat and sold tourist trinkets. As an adult, she kept zigging—cook to script girl to editorial assistant. She’d always minded the idea that she should stick to one thing. She’d loved drawing floor plans but hadn’t taken the physics that would have allowed her to become an architect; she’d toyed with the idea of graduate school but never applied. Though she’d loved science as a child, she failed Merle, a biology teacher, by taking English and history and art history because she thought of them as her family line. But Merle himself had wanted to be a poet.

  Back when Polly had had two-year plans, instead of daily swivels, Jane had said, “You’ll be a late starter like me. And like Papa. A late second start, anyway.”

  Or third. There were so many ways to count Polly’s forays. Despite having emigrated from Sweden with little money or formal education, Papa, Polly’s great-grandfather, managed a whole mysterious life before going to university in his late twenties, producing movies in his thirties, publishing books in his forties, and becoming a legend in mythology. He worked as an archaeologist throughout, chased by war after war, and taught at Columbia until his death at ninety. His life was all about telling echoing stories, whether he was digging them up or filming them or writing about them. He didn’t cash in like Joseph Campbell, but he was first and everyone knew it. Polly feared she hadn’t inherited enough of him.

  And Jane was rare simply because she’d returned to school for a master’s in mythology and religion from NYU after Polly was born. She taught history for twenty years before abruptly producing a manuscript on the eternal nature of stories (The Inherited Dream) and another on ethnic and religious conflict (Ages of Rage) that somehow managed to give coherence to varieties of hatred. Both sold well and made the Times end-of-the-year lists.

  Because she came from a family of writers, friends and family assumed Polly would write. She never wanted that—she liked to fix problems, not create them. Polly liked doing what she did. Editing recipes gave her both the anal, geometric satisfaction of quantities and process and the zen of variables. She liked the puzzle of scripts and mysteries, the who knows what when and why; she liked dreaming up solutions. The writhing, errant world was filled with good ideas that needed only a little air and discipline. Once a book or script was rolling, she stuck with it like a meth-addled Jack Russell on a large, juicy rat. She was a technician, with no interest in creating her own stories; she didn’t mind that an idea wasn’t hers in the beginning. She came from a family of special and strange, but she wasn’t special, not special at all.

  Though privately, she believed that the ability to turn a turd of a manuscript into a diamond was nothing short of magic.

  “I thought, Why Polly?” said her internist after her accident.

  “Why not?” asked Polly. She guessed the doctor meant that they knew each other and liked each other. They were almost friends, and he would rather misfortunes happen to people he didn’t know. Polly wanted to pat his arm, but he might take it the wrong way. Just an accident, just a shame. It would be easier to bear if the damage had a plot, if she knew the poin
t to this part of the story, or whether she’d ever make a living from her brain again.

  Everyone had different acts. Montana had begun for Polly and Ned in 1987, when she talked him into driving out with her. He’d never been west of the Mississippi. They arrived in November, grimmest of months, and moved into the rundown house Jane had inherited from her great-aunts. Ned passed the Montana bar and got a job with Vinnie Susak. Polly edited freelance and tried to get catering work. They spent what they made and more fixing up the house: new plumbing, new wiring, a roof. It had four tiny bedrooms, one of which Polly used as an office. They put new countertops in the kitchen but kept the old white subway tile, so dated that it was new again, installed a commercial range and double oven, patched the plaster rather than putting in modern drywall. Ned rebuilt the battered sections of brick wall around the garden, and they pruned the surviving fruit trees and vines, fiddled with old terraced beds (peonies, rhubarb, roses) that looked out over Sacajawea Park, soccer nets and tennis courts and a playground in what had been, back when the house was first built—long before the Yellowstone had been rerouted during the Depression and the park had been created by the WPA—marshy cottonwood lowlands buffering the river.

  They mail-ordered olive oil and fancy perennials. They bought a lot of midrange wine and novels they never read. These sorts of decisions and expenditures set a pattern, and they danced in and out of debt. Their friends all loved food and wine and the occasional joint, memories of hallucinogens, music. They shared books, teacher tips, pink-eye medication, Ariel as an employee. They trusted each other without confiding too much, and when Polly had her accident, all these people helped.

  Mostly, though, Ned and Polly worked. When they bought the businesses on the ground floor of the Elite Hotel, they leased the larger bar, which faced the brunt of the town and its tourists, but kept the restaurant and its small entry bar. Until the accident, Ned cooked three days and two nights and worked two bartending shifts, a Monday to mop up from the weekend, a Friday to start it right. Polly had helped on heavy nights, handled most of the specials prep, and dealt with the accounting.

  But no more. Polly’s problem after the accident, really one of her largest problems, was an inability to prune what she saw and what she thought, to stop her brain. She was both too easily distracted and too attentive. When she’d gotten out of the hospital, she’d gone on a looking binge. Ned brought her photography and gardening books, stacks of Sotheby’s catalogues he found at the local Goodwill store, piling them everywhere as a hedge against her glitches in language. Polly spent one unnerving afternoon flat on her back in the yard, watching trees encroach on clouds. There hadn’t been much to do but observe.

  But she had always looked too hard at things. When she was little, in a decade of assassination and riot and war, people couldn’t always scuttle her away from the news, but everything—books and records and magazines and calendars—played into some grand theory in her brain about lost people. Her dead aunt Evie gradually looked more and more like the woman on the cover of Durrell’s Justine, and her dead grandfather Frank became a doctor in LIFE magazine. Jane had framed an image of a phoenix, a Persian fresco, from a magazine, and hung it in the bathroom—a golden bird, rising in front of a black sun. It didn’t look reborn, it looked as if it wanted to scorch the world, and it became another tile in her mind, so that later when a neighbor had a parrot, she suspected it was a phoenix in disguise. Bird books, art books—the world was filled with strangeness. Gorillas playing flutes on the cover of terrifying Stravinsky albums, Chinese horses and Ray Charles, soldiers dead in the Southeast Asian mud, corteges on television instead of parades or cartoons.

  Now, though, pictures sometimes scrolled around her even when her eyes were shut—a ribbon of color and random objects, usually beautiful but sometimes terrifying—and if she concentrated on a painting or photograph, she sometimes went inside of it, the way she had as a child. She saw the leaves in a van Gogh orchard and the graying wounded hands and feet of Holbein’s long strange Christ. When Vinnie, an amputee from a forest fire–fighting accident in college, tested a new, unclad prosthesis, Polly was as fascinated as the children by the titanium and the hinges. She felt as if her eyes could enter any surface: the ground, the river, closed curtains, flesh. Sam ripped a hole in his leg in late May, and Polly, remembering another little boy, could not stop seeing his interior after he was stitched closed again.

  Ariel, lost, would have the run of Polly’s mind.

  Few people seemed to believe her when she described this issue, certainly not her mimsy neuropsychiatrist, and so Polly was pleased when she was weirdly good at finding morels that spring in the river bottomland, the cream-colored honeycombs glowing up when you were right above them. Polly was the only one who found dozens, and the only one who didn’t trip over submerged branches. She wanted to stay for hours, getting sunburnt, getting lost. Josie and Harry, Vinnie and Nora, Ned and Ariel and Drake and the kids tagged after, everyone getting a little drunk. Only Graham hung back and sat by the river, resentful and embarrassed, stealing looks at Ariel, her red-gold hair flashing through the trees.

  When Polly went in for her first full cognitive testing, six weeks after the accident, the woman who administered the test wore a tight black T-shirt with black jeans and black lace fingerless gloves. The Testgiver (capitalized and one word in the leaflet Polly was given) was young, but she had gray streaks in her hair and her arms were doughy and profoundly pale, the pale of no sun, ever. Polly watched her and tried to imagine the life behind all this—the gloves, no sunlight, the CBGB look coupled with a face that couldn’t love music, or drugs, or anything wayward on the planet.

  The experience was innately hostile. When Polly made stupid, self-disparaging jokes, the woman took notes. When Polly misunderstood instructions, the woman said, “No need to be defensive.” Four hours of general knowledge, definitions, story problems, arranging blocks, repeating series of words and numbers, looking at an image for fifteen seconds before drawing it from memory. Polly’s reaction time was measured, and she was given a hundred-question yes-or-no psychological test: Do your parents like your siblings better than you? Do you use dirty talk sometimes? Are you afraid of the dark? Do you believe in evil?

  Everything was cold: the woman, the lighting, the furniture, the pervasive flavor of humiliation in Polly’s dry mouth. The fucking gloves—what was that about? The Testgiver said, “Some people complain a lot. We’re used to it.”

  We, the wall of authority. Keep the patient small. In a follow-up, Polly was told her tests showed that she was perfectly average. “Well,” said Polly. “Then why do I feel so odd?”

  The youngish neuropsychologist, who said Polly and Ned should call him Dr. P (“for simplicity”), leaned back with his hands up, as if to say, What can you do? Polly scanned the sheaf of papers he’d handed her, passing them on to Ned one by one. She’d done honorably in language skills, not well at all in spatial skills and math. Ned asked about the comparison group, and the doctor beamed. Polly was stellar against sixty-year-old high school graduates, and a solid average compared to older college graduates.

  As Polly watched Ned read, she began to bridle. How could the doctor be sure that her scores wouldn’t have been higher before the accident? For a fast vocabulary recall, Polly pretended that she was walking through a fancy New York grocery where she worked in her twenties—had he seen the words she’d written? Celeriac? Pancetta? Why on earth had a clock face been flipped backward, for a month? The thirtieth percentile for spatial and math—Polly laid no claims to anything beyond algebra II and geometry, but before the accident, she’d measured out every inch of the house when they’d renovated.

  “You might be depressed,” he said. “Only natural, given your constant questioning of your state of mind. Or it could be a matter of stress. You said you have trouble sleeping. The aging brain, menopause.”

  Polly had just turned forty-two. Dr. P was getting a jump, there. It could be a lot of things, but she
thought the simplest explanation might be best: Her head had slammed down on pavement. The neuropsychologist—whose bill would be paid by the old man’s insurance company—was not endearing himself to his patient, or adept at luring her toward his chosen point of view. He had a sharp, tiny nose and the tic of pulling on his small, white fingers while he talked, as if he were taking off a ring or giving a tentative hand job.

  Ned tapped her on the knee; Ned almost always knew where her mind was headed. When Polly snapped back into the here and now, the doctor was saying that everyone thought they were more intelligent than they were.

  Ned, normally too composed for his own good, grew pink. “She edited. She cooked at high speed. She didn’t have to pause and think through every step.”

  “It may be unfair of you to set such a high bar,” said Dr. P. “We would like to avoid a victim complex, fear of failure bringing failure, bringing on an even greater depression. She’s depressed and thinking she’s damaged or that someone was at fault will make her even more tentative.”

  “She has changed,” said Ned. “This is not about grubbing money from insurance. This is about helping her to understand and be realistic and continue enjoying life.”

  Polly was locking into we and she and succumbing to agitation. Ned obviously wanted to hit Dr. P, but Dr. P needed to be Polly’s victim.

  “If you’re hoping for medication beyond an antidepressant, there’s no magic bullet. Nothing can make Mrs. Berrigan more innately intelligent. We are what we are. But I do recommend antidepressants, and counseling.” The doctor pulled a prescription pad out, signed his name with a curlicue, and handed it to Ned, rather than Polly.