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.
Nobody mentioned how long Rita and Edmund would stay, though Edmund’s father wouldn’t be home on leave until at least August. Merle spent most of the next day dragging things to the attic: his still-boxed journals, a steamer trunk with Dee’s old dresses, carton after carton of books. Polly was used to spreading her enthusiasms into the spare bedroom Rita now invaded, and spent hours cramming her dollhouse and her easel and a basket of her general mess back into her tiny room, which had been—like Edmund’s new room—a dressing room when people still cared about dressing.
“Rita could have warned us,” said Merle.
“She’s clearly not well,” said Dee, carefully.
Not well had so many possible meanings. After spending a week in the hospital with pneumonia, Polly connected illness with age, as in Dee, or with silence—Polly hadn’t talked much when she’d been in a little tent the fall before, sleeping and dreaming. Rita did not stop.
Rita’s mother-in-law phoned twice, and hung up on Dee both times when Rita wouldn’t come to the phone.
Papa called her back. “You know you’ve treated her like something stuck to your shoe, madam. And no, we will not send the boy alone to you.”
“Small-minded bitch,” he said, when she hung up again. “Horrible bourgeois cow. They should never be allowed to see that child again.”
“Do they want him or the idea of him?” asked Dee.
“Thomas will sort it out when he comes home,” said Papa.
On the trip to Michigan the summer before, the Wards and the Schusters had spent a weekend at a cottage on the beach. Polly and Edmund hadn’t felt compelled to talk to each other, but they slid into it, and they shoveled sand to redirect the creek while the adults sprawled, eating crackers and cheese and drinking from fancy-looking straw-wrapped bottles of wine. They didn’t bother with the children, and the children didn’t bother with them, and the night fell apart only when the six-month-old pointer Lemon jumped into the water and started swimming toward a freighter, Edmund and Polly running up and down the beach after their tipsy, weeping mothers while their fathers laughed.
The coast guard brought Lemon back. Merle slept in the tub that night and Tommy Ward fell asleep halfway up the stairs to the bedroom. When Polly woke up, she found Edmund in a chair with Lemon. Jane had Polly bring Merle water and ask how he was.
“I’m fine. Just fucking fine,” said Merle, pulling himself out of the dry bathtub.
It was Polly’s first crystalline recognition of bullshit. Merle and Tommy were giddy that day, in patches. They went out on a charter boat and both fathers vomited repeatedly over the side, which was funny at the time; Jane’s serene expression would remain one of Polly’s fondest memories. Then the beach again, people drinking again. Polly and Edmund, Jane slathering them with Coppertone, dug one more route for the creek, dozed with the waves tugging their feet, dangled from couches in the house, purple-lipped from sucking grape Popsicles.
The day, remembered as a whole (though Polly never was good at remembering the whole), was idyllic until they ended up at another beach in the town, near a break wall, to eat a picnic dinner of things from Edmund’s fancy grandparents (Merle’s description). Someone started screaming—the body of a girl had been found in the water near the break wall. Rita began to wail, and Jane and Merle and Tommy dealt with her while Edmund and Polly listened to the ambulance pass and watched the police and harbor men work with grappling hooks in the waves.
At dinner at a bar in the little town, they ordered fried perch, onion rings, a Roy Rogers and a Shirley Temple with flashy swords in the maraschino cherries. Merle and Tommy said they’d heard the girl’s boyfriend had thrown her off the break wall, as a joke. When they were all in the car again, Rita, who had been uncharacteristically quiet—even then, Rita was not quiet—announced that the dead girl had been her; she’d seen the red of her hair. It was blood, said Thomas. It was me in the water, she whistled. Jane reached into the front to pull Edmund into the back, away from both of them, as Rita punched her husband and the car weaved on the curvy road. Merle, drunk but a mild-mannered man of science, offered that there couldn’t have been much blood left, because there wasn’t much skin left, and the water had washed the girl’s system clean.
But Polly remembered red. How could she not? Rita crammed the memory deeper later when she showed Polly the tubes of color in her painting box, the smears on her palette. She said that if she painted Polly’s portrait, she would use alizarin inky black for her hair. She told Polly that in the old days black paints had been made with wood soot and burned ivory and burned vines. When Polly said her hair was brown, Rita said, Well, of course. And I’d use a brown for your skin, too. Look at your wrist and my wrist. I’m pink. You’re the color of wood. Very pretty, but you can’t be pink like me.
That smile—Polly hated it, and later she would hate the memory of it, that beautiful silky red hair, the sandalwood haze on Rita’s skin, the green stripes on her low-cut pants. At some point during the summer, Rita did a painting of Polly and Edmund. It was not, as Dee put it, a good likeness—Rita didn’t make them pose for long—and they were each blurred, moving away from the center, or possibly away from the artist.
But before all this, at that Michigan beach, during the last week of July, in 1967: The next morning, while Jane scrambled eggs, they watched Rita walk straight into the water like the dog Lemon, moving forward until she was up to her neck and started to disappear. Thomas ran down and jumped in after her. Edmund went back to reading, and Polly, gathering that this was the way to handle such situations, did, too.
They packed and loaded the car, but when Tommy turned around in the driveway, he backed into a sandy dune, and for the next half hour they dug like dogs, having no shovel, while Tommy and Merle argued and Jane kept Rita from straying, sometimes spinning her in place so that she giggled and forgot where she might have wanted to go. They stopped for fish sandwiches and beer and drove on to Edmund’s grandparents’ huge house in East Lansing. Storm lighting, humid and still, ninety degrees. Rita said the color of the air was viridian and kept saying it until everyone agreed with her. She started on about the color of her hair again, Titian red. When Polly said that this was the color of Nancy Drew’s hair, Rita went on about oxides.