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?”