His cheeks burned—Polly the editor hated meaningless phrases, but Graham’s truly burned maroon. “I can’t say it.”
“Tell Ned, then.”
A stunned look, then a flash of humor. “I really can’t tell Ned.”
Polly wondered about Graham’s inner life, mostly whether or not it existed. Girls, sports, resentments, better angels blunted by envy and insecurity, the sweet kid who’d visited Vinnie most summers beaten down by the world’s itchy bits. The Wednesday after the fight, when they tried him in the restaurant for prep, he was unable to peel a carrot or a potato in less than a half an hour, and they loaned him out to Harry for the archaeological survey at the site of the old Poor Farm—the defunct county home for the indigent, with a potter’s field—that had been scheduled before Polly was hurt, or Maude planned her birthday, or Ariel disappeared. Polly was tormented by the thought that if they’d kept him in the kitchen, Ariel and Graham would not have worked together and might not have ended up in the kayak together on Friday. But there was Graham, telling the police they’d been in love.
Polly, however iffy her driving, was the person nominated to take Graham home from the hospital at the end of the day. While they waited for the doctor to show up and sign the release, Polly looked at Graham sidelong, which was easy because he had a patch on one eye. She’d remembered him as a shy teenager who liked to draw, a soulful boy who’d somehow grown into one of those kids who shone, almost obnoxiously, with good health and power. Rude health, Polly thought, and his good cheer felt forced to her now, a depressive’s response. He was beautiful, but she was immune—maybe it was her age but she’d never found perfection inspiring, and cleaning that much blood off the bar floor after the Burt incident wasn’t her kind of flaw. Now Graham had new bruises overlaying an older one on his temple, where Ned had dropped him with a chair in an attempt to prevent Burt’s death, and scrapes everywhere else, stitches in his knees and on his scalp. The scratches on his throat were angry gouges, and river water in his stomach and lungs meant that he’d need to watch for both pneumonia and giardia.
Polly patted Graham’s hunched shoulder and he stiffened. She turned away and piled up medical handouts, hoping and failing to find a get-well card. She wanted to ask how long he’d been seeing Ariel, how and why they’d kept it a secret.
“Can I grab anything at the store for you? Help you in the apartment?”
He shook his head and stared out the window. She tried again. Did Graham want to talk to someone? Help with the search? Visit Ariel’s family?
“I can’t face people,” said Graham. “And anyway, they won’t want to see me.”
“I think they might,” said Polly.
Graham stared at the floor. Polly, shaky from the sheer effort of the conversation, grabbed the release papers and went looking for the doctor, who happened to be her own doctor. She knew he was appraising her as he signed off on Graham’s release.
“Is he on something?” asked Polly.
“Not a thing,” said her doctor. “How are you feeling?”
“Great!” she said. Sanity was tenuous and life was burning by.
They climbed into the car. Polly pulled out onto Geyser a little abruptly and Graham flinched. “Should you be driving?”
“Of course I should,” said Polly. “Would you prefer to walk?”
He didn’t reply or apologize or speak again until she pulled up by his apartment, across from Peake’s on the third floor of the old Masonic temple.
“No one expects you at work again for a bit. Maybe help with prep during the parade?” said Polly. “But Harry says he could use you, when he gets back to the excavation.”
“Okay,” said Graham.
“Can I help with anything?” asked Polly.
“Nothing to be done,” said Graham.
He looked so young—no beard, freckles between river scratches. “Do you want to go home to Seattle and wait there for your parents to return?” she asked. Vinnie’s brother and sister-in-law were traveling in Italy, and not volunteering to fly home to deal with their son’s trauma.
“No,” said Graham, still not looking at her. “I left for a reason.”
Polly drove off carefully, wondering what horrible thing had happened to Graham in Seattle, and thinking of how sad it was to have something happen here, too.
In the dark, on Saturday night, the world fell apart again when Helen had a nightmare. Sam had already come to Polly and Ned at midnight, and so Polly climbed into Helen’s bed. Maybe, two by two, they’d get some sleep.
The earth cracked open, said Helen. There were things inside. She wanted to look for Ariel.
Polly said “Sssssshhh,” and “I love you,” and shut her own eyes, wondering what Helen had seen. The cruelest thing, now that Ariel was probably lost forever, was that she was already on her way to being forgotten. She would now mostly make people think of their own dead or of things they should have kept doing in life, because they’d been reminded again that they were lucky. They would bring food, write notes, try not to say the wrong thing, and not allow themselves to think their way down to the dark, where Ariel’s family lived now.
Polly dropped away from everything and saw Ariel’s body unfurl underwater, arms and hair spinning like a pale seaweed weather vane, like car lights around a wet curve at night when Polly was a child stretched out on the back seat of the station wagon, passing stores and streetlights out on Long Island as Jane and Merle headed home from a party.
4
Spring 1963
Polly, who had known many people killed by water, and who now had a problem sorting the past from the present, was born with the name Apollonia Asta. Merle Schuster had been in a poetic phase, and Asta was the name of Jane’s dead mother. Those cursive As and Ls took Polly years to master.
Some history, and a love story: Merle had met Jane at a cocktail party in 1959, thrown by some English major using his absent parents’ fancy house in Ann Arbor, with a full bar, silver toothpicks for the olives and cherries and pickled onions, mixed nuts in an Italian glass bowl. People were dressed up, smoking and talking pompously about Bergman, while Jane was joking about the movies—admiring them, but comfortable enough to make fun of the boatload of symbolism in every frame. Merle heard she was well traveled and knew French and Italian and some Spanish. She was only nineteen, an orphan, but she’d started college early, and her grandfather was a Big Deal in archaeology and mythology. She was tall, with light-blue eyes that jarred against her thick dark hair and gold skin, which looked as if she’d been sunning on an island instead of stumbling through a dank midwestern term. All this, and she was from Montana.
Jane told Merle that Bergman had consulted her grandfather for The Seventh Seal and The Magician, meeting at Le Pavillon for feasts while they talked about death and old dreams. This level of sophistication, as well as the way Jane smoked a cigarette and preferred whiskey to beer, made various parts of Merle’s body and soul expand. He’d grown up smart but poor, and he wanted the world.
What Jane liked about Merle: He was good-looking but gawky, with a high forehead and curly hair, a lanky Roman statue with an astounding, aquiline nose. He didn’t patronize her, he admitted ignorance rather than feigning seriousness, he truly listened, and he knew how to fix things like cars and clocks and doorknobs. He was honest, and ardent, and read books. She pitied his polio-withered left arm and marveled at the brown, muscled right.