The Center of Everything Read online

  They all allowed a moment of silence. Polly imagined one of the hardest things to learn, as a psychiatrist, was how not to patronize your patients. “I don’t want medication.”

  “Are you sure you don’t already use something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve told me you enjoy wine.”

  “You’re a righteous little prick,” said Polly. “Go fuck yourself.”

  You could take the girl out of New York, said Ned on the way home. He didn’t need to point out that she had been drinking too much.

  Polly’s secret, which translated to a dozen small secrets a day: She was sure she was losing what was left of her mind. After the cognitive test, she abruptly saw the stakes and understood that admitting weakness was unthinkable. None of them needed another doomed, disintegrating woman. Polly started saying that she was fine, just fucking fine, better every day. She feigned calmness and deliberation, and those who knew her well, after briefly worrying this stance was some new manifestation of damage, went along with the whole thing. There was nothing wrong with pretending, Polly thought. People made it through cancer and jobs and whole marriages that way. And how different was she, really? If you couldn’t remember normal, how were you to tell?

  Polly didn’t lie, usually, but she became good at leaving things out, eliding everything iffy that no one had noticed. Melted spatulas disappeared, bounced checks were covered, her children didn’t fink on her when she put her purse in the refrigerator or the trash in the pantry or her laptop in Helen’s toy box (despite the hysterical search that ensued). Most people didn’t notice if she called out for a dead pet, and when she stopped commenting on her weird painless migraines and started to think of her seconds of paralysis as minor spells, she stopped minding them; what a trick. When she lost herself in one of the moments, she told people that she’d been thinking about something, which was true enough, and people welcomed the chance to ignore the fact that she’d turned into an awkward statue. It would be a fine thing if she could go anywhere she wanted to with her moments, on demand, rather than, say, while driving or burning down her house.

  And if she could actually pick what she saw, where would she go? Dee’s kitchen, a moment in a Michigan orchard, a French street, her own body at thirty with Ned anywhere, the minutes after Sam and Helen’s births. Instead she was treated to a slideshow of Ariel, images clacking like slides as they changed in her brain: a little girl throwing a ball for a dog, a taller girl with a cello looking annoyed during a concert, a grown girl with a shovel on a high hill.

  3

  Saturday, June 29, 2002

  Polly’s great-grandmother Dee told her once that there were three kinds of dreams—not the passing filaments, the sorted trash from the day, but the ones that came back, over and over—about three kinds of things: wishes or desires, loss or being lost, and fear. All her life, Polly thought these categories felt true, and lately, they came to her in combination.

  Right after the accident, Polly wandered around most nights, not quite sleepwalking, always with some goal in mind. She woke up confused about what was real and what was a dream. Did she still smoke, sometimes, or had she quit cold turkey before she’d had Sam? Was she having an affair? Had Dee made face cards come alive? Polly would smash memories and images together, and on the mornings when she was still in this state, she was half-blind while she made the children breakfast and tried to sort out the truth—had she bought tickets for Sydney? Was she pregnant?

  Ned called these moments déjà you, and tried to be light, but during the night, Polly would lose the line between memory and the here and now, what had been, what should be. She was editing her story, surprised over and over in the morning to find the work was erased, and she was haunted by the in-between, true and not, the story bending once it hit her brain. Her occasional inability to distinguish what was real and what she’d dreamed was a torment at first, but she began to accept it, even look forward to it. Most of her dreams were pleasant, and she cosseted them. She wanted, in the privacy of the dark, to think about the good things, to spend time with people who were gone, to let the world be strange. During the daytime, she forced her mind to make sense, but at night, she told Ned, it was like doing mushrooms again, in the gentlest possible way, and thinking this way, indulging her strangeness for those limited hours, made her relax. She worried less about shorting out. If things got weird, she told people she needed to rest, to lie there and drift. Dreams felt true again, and often she could push them into whole stories.

  But on the first night of Ariel’s disappearance, Polly saw only bits of things, none of them good. She was tangled in grass, she was in a restaurant kitchen but the stove was over her head, she was running down the hall of Dee and Papa’s house in Stony Brook, a figure following her inside the ocean-blue painting on the wall. She tried to stay in the dream but couldn’t, and when she woke up, Ariel was still gone, and Polly cried quietly, while Ned talked in his sleep about tides.

  They had to remember that this wasn’t their tragedy. On Saturday morning, before Ned left to search again, before Sam and Helen could hear people blither on about how there was a chance that Ariel would be found, Polly and Ned told the children that Ariel was gone, that there would be no miracles, that she had felt no pain. Sam sobbed and wouldn’t talk. Helen watched him, not entirely grasping what had been said, and told Ned and Polly that Ariel was scared of the water, as if that made her drowning impossible.

  And what had Polly said in response? A half hour later, walking along the river while Merle and Jane watched the kids, she hoped it hadn’t been the wrong thing. She sat down on a bench and watched the water pass and thought, If I sit here and wait, I’ll find her.

  Saturday morning, overwhelmed by the sound of the helicopter beating over the house, Polly and Jane and Merle took Sam and Helen to the museum in Bozeman. They went through every room, read every label about Plains tribes and dinosaurs, inland seas and megafauna. They winnowed around vanished things, trying to make the children concentrate on giant lizards and bison and insects in amber and quilled cradleboards.

  Everything disappeared. Maybe it would help, knowing this. Maybe Polly’s childhood trips to the museum had been meant to bring home the same point. Look at all the wonders that have vanished, and yet here you are.

  Polly of the visions, of the X-ray eyes: When she walked a stretch of the river with a group from town Saturday afternoon, people gathering at the city park for a quickly organized search, she truly felt that she held a new special power, that she would find their sweet girl. But she was delusional, in all ways. She found a dead bird, a river-smoothed arrowhead, and a yellow Peake’s ball cap, already half-buried in mud. Polly sat down and cried until Josie, having her own hard time, tears rolling down her face, pulled her up and made her keep walking. Josie and Harry had been due to marry the weekend after Polly’s accident, and then again on this Saturday, July 6, while Maude was in town. Two days before Ariel disappeared, Josie bought her a maid of honor’s dress.

  Before the baseball cap breakdown, Polly, who liked silence for the sake of seeing, listened to people in the search group go one way or another: Graham was lucky; Graham was doomed to a life of guilt. Imagine, they’d say, being the one who lived—the poor fucking kid. People in town would be watching him, grading his grief.

  Graham was pretty and baby-faced, an angel with an athlete’s body. Working in his uncle’s law office hadn’t gone well. “He needs to keep moving,” said Vinnie. “Not a candidate for a desk job yet.” And so Ned hired him. Graham moved well enough in the restaurant bar at Peake’s. He was attentive but polite, bait for women, though not great when frustrated, not adept at communicating with coworkers. But imposing physically and charming with customers, right until the moment he tried to push Burt’s nose into his brain.

  Burt was a notorious asshole, but he was also an investor in the Elite. He’d asked Graham to lean over the bar and whispered something to him—Burt had been too drunk to recall,
and was annoyed to be writing on a pad, given his wired jaw. It didn’t matter. Burt might have started the fight, but Graham almost started a lawsuit, and Ned and Polly lost any leeway when they learned that Graham had done two tequila shots in the kitchen after Burt began to hector him, and just before he knocked Burt off his stool and kicked him in the face. Their perfect, charming bartender had a short fuse when drinking.

  “What did he say to you?” asked Polly.

  His cheeks burned—Polly the editor hated meaningless phrases, but Graham’s truly burned maroon. “I can’t say it.”

  “Tell Ned, then.”

  A stunned look, then a flash of humor. “I really can’t tell Ned.”

  Polly wondered about Graham’s inner life, mostly whether or not it existed. Girls, sports, resentments, better angels blunted by envy and insecurity, the sweet kid who’d visited Vinnie most summers beaten down by the world’s itchy bits. The Wednesday after the fight, when they tried him in the restaurant for prep, he was unable to peel a carrot or a potato in less than a half an hour, and they loaned him out to Harry for the archaeological survey at the site of the old Poor Farm—the defunct county home for the indigent, with a potter’s field—that had been scheduled before Polly was hurt, or Maude planned her birthday, or Ariel disappeared. Polly was tormented by the thought that if they’d kept him in the kitchen, Ariel and Graham would not have worked together and might not have ended up in the kayak together on Friday. But there was Graham, telling the police they’d been in love.

  Polly, however iffy her driving, was the person nominated to take Graham home from the hospital at the end of the day. While they waited for the doctor to show up and sign the release, Polly looked at Graham sidelong, which was easy because he had a patch on one eye. She’d remembered him as a shy teenager who liked to draw, a soulful boy who’d somehow grown into one of those kids who shone, almost obnoxiously, with good health and power. Rude health, Polly thought, and his good cheer felt forced to her now, a depressive’s response. He was beautiful, but she was immune—maybe it was her age but she’d never found perfection inspiring, and cleaning that much blood off the bar floor after the Burt incident wasn’t her kind of flaw. Now Graham had new bruises overlaying an older one on his temple, where Ned had dropped him with a chair in an attempt to prevent Burt’s death, and scrapes everywhere else, stitches in his knees and on his scalp. The scratches on his throat were angry gouges, and river water in his stomach and lungs meant that he’d need to watch for both pneumonia and giardia.

  Polly patted Graham’s hunched shoulder and he stiffened. She turned away and piled up medical handouts, hoping and failing to find a get-well card. She wanted to ask how long he’d been seeing Ariel, how and why they’d kept it a secret.

  “Can I grab anything at the store for you? Help you in the apartment?”

  He shook his head and stared out the window. She tried again. Did Graham want to talk to someone? Help with the search? Visit Ariel’s family?

  “I can’t face people,” said Graham. “And anyway, they won’t want to see me.”

  “I think they might,” said Polly.

  Graham stared at the floor. Polly, shaky from the sheer effort of the conversation, grabbed the release papers and went looking for the doctor, who happened to be her own doctor. She knew he was appraising her as he signed off on Graham’s release.

  “Is he on something?” asked Polly.

  “Not a thing,” said her doctor. “How are you feeling?”

  “Great!” she said. Sanity was tenuous and life was burning by.

  They climbed into the car. Polly pulled out onto Geyser a little abruptly and Graham flinched. “Should you be driving?”

  “Of course I should,” said Polly. “Would you prefer to walk?”

  He didn’t reply or apologize or speak again until she pulled up by his apartment, across from Peake’s on the third floor of the old Masonic temple.

  “No one expects you at work again for a bit. Maybe help with prep during the parade?” said Polly. “But Harry says he could use you, when he gets back to the excavation.”

  “Okay,” said Graham.

  “Can I help with anything?” asked Polly.

  “Nothing to be done,” said Graham.

  He looked so young—no beard, freckles between river scratches. “Do you want to go home to Seattle and wait there for your parents to return?” she asked. Vinnie’s brother and sister-in-law were traveling in Italy, and not volunteering to fly home to deal with their son’s trauma.

  “No,” said Graham, still not looking at her. “I left for a reason.”

  Polly drove off carefully, wondering what horrible thing had happened to Graham in Seattle, and thinking of how sad it was to have something happen here, too.

  In the dark, on Saturday night, the world fell apart again when Helen had a nightmare. Sam had already come to Polly and Ned at midnight, and so Polly climbed into Helen’s bed. Maybe, two by two, they’d get some sleep.

  The earth cracked open, said Helen. There were things inside. She wanted to look for Ariel.

  Polly said “Sssssshhh,” and “I love you,” and shut her own eyes, wondering what Helen had seen. The cruelest thing, now that Ariel was probably lost forever, was that she was already on her way to being forgotten. She would now mostly make people think of their own dead or of things they should have kept doing in life, because they’d been reminded again that they were lucky. They would bring food, write notes, try not to say the wrong thing, and not allow themselves to think their way down to the dark, where Ariel’s family lived now.

  Polly dropped away from everything and saw Ariel’s body unfurl underwater, arms and hair spinning like a pale seaweed weather vane, like car lights around a wet curve at night when Polly was a child stretched out on the back seat of the station wagon, passing stores and streetlights out on Long Island as Jane and Merle headed home from a party.

  4

  Spring 1963

  Polly, who had known many people killed by water, and who now had a problem sorting the past from the present, was born with the name Apollonia Asta. Merle Schuster had been in a poetic phase, and Asta was the name of Jane’s dead mother. Those cursive As and Ls took Polly years to master.

  Some history, and a love story: Merle had met Jane at a cocktail party in 1959, thrown by some English major using his absent parents’ fancy house in Ann Arbor, with a full bar, silver toothpicks for the olives and cherries and pickled onions, mixed nuts in an Italian glass bowl. People were dressed up, smoking and talking pompously about Bergman, while Jane was joking about the movies—admiring them, but comfortable enough to make fun of the boatload of symbolism in every frame. Merle heard she was well traveled and knew French and Italian and some Spanish. She was only nineteen, an orphan, but she’d started college early, and her grandfather was a Big Deal in archaeology and mythology. She was tall, with light-blue eyes that jarred against her thick dark hair and gold skin, which looked as if she’d been sunning on an island instead of stumbling through a dank midwestern term. All this, and she was from Montana.

  Jane told Merle that Bergman had consulted her grandfather for The Seventh Seal and The Magician, meeting at Le Pavillon for feasts while they talked about death and old dreams. This level of sophistication, as well as the way Jane smoked a cigarette and preferred whiskey to beer, made various parts of Merle’s body and soul expand. He’d grown up smart but poor, and he wanted the world.

  What Jane liked about Merle: He was good-looking but gawky, with a high forehead and curly hair, a lanky Roman statue with an astounding, aquiline nose. He didn’t patronize her, he admitted ignorance rather than feigning seriousness, he truly listened, and he knew how to fix things like cars and clocks and doorknobs. He was honest, and ardent, and read books. She pitied his polio-withered left arm and marveled at the brown, muscled right.

  Jane didn’t know Merle was a sweet but melancholic alcoholic who would have trouble, all his life, finishing anything—fencing projects, n
ovel writing, the dishes. Merle didn’t know that every member of Jane’s family had at least one substantial secret, and that all these secrets had pooled in her body and her brain.

  Jane was beautiful, as beautiful as her lost mother, Asta, who’d existed only in photographs since a car accident in 1941, and as Asta’s mother, Perdita, Papa’s first wife, who’d died soon after giving birth in 1917. Jane was so lovely that Polly could remember being eight, living with Papa and Dee, watching visitors—poets and academics—spilling things while they tried to have a conversation with her. On the first day of school, Jane was always the mother everyone looked at, and Polly would feel a bolt of pride make its way through her dread of the new. Even at the time she’d known, without minding, that she would never come close. Jane could beat Polly in tennis while hitting with the handle, and on the iced-over pond near the farmhouse in Michigan, Jane would make graceful figure eights around her daughter, who fell again and again. Jane was elegant; Polly was not. Whatever genes Papa and Perdita had brought to the table—beauty, the ability to glide, the ability to kill with a look—very few had been left for Polly, whose figure was closer to that of Merle’s sweet dumpling mother, Cora.

  Jane was still a junior at the University of Michigan when she became pregnant. She managed to receive her bachelor’s degree two years late, but everyone gave up something. Instead of hitchhiking around Europe, or writing poetry, or whatever escape he’d half planned, Merle signed up for a graduate degree in microbiology in Ann Arbor. They moved into married housing but spent most weekends at Merle’s family’s house a half hour away, a small plain place with linoleum and thin-planked oak floors, a cross on the wall next to school portraits. Merle’s parents, Cora and Frank, fed them; a swarm of teenagers cared for Polly when Merle and Jane needed to be young and alone.