The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  No one anticipated any sort of brain cell death spiral; the doctors said these small, mostly peaceful pauses should become less frequent. Polly needed a few months to recover and should ideally avoid future impacts. Some glitches might persist, executive function issues. Her first impulse would no longer be her best.

  Ned and Polly decided to let the manager at Peake’s buy into the business and take on more responsibility, and Ned cut down on his own shifts. He and Polly came up with bits of the menu she could manage at home. Friends were oddly eager to stop by. Josie, who worked as a grant writer, taking the town through incremental improvements, claimed she needed help revising the local soup kitchen’s fundraising materials, and said the incomprehensible pages Polly turned in were brilliant. Polly’s cousin Harry badgered her for help researching the old Poor Farm graveyard at the county museum; Harry’s mother, Opal, wanted to learn how to use an iMac. The children were in high demand for playdates. Nora Susak, an internist who was still nursing her youngest child, said she wanted to learn how to bake; her husband, Vinnie, eloquent attorney, asked for help with a letter to the editor. Ariel Delgado, the girl now lost in the river, asked for tutoring on the GRE and claimed she needed help writing a graduate school admissions letter six months in advance.

  Over the last decade, half the town had brought Polly business letters, brochures, oral histories and obituaries, short stories, and even poems, the way you’d bring the sick to a shaman. Fix it, make the story come to life, make it true. Polly felt like a sham even before she smacked her head—she could only do so much. Now she couldn’t move a paragraph. She would either wander away from a thought the way she wandered away from the stove, or she’d descend into a visual whirlpool, sometimes with an accompanying earworm melody. For an overdue mystery edit she confused character names, covered the printout with enraged comments, wrote knight for night, toe for tow, and—weirdest of all—now for gnaw. Knew instead of new, passed instead of past. Right rite, bow bough beau. When she picked up an old coworker’s cookbook project, she shredded rather than edited and put the recipes back together in a novel order, with missing steps and fresh errors on quantities.

  Polly’s remaining independent source of income came from vetting scripts for Drake Aasgard, an actor she’d known since he was a teenager. Drake understood what had happened—Ned had been at his cabin when Polly went flying over the Bentley in March—and his agenda was so wayward that Polly could operate with little harm. He overpaid her to read and assess, to issue simple, graceful kiss-offs—this was sometimes a challenge now, given her damaged impulse control—to the scripts and novels his heartbroken agent still sent to Montana. Jane was snooty about the job, but trying to describe each script or novel plot was a good way for Polly to work toward making sense again. Drake, who hadn’t filmed anything in four years, had no real intention of working soon, but he checked the notes before they went out.

  The world became terribly fragile; the center, the imperfect brain Polly had been fond of, had fallen apart. The bleaks, short but sharp, swept over her after every error in judgment or memory, and when she sensed pity, she blew up in a nasty stew of confusion and panic. Polly felt sure she would need a minder forever, she would wear Ned out and he would leave, she would now be a horrible mother. What would Helen and Sam remember out of this mess?

  You’ll be fine, said Ned. We’ll be fine. It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand her fear, and he knew having Jane around opened this question up like a wound. Polly had always known she was lucky to have Jane, but the bad mothers, cruel mothers, absent mothers, rang in Polly’s head. She still loved the feel of Jane’s fingers on the good side of her skull, fluffing her fresh-cropped hair, stroking her cheek.

  Good mothers, good mothers were rarities, the center of everything.

  On that Sunday morning, Polly had things to do, errants, most having to do with the looming arrival of Maude Swanberg, great-aunt, for whom they’d planned a large birthday party on July 5. These plans were now complicated by Ariel Delgado’s accident—it was hard to throw a party for a hundred people when someone you loved was probably floating facedown in the river. It was almost equally hard not to have a birthday party for a woman turning ninety. “What if they find her right away?” asked Maude, her voice reedy on the phone.

  “Fifty people, not a hundred,” said Jane, who was depressed by the idea that Polly’s younger brothers and sister couldn’t come—they’d used their time off helping after the accident that spring. “The ones you truly care about. Do you want to come later, when we can do it right?”

  Maude did not; she wanted to turn ninety in the town where she’d been born. Later was problematic. She thought she’d die soon, and she probably would, because she was eighty-nine. Consider the actuarial reality, she said.

  Merle, designated asshole, called the guests who’d been cut. Ned canceled the tent and the cellist and planned pork specials at Peake’s with one of the two pigs they’d planned to cook. And so the tasks for today, after Polly resisted the urge to loose the dogs on the rabbit, were simpler than they might have been. At the grocery store, Jane and Polly still looked like a ranch family on a monthly shopping spree, groceries as a sport and a pastime. They bought a cheap wading pool and squirt guns and new badminton and croquet sets to amuse the kids over the next few days, poster board for all the photos of Maude’s life, socks and Velcro sneakers for Helen, who was still uninterested in clothing and liked to deposit items in corners of the garden. They picked up Sam’s friend Ian, who was terrified about most things in life, and listened to the boys gibber about medieval warfare, Helen content in her own world. They dropped off containers of sauces at Peake’s—the Berrigans’ home kitchen was licensed, and despite her dented head, Polly still prepped some nitpicky things. She’d cooked the night before, drinking wine and only burning one batch of carta di musica. She hadn’t ruined the lemon curd or meringues or duck confit, though she had eaten too much of the crunchy skin.

  Polly found Ned in the restaurant kitchen, fresh from searching another stretch of the river with Harry. He was sunburnt, his brown hair bleaching out, and he shook his head—no news—before he kissed her and went back to prepping duck. He said the walk-in compressor was dying, but it was always something. Could she braise fennel and onions that afternoon? Would she remember to add the pistachios to the focaccia this time?

  “I will,” said Polly (though she wouldn’t), floating off to the basement storage to determine how many tables would need to be carted to the house for the party.

  Outside, the sky was dark blue, with just a breath of wind. Seventy-mile-an-hour gusts were routine on this part of the Rocky Mountain front, sixty miles north of Yellowstone Park, but at this moment the air was dulcet, and the town felt sweet-tempered, with only a few crushed plastic glasses in the gutter to warn a traveler of the place’s roaring alcoholic heart. Livingston had only eight thousand people within a county that was twice the size of Long Island, and they were on the brink of peak tourist season. Polly and Jane and the kids stopped at a food truck in the hardware store parking lot and ordered coleslaw and fried clams, though Livingston was a mile high and a thousand miles short of an ocean. They drove to the river and walked toward a bench behind the baseball diamonds, where the dogs could run around. An osprey platform stood between the lights on the outfield fence, and the dogs sniffed for bones and scraps underneath. From the higher ground on the river path, Jane said she saw two small heads bobbing around an adult osprey in the nest, rather than the three Polly had counted the day before, and Jane wondered if the third chick had blown out during the wind the night before.

  The third osprey chick was fine, said Polly. Maybe it was in the deep center of the nest. The dogs would find the body if it wasn’t.

  The kids and dogs zigzagged around the field. “Something else may have eaten it already,” said Jane, who had an ancient view of life.

  Polly pushed such thoughts away. The bench faced south toward the river, the still-green hills an
d white-tipped Absaroka Mountains, all the snow from the tops and the darker north-facing slopes still plummeting into the Yellowstone, where it joined the immense melt from the caldera of Yellowstone Park and plunged on to the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Gulf. The river swirled and thundered, but the level would drop quickly. This green world would burn up in August when the fires kicked in. If Ariel’s friends had waited even one week to float, she might not be out there now, invisible.

  Why, thought Polly, losing herself for a second, ripping herself back. They watched a disembodied kite flit above a lonely cow on the far side, above trees and rocks, below the osprey’s circling mate. Jane’s spaniel, a blur with millipede legs, hadn’t seen much beyond her own Michigan backyard, and barked at a stroller, an alien. The couple pushing it showed no sense of humor. She barked at the oblivious day-trippers passing on the Yellowstone River, too. Jane and Polly avoided looking directly at the water until the county’s search boats appeared.

  “It seems like a tremendous waste of time,” said Jane. “They can’t see anything in that water.”

  “They’re hoping she’s alive on a bank,” said Polly, who felt as though she should be looking, too.

  “Not likely,” said Jane. “After two days. When do they give up?”

  “Not yet,” said Polly. She waved to a man in one of the drift boats, her skinny cousin Harry Swanberg, grandson of the redoubtable Maude. It wasn’t his first search.

  Two days earlier, on Friday, June 28, when eleven people headed to the Yellowstone, putting in at about three in the afternoon just south of Livingston for their first float of the year, the river was too high to be safe, but the group wanted to stay ahead of the onslaught of summer tourists. An older crew had talked about going but bowed out—Vinnie was dealing with a client’s suicide attempt in jail, Polly and Ned had an appointment in Bozeman, Josie and Harry were squabbling about their wedding. There would be nothing relaxing about a float when the river was flowing this fast, but many of this younger group were used to the Colorado and the Salmon. They’d floated a dozen times the year before and wanted to see which channels had deepened or filled with gravel during high water, where beaches had formed or banks collapsed. One drift boat held two people delusional enough to think they could fish in the cloudy, turbid water; a large raft carried seven others who only wanted to have fun; and a couple—Ariel Delgado and Graham Susak—chose a double kayak. The group packed beer, fried chicken, and coleslaw. They brought coats, though when they shuttled cars to their take-out, on the east end of town, it was ninety degrees. When they put in, ten miles south of town, it was slightly cooler, with a puff of clouds to the west.

  They passed many downed trees, some hard to see in the milky water. The people in the raft and drift boat—bartenders, teachers, carpenters—watched the kayak, worried, but Ariel was careful, and Graham had spent his childhood on Puget Sound and the Columbia River and swum on a college team.

  They saw two bald eagles, one golden eagle, many ducks, bank swallows, a fox, dozens of whitetails, hundreds of cows. Someone’s goat ran along the riverbank, watching the flotilla. Graham said he saw a bear, but no one believed him. The river was too violent to hear much, and people shouted conversations. Hail loomed when they were an hour in, nearly to the canyon. You could feel a sudden sharp edge to the air even before an extreme darkness appeared to the northwest. The threat passed quickly, with just a little wind, and though the people in the raft and the drift boat decided to get home, Ariel and Graham pulled over on a pretty island. They waved, and Ariel disappeared from the world.

  Something awful happened every year on the river. How could it not? Even during a spring when the flow wasn’t record-breaking, whole trees shot down like Pooh sticks. A stiff dead baby bison had floated through town a few years earlier with its own golden eagle riding on top, watching the world between nibbles.

  People loved the river Yellowstone for coolness, prettiness, peace, food, wildness, a dare, but touching it meant buying a lottery ticket. Using it was like driving on ice, flying a small plane, walking out of a bar with a stranger. It was easier if the unlucky person was a tourist, but usually it was someone the town knew, someone who loved the river, who understood what he or she might be getting into. This year it was Ariel, who’d been born here, played soccer and cello, tested high, been generally beloved.

  When Polly and Ned moved to Livingston, Ariel, age seven, was one of the first people they met. Harry, Ariel’s almost stepfather for three years before Ariel’s mother found religion, stayed close with the girl and brought her to Polly and Ned’s ramshackle house while they renovated, and Ariel swept sawdust or played with paint samples. When Ariel’s mother married the next year, they saw less of her, though Harry kept up monthly lunches. Ariel’s stepfather, who worked for UPS, was a conservative Christian and loved his stepdaughter but was jealous of his wife’s history. Harry, who’d managed the impossible task of being a popular cop in a small town, was a difficult predecessor.

  Ariel started helping with Sam when she was fifteen and he was two. She succeeded her joyless best friend Connie Tuttwilliger, whom Polly used for a few hours a week when Sam reached two months. Polly had been finishing a cookbook edit, and her notion of how things would proceed—she’d work at night and during the baby’s naps, or perhaps while Sam was peacefully watching dust motes and attentive dogs—was shredded during the first weeks of colic and doubt and fatigue. Connie thought Polly and Ned were bizarre—so many books, wine bottles, the foreign and violently flavored condiments in the refrigerator, and the clean counter of cooks above an unclean floor of slobs—and was offended by the idea that Polly insisted on nursing rather than handing over the baby for a bottle. Connie generally lacked humor, or what Ned referred to as elasticity, but she was renowned for her first aid skills—when Bobby Lundquist had stuck his tongue in an outlet, she’d gotten his heart beating again, and this had made her services priceless to all the parents who signed up for her summer swimming lessons. She was in demand, and the Berrigans were relieved when Ariel, who was more their speed, was allowed to babysit despite their status as nonbelievers.

  After high school, Ariel stuck close—college in Bozeman, an apartment with Connie. She was a good girl, a kind girl. She dated vaguely and rarely got in trouble. When Ariel did misbehave, Harry and Polly and Josie and Ned were the people she could call. Ned and Harry plucked Ariel out of a high school party during senior year and waited quietly while she threw up in an alley behind the Methodist church. Polly rescued her when Ariel, busted at an under-eighteen party in Bozeman, panicked and told the police Polly was her mother.

  But Ariel was mostly a cautious girl, sometimes to her detriment. Prepping for a catering one night, drinking wine with Polly, she’d said she’d never gone out with anyone she’d been in love with. All the boys she’d dated had been assholes.

  “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 s
wan, 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.