“All of them?” asked Polly.
“Maybe I didn’t know them well enough to be sure,” said Ariel. “All of them so far.”
A little humor, a little bravado. She was still dabbling, thought Polly. But had she been in love?
Maybe, said Ariel. Maybe she was now, but Polly would laugh at the name.
Tell me, said Polly.
Nope, said Ariel. I’ll be over it in no time.
The lack of bullshit, the frank doubt, impressed Polly, who’d always seen life, love, the whole mess as a war of possibilities and had never wanted to consider the bad odds. At Ariel’s age in New York, Polly hadn’t paused to think. They were talking in late May; they’d run down to the Yellowstone with the wagon to make the children happy after dinner, after wine, to see if the river had risen during the day. Polly’s curly dark hair was beginning to hide her scar, and she was giddy, trotting along the muddy dike. In the spring, even in years when there was little chance of flooding, it was hard not to believe that all the water in the world wasn’t rushing down toward them. Freshly ripped trees, a broken pelican tumbling through the muddy chocolate water. Or maybe a swan, but the flash of yellow-orange from a beak or feet seemed too large. Ariel was sunburnt that day. It made her even unhappier in her skin, but she was beautiful to all of them.
Over the hours Ariel worked for her, Polly edited a dozen mysteries and cookbooks, on top of the scripts she vetted. Ariel did some work for Drake, too, and he offered to help her get a real job in Los Angeles, but the futility of the Hollywood process shocked her—all the back-and-forth, and Drake never agreed to film anything; nothing was ever perfect enough to pry him out of hiding. Ariel liked concrete things, and that summer, she’d begun to help Harry with some archaeology jobs and think of a graduate degree, even though Harry was clear that archaeology was as shitty a way to make a living as writing or editing or cooking. He worried he would be responsible for a life of poverty, while Drake promised riches.
It was an interesting tug-of-war, but Ariel had been happy and comfortable with herself, unlike Graham Susak, the boy who’d been behind her in the two-man kayak. Graham had left Seattle to stay with his uncle Vinnie that winter because of some hard time, some incident or depression. There were so many possible ways trouble could manifest at twenty-four that no one pried into it. Graham was two years older than Ariel, tall and handsome and clearly lonely, but though he was articulate while bartending, he hadn’t been able to spit out a word in front of Ariel, and she had been noncommittal. Graham was nice, but not for her—too jocky, too surly. Polly had no idea of how they’d ended up in a kayak together, and no one riding in the other boats seemed to know, either. Ariel’s parents might, but it was unlikely.
Polly had talked to Ariel’s stepfather only at graduations and when he delivered UPS packages; since the end of the relationship with Harry, she’d talked to Ariel’s mother only when she called to track down her daughter. Now she felt queasy at the idea of seeing the family, and she’d given a little puff of relief when Harry said to wait to go by with food. Food meant death, and the Delgados still held out hope. They were bitter that people didn’t share it. How long could you make yourself believe that your child was alive and lying on a riverbank, waiting for rescue, but what was the alternative? All the hard thoughts: Had there been pain? Had Ariel known she was drowning, or had there not been enough time to think? And how on earth had someone with as much experience on rivers as Graham let it happen?
The sheriff’s department description for the searchers, as if they’d bump into another dead girl on the river: Ariel was five feet six inches, 120 pounds, a little long-waisted, with thick orange-gold hair and gray-blue eyes. She was wearing blue shorts and orange water shoes and a white T-shirt when she went into the river. She wore a Peake’s hat, too, but there was no way it would have stayed on. She had a goofy deep giggle. She loved Tolkien and Frank Herbert, and her Subaru was coated in good-natured left-wing bumper stickers. She was tough—she’d placed second in the St. Patrick’s Day Run to the Pub ten-kilometer race that spring. She’d been a lovely girl, funny and smart and ready to give the world wonder for decades. Or not—who knew what she would have been? Dead was all the things that would never happen.
Accidents, thought Polly, came like arrows. A plane in a shrill pirouette, the flicker of an oncoming car in the corner of the eye, the branch that took you into a final cold, wet, violent kingdom.
Graham told Cy Merwin and his deputies that he and Ariel had let their friends go on ahead so they could make love, that they’d been seeing each other for a while but kept it secret because of her family. When they put the kayak back into the river after waiting out the storm, they’d almost made it through a fast, braided section when a branch from a submerged tree hit the kayak just right at a dip, sweeping both of them into the water. Graham said he’d seen Ariel’s face underwater, but given the opacity of the river, this was delusion. He’d crawled up a bank with water in his lungs, bleeding from cuts, and a raft of stoned college students had found him there an hour later.
By then it was almost 7:00. After a deputy finally managed to translate what Graham—who was crying, though he would not cry again—was saying, Search and Rescue was on the river within a half hour. Ned was already in Harry’s drift boat before they understood they’d be looking for someone they knew.
Near the solstice, at this latitude and longitude, it was light enough to try to see sky-blue shorts and white limbs until after 10:00. There’d been no time to mount a true search before dark, though flashlights glittered on the riverbank all night. When Ned came home at 11:00, Polly heard the rattle of ice, the creak of the pantry door opened for the bourbon bottle. He came up and washed his face as she watched him, telling her about how little you could see in that water and along the green willow and red dogwood shore in that light, at that speed, the boat hurtling along. They’d done two five-mile stretches downstream from the bend where Ariel disappeared, shoulders popping at the oars to slow the boat down, and at the landing Ariel’s parents had been waiting in vain.
Ned rubbed his eyes, finished his drink, and vomited in the toilet.
2
Sunday, June 30, 2002
Police cars and boat trailers had begun passing the Berrigans’ small house, just two blocks from the river, before the next morning. The helicopter started at 7:00, and a dozen boats were on the river by 8:00. At noon, volunteer Gallatin County deputies found the kayak pushed against a weir two miles from where Ariel had gone in. If she was dead—and she was almost certainly dead—her body might still be close to that point, pinned down in a pool, or it could be shooting toward the Missouri. The current was still too high and strong for divers, and grappling poles could wrench a man out of a boat. All the searchers could do was try to reach every channel, scan every bank as they hurtled past the fishing accesses: Pine Creek, Carter’s Bridge, Mayor’s Landing, the Highway 89 Bridge, and eventually farther afield—Pig Farm, Springdale, Gray Bear, Otter Creek, Pelican. Harry said most drowning victims were found before Springdale, just twenty miles east of town. He promised that they’d find Ariel, though he complained to Ned about the other searchers and about methods.