The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  ALSO BY JAMIE HARRISON

  The Widow Nash

  Blue Deer Thaw

  An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence

  Going Local

  The Edge of the Crazies

  The Center of Everything

  Copyright © 2020 by Jamie Harrison

  First hardcover edition: 2020

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Harrison, Jamie, 1960– author.

  Title: The center of everything : a novel / Jamie Harrison.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019040742 | ISBN 9781640092341 (hardcover) |

  ISBN 9781640092358 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3558.A6712 C46 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040742

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  Family tree illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Will and John

  This beautiful sound. Like you’re thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you.

  RICHARD FLANAGAN, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

  . . . the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth

  ADRIENNE RICH, “Diving into the Wreck”

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  1. Sunday, June 30, 2002

  2. Sunday, June 30, 2002

  3. Saturday, June 29, 2002

  4. Spring 1963

  5. Sunday, June 30, 2002

  6. Winter and Spring 1968

  7. Monday, July 1, 2002

  8. Tuesday, July 2, 2002

  9. Wednesday, July 3, 2002

  Part Two

  10. Summer 1968

  11. Thursday, July 4, 2002

  12. Summer 1968

  13. Friday, July 5, 2002

  14. Summer 19682

  Part Three

  15. Saturday, July 6, 2002

  16. The End of the World, 1968

  17. The Beginning of the World, 1968

  18. Sunday, July 7, 2002

  19. Her Oldest Friend, 1987

  20. Sunday, July 7, 2002

  Acknowledgments

  Part

  One

  1

  Sunday, June 30, 2002

  When Polly was a child, and thought like a child, the world was a fluid place. People came and went and never looked the same from month to month or year to year. They shifted bodies and voices—a family friend shaved a beard, a great-aunt shriveled into illness, a doctor grew taller—and it would take time to find them, to recognize them.

  Polly studied faces, she wondered, she undid the disguise. But sometimes people she loved disappeared entirely, curling off like smoke. Her father, Merle, told her that her mind was like a forest, and the trees inside were her people, each leaf or needle a memory. Her mother, Jane, said that memories were the way a person tried to turn a life into a story, and Papa, Polly’s great-grandfather, said that there was a story about everything. He would tell them something long and strange to explain the existence of tigers or caves or trees, but then he’d say, Well, the Greeks said the same thing, or the Finns; the Athabascans, the Etruscans, the Utes. Days were an Aztec snake swallowing its tail, water came from a Celtic goddess’s eyes, thunder was a deadly fart from a Bantu in the sky. There was nothing new under the sun, but nothing truly repeated. Papa would row down a stretch of the Sound and back at high tide, proving his point, slipping home before it was too late to recognize home, but the water and light and noises of the world they’d left were different than the one they returned to, except for his humming, the splash of the oars, the fact of his presence.

  Lately, Polly thought her mind was a river, constantly scouring and pooling, constantly disappearing, filling with details that glinted and vanished. Even as an adult, every small thing meant a little too much to her, but these days she couldn’t go on like that, because though the world had become as strange as it had been when she was a child, she could no longer indulge it. She needed to buckle down, accept some objective reality.

  On June 30, a Sunday morning, Polly Schuster and her mother, Jane, were having a carefully worded argument in Livingston, Montana. Polly had smacked her head in a bicycle accident a few months earlier, and during a bumpy recovery, a long period of confusion and doubt, she’d begun to point out all sorts of things she could still remember clearly: arcane facts from college Russian history courses, lines from Othello, houses and funerals and train rides from early childhood.

  “These aren’t true memories,” said Jane, reaching into the back seat to fix her granddaughter Helen’s twisted car-seat strap. Polly was backing the car out of the garage; they were off to do errands. “They’re photographs you’ve turned into memories. Ninety percent of childhood memories are pulled from photographs.”

  No one believed Polly about anything, and it was wearing her down. As she craned to check behind the car, she saw the alley rabbit by a neighbor’s gate, and the alley rabbit—clear-eyed, dusty gravel-gray fur, brain the size of a chickpea—watched back, sweetly framed by new green grass. Fritz, a black-and-tan mutt, saw the rabbit, too, and went on something close to a point, frozen with one paw up, tail straight. The old poodle watched, and Jane’s spaniel twisted on her lap, but the children in the back seat seemed oblivious. Sam was reading a comic, and Helen kicked her grubby sockless sneakers in time to a Clash song Polly was playing to annoy her mother.

  One side effect of Polly’s head injury was a tendency to lose her train of thought. Once she saw the rabbit, which had waited for them every morning that week like some furry Pythonesque talisman, she might as well have been another dog. But Jane would not give up the argument, which was really about what Sam and Helen would remember about a drowning that had happened two days earlier.

  “All those photos we have out for Maude’s party—you’re turning them into memories,” said Jane. “You’ve always been muzzy that way, but the head thing has made it harder to tell the difference.”

  Muzzy; was that a word? Polly and the rabbit held their stare, and here was the thing: Polly wanted to reach behind and set Fritz free, give him a little joy. He’d never manage to catch it, and maybe this was a game for the rabbit, too.

  “It’s possible that you remember that first apartment, or doing errands in the Village,” said Jane, oblivious.

  If they kept this up, Jane would be putting her daughter in a book. Polly thought she might as well give her something to write about. She was reaching back with her left hand for the door handle when a flash of light glinted through the trees, like a bright-plumed bird, a noisy parrot: the helicopter looking for their friend Ariel Delgado.

  “Give me another example,” said Jane. “And what are you doing with the back door? You need to concentrate on the car, honey. And Sam, put on you
r belt.”

  “Nothing,” said Polly, bringing both hands to the wheel. This was the second time she’d driven in a month. In the rearview mirror, she watched Sam peacefully turn pages, Helen hug the spaniel now trampling her lap. Two women, two children, and three dogs in one car; a strange idea of fun. “Well,” she said, while Sam fumbled with his belt. “Another example, then. The drowning.”

  “What do you mean?” said Jane.

  “Not the one on Long Island. On Lake Michigan, with Rita and Tommy, when we were seven,” said Polly. A long, idyllic day on the beach with the Wards, but then a drowning, a young woman pulled out of the water after an hour of being churned against a harbor break wall, like a forgotten sock in a dryer or more pointedly a pebble in a rock polisher. Polly remembered the picnic basket of fancy food the Wards had brought, the quilt Jane spread on the sand, the wind spout that ran across the water toward them and disappeared just before it struck. The children lay on their bellies in the wet sand, letting the waves tug at their feet, watching everyone talk and laugh until a woman ran toward them from the harbor, calling for help.

  “Another photograph,” said Jane abruptly. “Or Merle talking.”

  There might have been a snapshot of the group together that day, but they certainly didn’t have a photo of the red-and-white body. Just a glimpse, but Polly could see the color, feel the water, hear the waves, hear the person who’d found the body scream. Which was only natural. Wouldn’t anyone scream?

  “Not the picnic or swimming,” Polly said. “I remember the body.”

  It was the wrong word to say out loud. Helen was tracking everything now, watching Polly’s face in the rearview mirror, and Sam gave up on the comic. He wouldn’t look at the helicopter anymore but she knew he could hear it.

  “What body?” he asked.

  “Years ago,” said Polly, putting the car in drive. “Put on your belt, now.”

  Fritz gave a low keen, still locked on the rabbit, which squared off to face the car directly. Polly put her foot on the brake and turned in her seat, once again judging the distance to the back door handle. Fritz was trampling Sam, but he only held his comic higher and gave his mother a small, evil smile. “He just wants to play with the rabbit,” he said. “Aren’t you going to let him?”

  People told Polly that she had the nicest children in town.

  Jane tapped her leg. “Don’t do it.”

  Polly honked and accelerated and focused on the street ahead. Look twice at stops, brake, be patient. The rabbit vanished into some browning lilacs.

  “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 wit
h 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.”