Jane always looked ethereal, even when she politely dripped scorn. “No reason to rush,” she said mildly.
“I saw four bodies before I turned nine,” said Polly, despite the fact that she despised one-upmanship. It was a blurt, a confession, and they all stared at her. Polly surprised herself, and she surprised her mother, too. Jane the athlete slid on the slimy green river rocks but stayed upright.
Josie opened her mouth to ask for some sort of accounting for these bodies—who what where why—but she knew half of it, after years of Polly, and started walking again.
Polly tried to concentrate on the good stuff, the wild iris, blooms long over, the wild asparagus, stalks bushed out. Today, instead of mushrooms, Polly found a dozen different animal bones, some owl pellets made smaller, stranger bones, a hiking boot, shotgun shells, an empty wallet and a half-dissolved copy of a novel. Jane found an old teakettle. Nora found a broken wristwatch. Josie saw something blue and screamed. It was a motor oil jug; Josie had no sense of naturally occurring colors.
They were shiny with DEET in defense against trapped flood pools, little spas for miasmas of happy mosquitos, as they struggled over ankle-breaking cobble, slick from the dropping river. They saw evidence of beavers, two dead deer, a pile of fluffy feathers from a fox or hawk or owl kill. They saw two black snakes and many indiscriminate live birds. Polly could identify dozens of perennials, but she was largely bird-blind, despite being dragged through the wilds and thickets of America by her father, grandmother, Maude. The dogwood and willow stands were dense and mucky, broken up by abrupt rock banks. Everyone but Jane fell down, everyone got blisters from bad-fitting rubber boots.
On the ride back to town in Nora’s back seat, Polly flipped open the soggy book she’d found, looking for some meaning, and read:
Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
It didn’t take much to make Polly’s addled brain expand. She knew Jane was watching her. On the seat between them, a folded newspaper with Ariel’s face smiling out at the world; next to that, a frilled baby summer hat, a pacifier covered with dog hair, and an energy bar. Polly squinched her eyes shut. Her brain teemed.
They brought their finds to the sheriff’s office, where they learned that another body had been found on the river, probably that of a Chinese American honors student from Claremont who’d been on the wrong trail in Yellowstone Park the previous June, slipped in the wrong place, been swept away. Cy bagged the boot, saying it was a match to the one found on the body. “Hell of a long ride on the river.”
“Who found the boy?” asked Polly.
“Harry, of course, in a tree, near where the girl went in. It wasn’t fully a body,” Cy said. “Just a tibia and foot hanging in a tree, stick with a boot.”
Though Harry was no longer a cop, he still helped with forensic work throughout the state—lonely femurs found on talus slopes, the bleak final campsite of a runaway, the predictable assumptions that any older grave was a crime scene and any dog’s tooth was a dead child’s incisor.
“What side of the river were you walking?” Cy asked.
He was writing on an already-crumpled map, many colors of ink, initials, notes about density of vegetation. The map moved on Polly, as if the drawing of the river was running off the page. She couldn’t grasp direction, and her face heated up. “East and south,” she said. “From Harvat’s Flats upstream.”
Cy nodded nervously, sympathetically. “How are you feeling, lately?”
“I’m fine,” said Polly, watching the map’s river flow. “How about you?”
“In over my head,” said Cy, who wished Harry was still the sheriff.
That night, Polly made a lovely chili—a 4-H beef shoulder and Chimayo chili powder, good tortillas and the last radishes. She took her time and concentrated, which lessened her new tendency toward the grand fuckup. Through the open window, while she prodded a chunk for tenderness, she could hear the high notes as Merle and Jane argued over blinds. Every morning, to keep the alley cottage cool, Jane would close the windows and draw the shades, and every night she’d raise the blinds and open the windows, and at both times of the day Merle would follow her around the house, making slight adjustments, while never taking on the whole task himself.
This squabble was about whether it was too warm to open up before dinner. The alley house was tiny, with a nice porch facing a small yard with roses. Papa had built it in about 1920 for Jane’s two great-aunts, spinster schoolteachers named Odile and Inge. Now it was fixed up enough to rent to a series of forlorn friends and family, or at least friends and family going through forlorn times.
But it was too cramped for Jane and Merle, who’d retired the year before. They wouldn’t last another week without a major fight, and needed to see a realtor. They’d been kinder to each other for a year now, with Merle not so resentful about life, Jane no longer telling him to exercise, drink less, mute his self-pity. It didn’t seem fair that you’d start life with polio and end with cancer, but, as Merle pointed out, he hadn’t ended yet. He was in remission, and in Michigan, he would still swim every day, either in a pool or a lake. In Livingston, there was no pool within thirty miles, and the river wouldn’t do for laps, ever. He was an obsessive man, prone, when nervous, to bouts of overeating followed by bouts of exercise. He was going to lose his mind over the course of the summer, and take them all down with him, especially Ned.
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.