The Center of Everything Page 6

  Polly tasted the glossy meat and tried to concentrate on how delicious it was, how fucking perfect, rather than the next batch of dialogue warbling across the yard, Merle talking Jane through the nitty-gritty of drowning: how long it took, what it probably felt like, why a body stayed down, how a body came up, how far Ariel might have traveled, how little was known about river morphology.

  Polly slammed a door to make him stop.

  They ate outside at a picnic table shaded by the willows that ran along the property line. From Polly and Ned’s yard you could see mountains to the south; from the upstairs you could see the Crazy Mountains to the northeast, and the slow rise of the Bozeman Pass to the west. During this kindest time of year, the wind rarely got over forty miles an hour, though it tended to hit that mark often during the fire season in late July and August. Tonight it was still clear, and in the garden, the roses were still blooming, and the tomatoes were surging out of a chilly June, not yet battered by bugs or heat waves or hail.

  After dinner, they dispersed. Helen dragged a hose around the yard, Sam read in the hammock. Polly started a card to Ariel’s parents, then gave up and wandered in the garden. On a normal day, in a normal week, she’d crawl around for hours, ignoring her children, watching things branch and bud, killing flea beetles by hand, one by one. She hilled potatoes, weeded, pulled out a row of bolted lettuce. She no longer heard the helicopter, out for a last evening run, but she noticed when it passed in front of the low sun.

  At 8:00, Ned slumped up the sidewalk with Vinnie Susak, Drake Aasgard, and Harry. They were sunburnt, with bloodshot eyes, exhausted and quiet and mostly fatalistic, sliding into beer, trying to keep their heads in the beauty and rhythm of the river. After they finished off the chili, Merle opened a bottle of tequila and they had shots, though there was nothing to toast. Ned showed Polly the muscle on his forearm that had been twitching for an hour; when the current was this strong, you had to sometimes stand at the oars. They hadn’t seen the downed tree Graham had described, but then no one who went through this sort of experience would probably have a straight memory. They talked about what was different about the river this year, after high water, about deeper holes and stronger currents and what the pylons on a new bridge east of town might have done to the flow.

  Throughout the conversation, Drake watched Jane, and as she slid out of the room, he pursued her toward the back door. He said he was reading Jane’s most recent book, Ages of Rage, and loved her chapter on Irish mercenaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more at home in Venezuela or Mexico than Dublin. Had she thought of how cinematic some of these stories were?

  The sheer physical blast of Drake was often too much. He was just more, all the time, a loud, fast, golden thing of beauty. At some point Jane might come around, but for now, he frazzled and annoyed her, and she snubbed him consistently. Now, when she fled, he stared out the window, settling back into sadness. He left a stack of files for Polly by the door; lately he’d accepted that he wasn’t the center of her world, and tonight, anyway, he looked almost as rough as Harry and Ned, though he was only thirty-two. Drake had spent hours every week with Ariel, and offered to pay for her graduate school, even though he thought she should go to Hollywood instead of becoming an archaeologist. Now he was offering to pay for extra days of the helicopter search.

  Vinnie, who was drunk, made up for Drake’s silence. Would people blame him for lending the kayak? Blame him for bringing Graham to town, or blame Graham?

  No one answered.

  “Why did he leave Seattle?” asked Polly. “What happened?”

  But Vinnie shook his head, finally noticing Sam’s presence. Vinnie was a good person, a defense attorney from a Butte union family, a quiet serial philanderer. Polly wasn’t going to peel his layers of guilt. They were all of them, at the best of times, amusing depressives and alcoholics. High functioning, Harry might add, in a better mood, and Harry was pretending to be cheerful, as if he hadn’t lost someone he thought of as a daughter. He was impressed that Polly had found the hiking boot. Maybe they should start using her on the river, put her in some sort of balloon and drag her overhead.

  “I don’t like heights,” said Polly. She pushed the kids outside, out of earshot. It was still light, warm and beautiful; if the helicopter was flying, it was east of town, out of sight and therefore out of Sam’s mind. After Polly gave them ice cream sandwiches, Sam took his book to the hammock, and Helen pushed him from underneath, sometimes poking Sam’s butt through the mesh. Polly dragged an old metal lawn chair onto the grass, ignoring the notebook and script on her lap for the sake of watching the bats. She did this most nights in the summer. She loved imagining what the bats saw, what the ping of a mosquito in an open mouth meant to them. She wondered where they roosted, if they were long-eared myotis or big browns or maybe endangered little browns, how old their pups were, what they’d think during the rodeo fireworks and if they would feel relief when the Fourth of July was over. She wondered if they hated her shrieking children and barking dogs, if they knew she was cuckoo, daffy, buggy, haywire, one watt short of a light.

  Behind Polly, inside the open kitchen window, Ned slammed dishes and Harry talked about where they’d look the next day. This was supposed to be his year for building business back up as an archaeologist—teaching part-time at Montana State University, some contract work in Butte, a survey up at the old Poor Farm on Harvat’s Flats, where the county had granted an easement to put in a road to a proposed subdivision and hired Harry to ensure the bulldozers and graders hit nothing problematic. Ariel had worked with him the week before, finding old plats showing the footprint of the burned and razed twenty-room dormitory for the indigent, a graveyard for paupers, farm buildings. But that Thursday, as a grader operated thirty yards from the closest foundation and ten from what should have been the nearest grave in the pauper’s field, it ripped into old pine boards and Harry and Ariel looked down at the many bones of a human hand. Ariel was thrilled—when she and Harry stopped by afterward she showed Polly her field sketches. Harry, carrying the bones in a canning jar, was less excited.

  The bats looped around a late-flying magpie and crossed to make a figure eight. Polly wondered if they herded the mosquitoes like dolphins herded schools of fish. All the small, swarming things of the earth—she thought of her childhood toes in the quiet water of the Sound, all the fry winnowing around, nibbling on her shins. She saw herself wading to the drifting rowboat, wondering why it was in the wrong place.

  Helen climbed into her lap and started scribbling in the notebook. Polly didn’t startle; she knew she’d dropped into another place, one of those pauses. Mix in some wine and fatigue and it wasn’t that different from going to sleep, even if her eyes were open. But from the far side of the window, Harry’s voice was real life, a steady murmur aimed at the other men. Harry could be calming when he needed to. Vinnie was back to ifs and thens and the unfairness of anyone blaming Graham. If Ned had told Graham he had to work in the kitchen despite his ineptitude, or in the bar despite begging for a lawsuit, Ariel would have been in the raft, and lived. If Vinnie hadn’t loaned the group the kayak, Ariel would have lived. If Ariel hadn’t decided to fuck his good-looking nephew—

  “Stop it,” said Ned. “No one blames Graham, but don’t you ever blame that girl.” The open kitchen window was beginning to throw a greater amount of light than it was taking in, the moment of reversal, day for night, and Polly could see the jut of his jaw. She knew how badly he wanted his good friends to go home, and now chairs scraped, Drake insisting he’d drive Vinnie, Vinnie saying he was fine.

  Harry left through the back door. His face had been blasted by tears and wind and sun, though he would always be good-looking in a battered, geeky sort of way. He and Josie had been together, more or less and off and on, for years, but in his twenties and early thirties, here and in New York, he’d been cheerfully, openheartedly randy. Harry could walk into any bar or funeral in town and a solid percentage of women within ten years
of his age would give him a fond, knowing neck rub. He gave Polly one now and talked about finding the Claremont student’s leg, and about the parents of the dead boy, whom he’d gotten to know the summer before when he was still a cop. They’d quit their jobs to search the river for their son’s body. When Harry called them after he’d found the bones, he promised to keep searching for the rest of his body.

  “Hey,” said Polly.

  “What?”

  “Why wasn’t Ariel wearing a preserver?”

  “Graham said she was earlier. They were sitting on them in the kayak after the island. He doesn’t remember why they hadn’t put them back on.”

  Polly thought of being young, warm sand grinding into your tailbone or knees. You finish and you laugh and you climb back into a kayak without weighing your skin down.

  Not Polly. She could have been out of her sexual pea brain, drunk to her nose, and she still would have put on a preserver in a kayak in that kind of water.

  “People fuck up,” said Harry. “It’s so easy to fuck up. It only takes a moment when the water is this high. Don’t overthink this.”

  Helen touched Polly’s cheek and whispered. Had Polly read the secret message?

  Polly looked down at the waves Helen had drawn in lieu of letters.

  “Is it about a treasure?”

  Helen shook her head, disappointed. Her brown eyes, the spiral of blond curls, a hint of the family attitude to her mouth.

  “Magic?” asked Polly.

  Helen smiled. Harry leaned over and studied the notebook. “Working again, Poll?”

  “Always,” she said. “Just Drake’s slush pile.”

  Harry tapped the notebook. “Is that Dee?”

  They looked at the open page next to Helen’s secret alphabet, Polly’s paltry paragraph of notes about a script next to a doodle of tree leaves and a profile of an old woman.

  Huh, thought Polly. It did look like her.

  Helen was sad, Helen was quiet. She wanted a glass of chocolate milk and Polly didn’t bother with a lecture about dental health. When Polly tucked her in, Helen said again that she wanted to look for Ariel. They’d get in a boat and find her. Polly was so good at finding things.

  Ah, said Polly, lying down next to her. We will find her, but you have swimming lessons. She knew where Helen was going with this. Finding meant fixing. Finding was a cure, and being lost was horror. A kid could hear a word clearly but entirely miss its context. She watched the tiny wrist flex to drink the milk, listening to the stagy gulp, waited for Helen to close her eyes, remembering what it was like to be small, holding a glass like that, wanting to make everything better in the world.

  Back in her own bed, Polly thought of drawing Dee in the notebook and of dropping into the moment, seeing Papa’s drifting rowboat for the first time in years, the minnows circling her toes in Long Island Sound. Now she turned her mind from what they’d found on the beach that day, and made her child’s body walk up the beach path to the house, climb the stairs to her old bedroom. She pushed the memory to another day, so that she could hear Papa and Dee talk, hear him follow Dee down the hall, saying something Polly hadn’t understood but now guessed was sweet and dirty—the sound of it, the edge, had a small tangy vibration. The old-fashioned cadences of Dee’s voice, laughing, and the lag of her bad leg as she and Papa walked to their bedroom

  Was Polly right? She’d known them so well. When the rowboat floated back into her head, she struggled awake, nudged Ned so that he moved onto his side and stopped snoring. Why these thoughts, now? The drowned man on the beach by the drifting boat—she hadn’t forgotten, precisely, but tucked it under the rest of what happened that summer, when she was eight.

  Polly let herself fall back asleep. Now she was in the boat as it spun and bobbled. Ned was rowing and Polly was looking through the blue glass bottom at Ariel, who passed underneath and rose to face the moon briefly before she rolled over, fingers and toes dragging against the gravel in a shallow stretch of the river.

  Polly woke again and listened to the rain. It wasn’t until the next day that a man camping on an island just south of town came into the station and said he’d seen a woman pass by the evening before, cresting the surface and waving a stiff arm. A shallow stretch, but before he could wade in she hit a faster, deeper current and vanished. He apologized for the delay but seeing her hadn’t made him want to get back into his kayak, in the dark.

  6

  Winter and Spring 1968

  Her good friend Edmund, didn’t she recognize him?

  Polly stood near her mother and her great-grandmother on a Long Island sidewalk, on a mild day in the middle of January 1968, listening to Edmund Ward’s mother, Rita, rattle on about old friendships, and pretending this wasn’t happening. She and Edmund snuck quick looks at each other while feigning interest in the cars going down Christian Avenue or the dog on the chain, yodeling at the sight of the visitors. Edmund had brown hair and a sad, tired face. They were both seven.

  Rita rattled on. When they were five or six, Polly must remember the day on Lake Michigan? They played in a creek, and there had been a puppy, and a campfire. Edmund’s father got the car stuck in the sand.

  “We saw each other just last summer, Rita,” said Jane. “They moved the creek last summer, before that horrible day at Tommy’s parents’ house. And we have the puppy.”

  They watched Rita’s mouth open. Her skin was so smooth she lacked expression. It was hard to look at her directly, as if something were wrong with her features, maybe even her smell. Polly turned away and let in a jumble of time and light: They’d cut off an oxbow in a creek along Lake Michigan and run through shallows while their parents were drunk and laughing. She mostly remembered the idea of Edmund, not his physical being. Yet here he was, paler and a little larger, now breathing noisily in her doorway, not a tan child standing in waves. She herself was a washed-out, skinny girl, nearsighted and born frayed, with black tangled hair.

  No one had warned her that these people were coming to their house. Dee broke up the moment and pushed the children inside. She said things like, So, Edmund, this is the kitchen. We don’t keep a lock on the fridge. Let’s have a bit of something and we’ll show you a room you might like. She had Polly lead him up to the little bedroom next to her own, usually reserved for their old friends from the city.

  All afternoon, Rita talked about the earlier times, when she and her husband, Thomas, and Jane and Merle had been in college together, when Polly and Edmund shared a crib or butted heads on a lawn outside of married housing in Ann Arbor. She had an accent—she’d been born in Ireland—but her voice was too loud, too sharp and piping, and because her face was so blank the noise seemed to come out of nowhere, a trumpet from a wispy halo of red hair. Polly, squirming at one end of the living room couch, tried to imagine the sticky plastic of the crib floor she’d shared with Edmund, the nylon web blocking their sight. They were foisting Edmund upon her, and she was watchful, because she sensed an explanation that hadn’t been offered, something wrong with either Edmund or his world beyond the clear issue of Rita.

  When Papa came home, Polly saw disbelief and muffled anger. Dee explained the situation in a kind of a circle, moving right through any pause that might give Papa a chance to ask a question. Rita and Edmund Ward are living here for a bit. Let me get you a drink.

  Papa followed Dee into the pantry with a set face. She could hear their voices through the wall, despite the fact that Rita grew louder and faster with every minute.

  When Merle got home, Jane put him on the couch facing Rita’s monologue and hid in the kitchen with Dee. Papa worked behind a closed door, and Polly and Edmund stuck to their rooms.

  What does Polly really remember? Since the accident, the temperature of the air, the way a mosquito could balance on the peach fuzz on her small arm, a sticky line of dirt in the inner crease of the elbow. Childhood is a green knot, hiding places and suspended time. It is the speed she can run through grass, the heat of the air, the fear of
pissing her pants on a school bus, the difficulty of returning someone’s gaze, a bright object in the sand, the way a good moment can slide to bad.

  Polly and Jane and Merle moved to Stony Brook from the city the year before. They were poor, with no money for both tuition and a young child. Papa and Dee were old—very old, in their late eighties—and Dee needed help. Jane stayed at NYU, but Merle transferred to SUNY, and Polly was enrolled in the Suffolk County school system. She had a new kingdom. Now, Rita and Edmund Ward were joining them because Edmund’s father, Thomas, Merle’s best friend and roommate in college, was overseas in the war, and because Rita could no longer stay with her in-laws, or they could no longer bear her. She said they were hateful, shriveled people. Leave Edmund with us, they’d told her, and they meant they wanted Rita to go away and die. This was most of what she talked about for the first few days. Jane gave up trying to herd Polly away, but Polly stopped listening on her own accord, and it seemed that Edmund did, too. They slid into companionship, silent at first. Later they were only quiet when an adult was around.

  Edmund and Rita were given the rooms next to and across from Polly’s. Merle and Jane had the big room at the top of the stairs, and Dee and Papa owned the end of the hall, a bedroom and study and a private bathroom. The house in Stony Brook had been a gatehouse of a larger, grander estate, most of it burned or sold off in the twenties and rebuilt in clusters of war-era starter boxes. Papa and Dee, needing a change after their daughter Asta’s car slid off an icy road and into the Yellowstone River, left Montana during World War II and bought the house when Papa took a job at Columbia. The other remnants of the old estate were the greenhouse Dee now used for a pottery studio and a small stone house owned by a woman everyone called the witch, who had a mostly green parrot that Papa and Dee’s cat May kept trying to kill. Before Edmund arrived, Polly never looked at the witch’s house directly, despite passing it daily on the sanded-in path down to the Sound. Though the water was only a hundred yards from their house, it felt farther because of the trees, the curved path, the witch’s vine-covered bungalow. On the beach the footprint of a boathouse was still visible, with a high-tide iron ring Papa used to tie up his rowboat.