Polly didn’t lie, usually, but she became good at leaving things out, eliding everything iffy that no one had noticed. Melted spatulas disappeared, bounced checks were covered, her children didn’t fink on her when she put her purse in the refrigerator or the trash in the pantry or her laptop in Helen’s toy box (despite the hysterical search that ensued). Most people didn’t notice if she called out for a dead pet, and when she stopped commenting on her weird painless migraines and started to think of her seconds of paralysis as minor spells, she stopped minding them; what a trick. When she lost herself in one of the moments, she told people that she’d been thinking about something, which was true enough, and people welcomed the chance to ignore the fact that she’d turned into an awkward statue. It would be a fine thing if she could go anywhere she wanted to with her moments, on demand, rather than, say, while driving or burning down her house.
And if she could actually pick what she saw, where would she go? Dee’s kitchen, a moment in a Michigan orchard, a French street, her own body at thirty with Ned anywhere, the minutes after Sam and Helen’s births. Instead she was treated to a slideshow of Ariel, images clacking like slides as they changed in her brain: a little girl throwing a ball for a dog, a taller girl with a cello looking annoyed during a concert, a grown girl with a shovel on a high hill.
3
Saturday, June 29, 2002
Polly’s great-grandmother Dee told her once that there were three kinds of dreams—not the passing filaments, the sorted trash from the day, but the ones that came back, over and over—about three kinds of things: wishes or desires, loss or being lost, and fear. All her life, Polly thought these categories felt true, and lately, they came to her in combination.
Right after the accident, Polly wandered around most nights, not quite sleepwalking, always with some goal in mind. She woke up confused about what was real and what was a dream. Did she still smoke, sometimes, or had she quit cold turkey before she’d had Sam? Was she having an affair? Had Dee made face cards come alive? Polly would smash memories and images together, and on the mornings when she was still in this state, she was half-blind while she made the children breakfast and tried to sort out the truth—had she bought tickets for Sydney? Was she pregnant?
Ned called these moments déjà you, and tried to be light, but during the night, Polly would lose the line between memory and the here and now, what had been, what should be. She was editing her story, surprised over and over in the morning to find the work was erased, and she was haunted by the in-between, true and not, the story bending once it hit her brain. Her occasional inability to distinguish what was real and what she’d dreamed was a torment at first, but she began to accept it, even look forward to it. Most of her dreams were pleasant, and she cosseted them. She wanted, in the privacy of the dark, to think about the good things, to spend time with people who were gone, to let the world be strange. During the daytime, she forced her mind to make sense, but at night, she told Ned, it was like doing mushrooms again, in the gentlest possible way, and thinking this way, indulging her strangeness for those limited hours, made her relax. She worried less about shorting out. If things got weird, she told people she needed to rest, to lie there and drift. Dreams felt true again, and often she could push them into whole stories.
But on the first night of Ariel’s disappearance, Polly saw only bits of things, none of them good. She was tangled in grass, she was in a restaurant kitchen but the stove was over her head, she was running down the hall of Dee and Papa’s house in Stony Brook, a figure following her inside the ocean-blue painting on the wall. She tried to stay in the dream but couldn’t, and when she woke up, Ariel was still gone, and Polly cried quietly, while Ned talked in his sleep about tides.
They had to remember that this wasn’t their tragedy. On Saturday morning, before Ned left to search again, before Sam and Helen could hear people blither on about how there was a chance that Ariel would be found, Polly and Ned told the children that Ariel was gone, that there would be no miracles, that she had felt no pain. Sam sobbed and wouldn’t talk. Helen watched him, not entirely grasping what had been said, and told Ned and Polly that Ariel was scared of the water, as if that made her drowning impossible.
And what had Polly said in response? A half hour later, walking along the river while Merle and Jane watched the kids, she hoped it hadn’t been the wrong thing. She sat down on a bench and watched the water pass and thought, If I sit here and wait, I’ll find her.
Saturday morning, overwhelmed by the sound of the helicopter beating over the house, Polly and Jane and Merle took Sam and Helen to the museum in Bozeman. They went through every room, read every label about Plains tribes and dinosaurs, inland seas and megafauna. They winnowed around vanished things, trying to make the children concentrate on giant lizards and bison and insects in amber and quilled cradleboards.
Everything disappeared. Maybe it would help, knowing this. Maybe Polly’s childhood trips to the museum had been meant to bring home the same point. Look at all the wonders that have vanished, and yet here you are.
Polly of the visions, of the X-ray eyes: When she walked a stretch of the river with a group from town Saturday afternoon, people gathering at the city park for a quickly organized search, she truly felt that she held a new special power, that she would find their sweet girl. But she was delusional, in all ways. She found a dead bird, a river-smoothed arrowhead, and a yellow Peake’s ball cap, already half-buried in mud. Polly sat down and cried until Josie, having her own hard time, tears rolling down her face, pulled her up and made her keep walking. Josie and Harry had been due to marry the weekend after Polly’s accident, and then again on this Saturday, July 6, while Maude was in town. Two days before Ariel disappeared, Josie bought her a maid of honor’s dress.
Before the baseball cap breakdown, Polly, who liked silence for the sake of seeing, listened to people in the search group go one way or another: Graham was lucky; Graham was doomed to a life of guilt. Imagine, they’d say, being the one who lived—the poor fucking kid. People in town would be watching him, grading his grief.
Graham was pretty and baby-faced, an angel with an athlete’s body. Working in his uncle’s law office hadn’t gone well. “He needs to keep moving,” said Vinnie. “Not a candidate for a desk job yet.” And so Ned hired him. Graham moved well enough in the restaurant bar at Peake’s. He was attentive but polite, bait for women, though not great when frustrated, not adept at communicating with coworkers. But imposing physically and charming with customers, right until the moment he tried to push Burt’s nose into his brain.
Burt was a notorious asshole, but he was also an investor in the Elite. He’d asked Graham to lean over the bar and whispered something to him—Burt had been too drunk to recall, and was annoyed to be writing on a pad, given his wired jaw. It didn’t matter. Burt might have started the fight, but Graham almost started a lawsuit, and Ned and Polly lost any leeway when they learned that Graham had done two tequila shots in the kitchen after Burt began to hector him, and just before he knocked Burt off his stool and kicked him in the face. Their perfect, charming bartender had a short fuse when drinking.
“What did he say to you?” asked Polly.