That spring, she finally found Frank and Evie at the dry cleaner’s on Sullivan and Prince and studied them from behind her mother’s legs. Evie, fourteen when her plane fell into Lake Michigan, now looked as if she were about ten but still had flat dark hair and a small mole on her cheek. Her eyes were right, clear rich brown, and her skin looked the same, and her voice sounded familiar when she asked Frank when they’d have lunch (another convincing detail). Frank’s eyeglasses were different, and he was pale, but everyone was paler in a city. He was counting a stack of brown-wrapped dress shirts while the Chinese woman who ran the shop scanned the shelves for a last packet.
Polly was stealthy; she was careful. She couldn’t bear the terror of them looking back, the answering flash of recognition or the disappointment of being wrong or being forgotten. When another customer entered, a large woman with curly hair and a shiny coat, Polly wedged herself between Jane’s leg and the counter, splitting the difference between strangers to avoid and strangers to watch. Jane counted the money in her red change purse while they waited for the man and his daughter to finish, coins tapped out onto the Formica counter. The old Chinese woman reemerged in a cloud of hot fabric and blue chemicals, and the smell of the place was like its own ghost. As she handed Frank a raincoat and hung Merle’s only suit and Jane’s blouses from a hook, the young Evie met Polly’s eyes and smiled.
Polly felt her face crack open. She gripped Jane’s leg so hard her mother gave a little yip and looked down in confusion. “They’re not dead,” Polly said. “I told you.”
The other people in the store heard her. Evie looked away and Frank took her hand. Jane led Polly outside, into the wet pavement smell of spring, but Polly knew she’d been right. Frank and Evie still existed, though changed. They’d come here to hide and she’d found them. They’d forgotten who they’d been, but she knew better.
That afternoon Polly and Jane wrote letters. Polly knew most of the alphabet but didn’t bother with it on such occasions. Jane gave her a mug of cocoa and three pens, red, blue, and black, and they sat down to pale-blue sheets of airmail paper. When you’re three, you can write your own epic in your own hidden language, and even after you’ve faced the fact that some sort of shared code is necessary, the mystery of the original story might survive, if it was there to begin with. Polly drew careful slanted shapes with spaces and exclamation points to mark shifts in the story. She knew she should write the way she talked, rather than the way she thought, but after a few minutes the pattern strayed, and her private handwriting circled the page. She drew human figures, birds, clouds, a cave in a mountain, jagged waves and fish with sharp teeth.
“What’s all this, honey?” asked Jane.
“The people are thinking about whether to fly or swim or live on land,” said Polly. “Now that they’re someone else.” She drank some cocoa and went back to her pencils. That night she explained again, and Merle told her that dead was dead. Polly tried to talk about it again when she was eight, but then she put it away, with other childish things.
5
Sunday, June 30, 2002
On Sunday afternoon, as Jane sat at the dining room table drinking coffee, her face was bleak as she read one of Polly’s lists, this one highly specific:
Party menu: Just one pig now or extra shoulders? Ten loaves, salad Nicoise or Caesar? Spuds. Shrimp, cheeses, bagna cauda, make sure oysters cancelled.
Work: Write Dan (myst in August?), give up on Helga?
Clean baseboards, toilets, windows, lights, sinks, OFFICE, sidewalks
Find Helen’s swimsuit
Polly poured Helen and Sam orange juice in pretty ribbed glasses, diner-style glasses.
“Do you know where I got these?” she asked Jane.
“From Cora,” said Jane, uneasily.
“Do you know what I remember her doing?”
Jane pushed away the list and waited.
“I remember her pouring juice into one of these glasses, and then throwing it against the wall, and going into her bedroom and crying.”
“Cora didn’t throw things,” said Jane. “Ever. Not so much as a ball.”
“You weren’t there.” Polly could see the glowing glass of orange juice, and she remembered it from the perspective of someone who was thirty inches tall, nose an inch from the rim of the Formica table, the orange ribbons as the thing took flight. Not the why of it all, but the act. She had watched Cora crying in her bed, at eye level. “I’m sure it was after Evie and Frank died.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t before,” said Jane, marching toward the dining room and the boxes of photographs. “And we have a snapshot of you and a glass, taken in Cora’s kitchen. It’s black and white, so if you want to say it’s orange juice, great. But you’re mixing up life with pictures again.”
Polly thought of all the things she wished she could remember from photographs, all the photographs she wished existed. She’d like photographs of herself being hugged by any number of dead people: Frank and Evie, Papa and Dee, boys dead in the first AIDS rampage when she worked in New York. She’d like anything from the year 1968, when her world blew up. She’d like photos of the casual lovers of her youth, to see why she’d done such things; she’d like a photo of herself in a bikini in approximately 1986, to see why they’d done such things; she’d like the look on Ned’s face the first time he’d entered her; she’d like a photo of Sam or Helen, nursing.
If Jane could have anything, Polly guessed it would be one true memory of her mother Asta’s face. Young, in the moment, no sense of doom. Maybe this was what they were arguing about, the idea that Polly could remember the dead and her mother could not.
“I’m not lying.”
“I never claimed it was a lie. I know you believe it.”
Polly stomped upstairs with a pile of Drake files. Her small office was at the head of the stairs, looking over the yard. This was the room, walls currently covered with notes and postcard images, pinned like ugly butterflies, that she would need to clean for Maude. Now she looked out the window to see Merle studying the perimeter fence, tugging on boards and testing looseness, peering up into the fruit trees to see if they needed pruning. He seemed to be counting her tomato plants, and he poked at the bean trellis to see if it was solid.
Merle looked up and waved to Polly in the window, Mr. Happy. Everyone was so fucking cheery with her.
Ned was with Harry and Drake on the river again that Sunday afternoon, and Jane and Polly left Merle with the kids while they joined Nora and Josie and dozens of others in searching assigned stretches of riverbank. They thrashed through willow thickets and mosquito bogs; they were nearly charged by a bull, nearly eaten by an unnaturally vicious retriever. Nora, a filmy blonde who ran marathons, cut her ankle on barbed wire and promised to give herself a tetanus shot. She was a pediatrician, back to working mornings after her third child—Connie was her sitter—and this wasn’t her idea of a break. As they walked, she gave them a graphic description of just how one died from tetanus, something she’d seen as a resident.
“I’ve never seen a dead person,” said Josie. “Outside of a coffin. I’ve avoided it.”