“Do you think I don’t truly have a memory of the next summer, either, the man on the Sound?” asked Polly. “No cameras, that day.”
“No,” said Jane. “I’m sure you remember finding the man.”
Muzzy: Polly had close-cropped hair and a scar on her scalp; Polly had thunked her head on the pavement. Polly was bouncing back, sharpening up, vigilant, and on her way to being perfectly fine. To that end, at a doctor’s suggestion, she made at least one list each day, starting with everything she hadn’t managed the day before. She’d always loved lists, and she despised the doctor, and so she now believed the tactic had been her own idea.
REMIND PEOPLE blue tape for dates on walk-in
drop off food at restaurant
clean house! hahaha!
Maude party menu
Mom’s manuscript & tribute notes
call Helga about edit on Andalusian cookbook—okay by Sept
Drake’s stuff
PHOTOS
family tree
note to the Delgados? food to the Delgados?
Polly could have combined some of these lines, but she was trying for a sense of accomplishment. She’d forgotten to include errands on the list, a lost opportunity for a satisfying deletion. When she added it to the top later, she would not realize that she’d written errants.
The new morning drill, before they’d set out in the car that morning, Jane phoning from across the yard to ask if she could come over: Did Polly want to start editing Jane’s manuscript, just for practice? They could do something fun, or Jane could help with the kids, they could simply get ready for Maude. Or Jane could help Polly sort her projects, the great slipping piles of paper in the office, so that Polly could be ready to start working when she felt better.
A dizzying welter of shit, but it was meant to be face-saving, all around. If Jane didn’t approach it this way, if she didn’t dangle herself in multiple positions, Polly might act as if she didn’t have time for her mother, or Polly might feel that Jane was making the obvious point that Polly’s brain might be too damaged for much of anything.
Polly and her husband, Ned Berrigan, had moved to Livingston, Montana, fifteen years earlier from New York, and their two children—Sam, nine, and Helen, four—were born in the hospital six blocks from their frame house. Ned worked as an attorney for five years before they bought an old restaurant in the Elite Hotel, which they named Peake’s after an old family friend, with a small inheritance. As she had in New York, Polly edited (mostly mysteries, scripts, and cookbooks) and helped on a few shifts. They acquired two dogs, a cat, and good friends. Polly had piles of second cousins in town, and now more family was visiting: her parents, Jane and Merle Schuster, had driven out from Michigan the week before, and would stay another month in the alley cottage next to Polly and Ned’s house. They wanted to help; because of the accident, they thought Polly and her family needed help.
On a strange, warm day at the end of March, Polly had been riding her bicycle home from the restaurant when a car blew past a stop sign. It clipped her and sent her sideways, nothing like a horse fall, no midair time to think of how to handle it. Her head hit the pavement, but the first, larger feeling was the airless sucking and pain of her deflated chest, the fear that another car would come, rage at the person who got out of his car to scream at her.
The old man who’d hit her (twice, in emails to friends, she’d written bit) howled while witnesses waited with them for the police: Stupid girl, stupid girl, how dare you? He screamed harder when people insisted he was at fault. He was malign and narrow-faced; later, she learned he was the candy factory owner who lived on Yellowstone Street, collected old cars—he’d dented a Bentley on Polly’s bike—and, according to Josie Wall, spent too much time watching children through his plate glass window. When the sheriff, Cyrus Merwin, arrived, Polly said she felt fine—look at her talk, look at her move, look at her not beating this frail mutant bloody for nearly killing her. Cy stalled for the paramedics, but as they arrived in the town’s second-best ambulance, the radio went wild about an accident on the interstate. When the old man turned blue and collapsed into a heap, Cy forgot Polly.
She pushed her broken bike home with the police report crumpled in her shorts. If she thought at all, it was about whether the old shit would survive to buy her a new bike, and if her scraped legs—almost tan after a week of digging in the garden in the weird, balmy weather—would make a short skirt no longer an option for Josie’s wedding to Polly’s cousin Harry Swanberg that weekend. But before Polly let the bike drop in the grass in the front yard, she’d forgotten who was getting married, and she didn’t wonder at the absence of her children or her husband or her dogs, all off at a friend’s cabin at Mission Creek. She didn’t remember she had kids or Ned or pets, even though the cat was following her around the house. She climbed into bed and slept. When Ned came home at 9:00 and tried to wake her, Polly said “sick,” but she wasn’t hot, and she wasn’t fretful, and since she’d never done anything like this before he was worried but let it go. He put the children to bed and was asleep next to her within an hour. In the morning, when she wouldn’t get up, he saw some blood on the pillow and found the police report in her shorts and took her to the hospital. They sent Polly by helicopter to Billings and thought of transferring her to Seattle, but the bleeding was minor, and the swelling abated quickly, and Polly seemed like herself within a couple of days.
And so she went home with a stitched scalp and waited to feel normal after Josie buzz-cut the rest of her hair. Jane and Merle flew from Michigan the day after the accident to sit in the hospital. Polly’s three younger siblings, all in California, visited over the next few weeks. Jane and Merle talked of moving, saying they’d wanted to for years. Merle, who’d retired after thirty years of teaching high school biology, spent most of his time lulling Polly into playing card games.
At Easter, Polly overboiled eggs and spilled dye everywhere, but she worked on her attitude and was reassured by the idea that she’d always been a flake. She’d put a tray of something in the oven, sit down to work at the dining room table, remember she needed to move the sprinkler, and head outside. Once there—sometimes forgetting the sprinkler mission—she’d start looking at her plum tree for evidence of blossoms, and she’d keep doing this until the smoke detectors rang and smoke billowed through the windows she’d forgotten to shut. The worst moment of confusion came during her thirty-year-old sister Millie’s visit, when Polly looked down at the child next to her on the hospital bed—Helen—and wondered how Millie could be in two places. The second worst came when Polly called Sam “Edmund,” and everyone left the room in tears.
Polly painted half of her tiny study dark blue before losing interest. Sometimes she sat at intersections for minutes, and sometimes she power merged. She’d nearly backed over an elderly woman in the Costco parking lot in late May. Vinnie Susak, Ned’s former law partner, gaped through the window at Peake’s as Polly accelerated through a stop sign into oncoming traffic a week later. That was it for the car for a while.
Polly had ocular migraines for the first time in her life—jewel-like, kaleidoscope patterns that got in the way of reading but didn’t hurt—and she’d watch the show spread from a hard diamond to a fractal whirligig. At other times, she’d drop into a dream, a film instead of a painting, memories moving in her brain like a current. During these spells—she liked the Victorian weirdness of the word better than seizures—she’d see wonderful or horrible things, true moments and others that couldn’t possibly have happened. She fell off the end of the picnic table on May Day after a single glass of wine, having simply lost any sense of where her body was, but usually she’d just freeze in place. “Just give her a minute,” said Ned, now used to watching his wife dream with her eyes open. Sometimes she could hear him say it, even if she couldn’t speak. “She’ll come right back.”