“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.