The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  Jane, child bride with no siblings, became silly and giddy with the noisy, chaotic Schusters. Merle’s brothers and sister and the flood of cousins in the neighborhood dressed Polly up and took her to church and for walks. Everyone paid attention to her, first grandchild, novelty—they read books to her, taught her games, gave her their best marbles. They took her to a cabin and towed her around a lake in an inner tube; they pretended she was managing to whip the cream or smash the potatoes on her own power.

  The world was happy, accelerating—Merle would ditch science to write novels, Jane would get a doctorate someday, in something, because she knew everything—until the morning Merle’s father, Frank, and sister, Evie, were given a ride in a plane as a gift by Merle’s uncle, who hired an air force veteran to fly them. The ride was a celebration of Evie’s fourteenth birthday, but the plane dropped into Lake Michigan a mile from Elberta, a place of beautiful white sand dunes. The pilot had been intent on suicide, waiting for an opportunity, and they were simply unlucky. Polly was three. A family can be snapped to the ground, just like that, and almost forty years later, the wounds still bled red tears.

  As a result of these absences, Polly came up with some specific ideas about death. She believed that when people died, they disappeared but began anew somewhere else, disguised and hidden from the people of their old life. This explained all the youthful angels in art books, and Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Polly didn’t know what had ended up in Frank’s and Evie’s coffins, or how to explain the mangled airplane, but she believed they were hidden away, warm and unripped and safe, not understanding how sad they’d left the world. But when she tried airing her ideas, she upset Merle, and Jane explained again that Frank and Evie were gone forever, either buried in the ground in Michigan or up in heaven.

  When Merle and Jane announced they were moving to New York a few months later, Polly assumed that the point was to find the dead again. Why else would they leave her world behind? She was bereft, and theories and solutions filled her brain. She would find Frank and Evie on her own, because clearly no one else knew how to go about it.

  And so Polly and Merle and Jane set off for the city, three against the world. Merle drove the cat with a baggie of veterinary downers, and Polly and Jane took a sleeper train from Detroit. Polly remembered thinking through her task—she remembered remembering, even though Jane now claimed she’d been too young—on the ride from Michigan to New York, watching the landscape blur by in a frenzy of supposition. There was no photograph of the train.

  In New York, they found a third-floor apartment on Thompson Street. Papa and Dee’s place was a few blocks away, but it wasn’t big enough to take in refugees. They were often traveling, and they were a blank in Polly’s mind until she was six or seven. She was a denning child, given to blanket forts and shipping boxes, the queen of small spaces, and she refined her plan while hiding in a thicket in the muddy courtyard behind the apartment building, a secret trampled place among elderberry bushes that she made her own. The lacy white umbels gave the thicket a dizzy feel when they moved in the wind, and later the berries, though bitter, looked like jewels. Back then, she thought the older children never saw her, but now she was sure they chose to ignore her. They at least allowed her to listen to their games: If you were an animal, what would you be? What country would you live in, and how big will the kingdom be? How many children will you have, what will your new name be, what will you see?

  You could pick whatever you liked. It seemed reasonable.

  The three of them on Thompson Street learning how to live. They made coffee at the same time every morning, stopped letting the laundry mildew on the floor or in the washer, began to have dinner at 6:00, with an eye on Walter Cronkite. Merle put on his badly ironed starch-rippled shirts every day to be an assistant for a biologist he despised, and Jane took summer classes at NYU, though she was always behind, always late. She’d grown up with Dee, a world-class cook, without ever paying attention, and now she floundered through Joy of Cooking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She was only twenty-two, hot and resentful in a housedress, starch water in a Coke bottle with a saltshaker top, ironing work shirts badly while they watched Julia Child on television. Polly remembered the mundane moments, not just the laugh reel, the construction of a stew, a cake, a sauce. “Soufflé on a Platter,” for instance—Jane was a real mouth-breather for that episode, watching with a steno pad and a pen. Some experiments were repellent (salmon soufflé with canned salmon, bones and all), but the triumphs—duck à l’orange, béarnaise sauce, éclairs—burned their way into Polly’s soul.

  Giddiness when a meal worked, hungover mornings. At night, even when she was three years old, Polly never dreamt of breaching the wall of the bedroom door. It was Merle and Jane’s world. They were different people on Thompson Street, always whispering to each other, always close, and Polly was always with them but forever in her own world watching. They were nothing like the people she knew now, another point for memory over imagination.

  Whenever she was out in the city, Polly searched for her dead aunt and grandfather. She always looked at the eyes, because it might be the only way she’d know. Evie had huge chocolate eyes with soft brown eyebrows. Polly didn’t know how old Frank and Evie would be now—time seemed infinite, since they’d left Michigan, and she believed they’d choose whatever age they liked. Frank might be a teenager, Evie a baby, but Polly hoped they’d both be her own age. She spied on people in museums, circled customers in the fish store to look up at their faces. Back at the apartment, she’d sort what she’d seen against photographs in the grubby brown photo album.

  That spring, she finally found Frank and Evie at the dry cleaner’s on Sullivan and Prince and studied them from behind her mother’s legs. Evie, fourteen when her plane fell into Lake Michigan, now looked as if she were about ten but still had flat dark hair and a small mole on her cheek. Her eyes were right, clear rich brown, and her skin looked the same, and her voice sounded familiar when she asked Frank when they’d have lunch (another convincing detail). Frank’s eyeglasses were different, and he was pale, but everyone was paler in a city. He was counting a stack of brown-wrapped dress shirts while the Chinese woman who ran the shop scanned the shelves for a last packet.

  Polly was stealthy; she was careful. She couldn’t bear the terror of them looking back, the answering flash of recognition or the disappointment of being wrong or being forgotten. When another customer entered, a large woman with curly hair and a shiny coat, Polly wedged herself between Jane’s leg and the counter, splitting the difference between strangers to avoid and strangers to watch. Jane counted the money in her red change purse while they waited for the man and his daughter to finish, coins tapped out onto the Formica counter. The old Chinese woman reemerged in a cloud of hot fabric and blue chemicals, and the smell of the place was like its own ghost. As she handed Frank a raincoat and hung Merle’s only suit and Jane’s blouses from a hook, the young Evie met Polly’s eyes and smiled.

  Polly felt her face crack open. She gripped Jane’s leg so hard her mother gave a little yip and looked down in confusion. “They’re not dead,” Polly said. “I told you.”

  The other people in the store heard her. Evie looked away and Frank took her hand. Jane led Polly outside, into the wet pavement smell of spring, but Polly knew she’d been right. Frank and Evie still existed, though changed. They’d come here to hide and she’d found them. They’d forgotten who they’d been, but she knew better.

  That afternoon Polly and Jane wrote letters. Polly knew most of the alphabet but didn’t bother with it on such occasions. Jane gave her a mug of cocoa and three pens, red, blue, and black, and they sat down to pale-blue sheets of airmail paper. When you’re three, you can write your own epic in your own hidden language, and even after you’ve faced the fact that some sort of shared code is necessary, the mystery of the original story might survive, if it was there to begin with. Polly drew careful slanted shapes with spaces and exclamation points to mark shift
s in the story. She knew she should write the way she talked, rather than the way she thought, but after a few minutes the pattern strayed, and her private handwriting circled the page. She drew human figures, birds, clouds, a cave in a mountain, jagged waves and fish with sharp teeth.

  “What’s all this, honey?” asked Jane.

  “The people are thinking about whether to fly or swim or live on land,” said Polly. “Now that they’re someone else.” She drank some cocoa and went back to her pencils. That night she explained again, and Merle told her that dead was dead. Polly tried to talk about it again when she was eight, but then she put it away, with other childish things.

  5

  Sunday, June 30, 2002

  On Sunday afternoon, as Jane sat at the dining room table drinking coffee, her face was bleak as she read one of Polly’s lists, this one highly specific:

  Party menu: Just one pig now or extra shoulders? Ten loaves, salad Nicoise or Caesar? Spuds. Shrimp, cheeses, bagna cauda, make sure oysters cancelled.

  Work: Write Dan (myst in August?), give up on Helga?

  Clean baseboards, toilets, windows, lights, sinks, OFFICE, sidewalks

  Find Helen’s swimsuit

  Polly poured Helen and Sam orange juice in pretty ribbed glasses, diner-style glasses.

  “Do you know where I got these?” she asked Jane.

  “From Cora,” said Jane, uneasily.

  “Do you know what I remember her doing?”

  Jane pushed away the list and waited.

  “I remember her pouring juice into one of these glasses, and then throwing it against the wall, and going into her bedroom and crying.”

  “Cora didn’t throw things,” said Jane. “Ever. Not so much as a ball.”

  “You weren’t there.” Polly could see the glowing glass of orange juice, and she remembered it from the perspective of someone who was thirty inches tall, nose an inch from the rim of the Formica table, the orange ribbons as the thing took flight. Not the why of it all, but the act. She had watched Cora crying in her bed, at eye level. “I’m sure it was after Evie and Frank died.”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t before,” said Jane, marching toward the dining room and the boxes of photographs. “And we have a snapshot of you and a glass, taken in Cora’s kitchen. It’s black and white, so if you want to say it’s orange juice, great. But you’re mixing up life with pictures again.”

  Polly thought of all the things she wished she could remember from photographs, all the photographs she wished existed. She’d like photographs of herself being hugged by any number of dead people: Frank and Evie, Papa and Dee, boys dead in the first AIDS rampage when she worked in New York. She’d like anything from the year 1968, when her world blew up. She’d like photos of the casual lovers of her youth, to see why she’d done such things; she’d like a photo of herself in a bikini in approximately 1986, to see why they’d done such things; she’d like the look on Ned’s face the first time he’d entered her; she’d like a photo of Sam or Helen, nursing.

  If Jane could have anything, Polly guessed it would be one true memory of her mother Asta’s face. Young, in the moment, no sense of doom. Maybe this was what they were arguing about, the idea that Polly could remember the dead and her mother could not.

  “I’m not lying.”

  “I never claimed it was a lie. I know you believe it.”

  Polly stomped upstairs with a pile of Drake files. Her small office was at the head of the stairs, looking over the yard. This was the room, walls currently covered with notes and postcard images, pinned like ugly butterflies, that she would need to clean for Maude. Now she looked out the window to see Merle studying the perimeter fence, tugging on boards and testing looseness, peering up into the fruit trees to see if they needed pruning. He seemed to be counting her tomato plants, and he poked at the bean trellis to see if it was solid.

  Merle looked up and waved to Polly in the window, Mr. Happy. Everyone was so fucking cheery with her.

  Ned was with Harry and Drake on the river again that Sunday afternoon, and Jane and Polly left Merle with the kids while they joined Nora and Josie and dozens of others in searching assigned stretches of riverbank. They thrashed through willow thickets and mosquito bogs; they were nearly charged by a bull, nearly eaten by an unnaturally vicious retriever. Nora, a filmy blonde who ran marathons, cut her ankle on barbed wire and promised to give herself a tetanus shot. She was a pediatrician, back to working mornings after her third child—Connie was her sitter—and this wasn’t her idea of a break. As they walked, she gave them a graphic description of just how one died from tetanus, something she’d seen as a resident.

  “I’ve never seen a dead person,” said Josie. “Outside of a coffin. I’ve avoided it.”

  Jane always looked ethereal, even when she politely dripped scorn. “No reason to rush,” she said mildly.

  “I saw four bodies before I turned nine,” said Polly, despite the fact that she despised one-upmanship. It was a blurt, a confession, and they all stared at her. Polly surprised herself, and she surprised her mother, too. Jane the athlete slid on the slimy green river rocks but stayed upright.

  Josie opened her mouth to ask for some sort of accounting for these bodies—who what where why—but she knew half of it, after years of Polly, and started walking again.

  Polly tried to concentrate on the good stuff, the wild iris, blooms long over, the wild asparagus, stalks bushed out. Today, instead of mushrooms, Polly found a dozen different animal bones, some owl pellets made smaller, stranger bones, a hiking boot, shotgun shells, an empty wallet and a half-dissolved copy of a novel. Jane found an old teakettle. Nora found a broken wristwatch. Josie saw something blue and screamed. It was a motor oil jug; Josie had no sense of naturally occurring colors.

  They were shiny with DEET in defense against trapped flood pools, little spas for miasmas of happy mosquitos, as they struggled over ankle-breaking cobble, slick from the dropping river. They saw evidence of beavers, two dead deer, a pile of fluffy feathers from a fox or hawk or owl kill. They saw two black snakes and many indiscriminate live birds. Polly could identify dozens of perennials, but she was largely bird-blind, despite being dragged through the wilds and thickets of America by her father, grandmother, Maude. The dogwood and willow stands were dense and mucky, broken up by abrupt rock banks. Everyone but Jane fell down, everyone got blisters from bad-fitting rubber boots.

  On the ride back to town in Nora’s back seat, Polly flipped open the soggy book she’d found, looking for some meaning, and read:

  Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  It didn’t take much to make Polly’s addled brain expand. She knew Jane was watching her. On the seat between them, a folded newspaper with Ariel’s face smiling out at the world; next to that, a frilled baby summer hat, a pacifier covered with dog hair, and an energy bar. Polly squinched her eyes shut. Her brain teemed.

  They brought their finds to the sheriff’s office, where they learned that another body had been found on the river, probably that of a Chinese American honors student from Claremont who’d been on the wrong trail in Yellowstone Park the previous June, slipped in the wrong place, been swept away. Cy bagged the boot, saying it was a match to the one found on the body. “Hell of a long ride on the river.”

  “Who found the boy?” asked Polly.

  “Harry, of course, in a tree, near where the girl went in. It wasn’t fully a body,” Cy said. “Just a tibia and foot hanging in a tree, stick with a boot.”

  Though Harry was no longer a cop, he still helped with forensic work throughout the state—lonely femurs found on talus slopes, the bleak final campsite of a runaway, the predictable assumptions that any older grave was a crime scene and any dog’s tooth was a dead child’s incisor.

  “What side of the river were you walking?” Cy asked.

  He was writing on an already-crumpled map, many colors of ink, initials, notes about density of vegetation. The map moved on Polly, a
s if the drawing of the river was running off the page. She couldn’t grasp direction, and her face heated up. “East and south,” she said. “From Harvat’s Flats upstream.”

  Cy nodded nervously, sympathetically. “How are you feeling, lately?”

  “I’m fine,” said Polly, watching the map’s river flow. “How about you?”

  “In over my head,” said Cy, who wished Harry was still the sheriff.

  That night, Polly made a lovely chili—a 4-H beef shoulder and Chimayo chili powder, good tortillas and the last radishes. She took her time and concentrated, which lessened her new tendency toward the grand fuckup. Through the open window, while she prodded a chunk for tenderness, she could hear the high notes as Merle and Jane argued over blinds. Every morning, to keep the alley cottage cool, Jane would close the windows and draw the shades, and every night she’d raise the blinds and open the windows, and at both times of the day Merle would follow her around the house, making slight adjustments, while never taking on the whole task himself.

  This squabble was about whether it was too warm to open up before dinner. The alley house was tiny, with a nice porch facing a small yard with roses. Papa had built it in about 1920 for Jane’s two great-aunts, spinster schoolteachers named Odile and Inge. Now it was fixed up enough to rent to a series of forlorn friends and family, or at least friends and family going through forlorn times.

  But it was too cramped for Jane and Merle, who’d retired the year before. They wouldn’t last another week without a major fight, and needed to see a realtor. They’d been kinder to each other for a year now, with Merle not so resentful about life, Jane no longer telling him to exercise, drink less, mute his self-pity. It didn’t seem fair that you’d start life with polio and end with cancer, but, as Merle pointed out, he hadn’t ended yet. He was in remission, and in Michigan, he would still swim every day, either in a pool or a lake. In Livingston, there was no pool within thirty miles, and the river wouldn’t do for laps, ever. He was an obsessive man, prone, when nervous, to bouts of overeating followed by bouts of exercise. He was going to lose his mind over the course of the summer, and take them all down with him, especially Ned.