Polly and Sam watched as Connie and her assistant seized small wandering bodies by their life preservers, held them gently for back floats, towed them back and forth, cooed over the roar of dozens of slapping hands and shrill cries. Polly watched Helen spin and splash, but when she put her face underwater Polly squinted her eyes shut against bad thoughts: child underwater, child changing shape. She stood, but suddenly both she and Helen were back in the daylight, the here and now of the bright pool. Helen lifted her head and laughed, and unloving Connie hugged her like she meant it. Really, the most dangerous thing that would happen to the child that day would be getting in a car with her mother.
The kids clambered out and Polly wrapped Helen in a towel. Sam was a rosy Irish American boy, but Helen was tawny, like much of Polly’s family. When Connie swam to the side and waved, Polly plopped Helen down in the sun to warm up—the temperature was ten degrees higher than when they’d arrived, and Sam shed his parka—and walked over. Polly knelt when Connie gestured again to come closer.
“Mrs. Berrigan? Have they found anything?” Connie loved married names.
“One sighting, south of town, last night,” said Polly.
“I meant,” said Connie, “about how it happened. Have they found her preserver?”
“I don’t know,” said Polly. “It seems like that would be as hard to find as her body.”
“She had it when we left them.” Connie had been in the raft that day. “If it was with her in the kayak, she would have worn it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I heard him tease her for wanting to wear it. He held it up over her head. I think he kept it away from her.”
He. Connie, spiteful and jealous, wasn’t going to utter Graham’s name.
“He wouldn’t. He’s not some monster.”
Connie studied Polly. “If he did, he wouldn’t tell the truth now, would he? She wasn’t a good swimmer. I never even saw her in the deep end without holding the side.”
This didn’t strike Polly, who was a side grabber, too, as revelatory. She liked swimming despite choking, terrifying misadventures. Water lurked, but it invited; Polly dabbled. Now she wondered if she’d ever seen Ariel swimming.
“And yet she climbed into a kayak.” A little girl was actually waving to Sam, and Polly would have preferred to watch that show. “He says they were in love.”
“She wasn’t in love with him. She felt sorry for him. And why didn’t he die, too?”
Connie rattled Polly. Pretty eyes in a flat, judgmental face, now filled with anguish. Helen was coming out of her hypothermic huddle, eyeing the alluring crew at the deep end. Sam, who couldn’t remember Connie sitting for him when he was tiny but could remember disliking her, was watching the ducks on the far side of the fence, rather than keeping track of his sister or acknowledging the waving girl.
“I’m sure he feels horrible,” said Polly. “He’ll deal with this all his life.”
“Good,” said Connie.
Since her accident, Polly had survived many tasks that had never before been so difficult—bills, grade school registration, weighing whether to take medication, not killing someone during a psych test, not saying the wrong thing to the bereaved, not burning her kitchen down—but her cleaning efforts were so intermittent and spastic that she never made any real progress. Dust customarily lay heavy on the house of Schuster-Berrigan, the kingdom of dog hair, but Polly stripped beds, put away months’ worth of clothing and handled the bathroom with broad, spray-heavy strokes, reached for cobwebs without falling off her shitty bent ladder. She’d brushed the furniture, scraped splattered condiments off refrigerator shelves, extracted bug bodies from lights. Now, she scrubbed one five-foot square of floor with Helen on her back, pretending Polly was a horse, before she sent her daughter outside to clean the sidewalks with the hose. She knocked spiders out of the garage shop vacuum and brought it inside, jerking open cabinets and drawers one by one. Sam and Helen would grow up thinking that vacuuming drawers was normal, but it couldn’t hurt in later life.
Polly wasn’t any better or worse at doing this than she’d ever been, and she lost herself only once, popping back into the here and now to wonder why she was on the floor, holding a soapy toothbrush.
In Polly’s office, where Maude would sleep, Jane was waiting with boxes. It was hard to get her to admit defeat, but this room was taking her to her knees. They were trying a new filing system, and Polly, who guessed Jane’s goal was to make some failed efforts disappear, handed over files docilely as they sorted a pile of the scripts submitted to Drake. Jane did the labeling. Polly loved Jane’s handwriting, and she loved having her to herself.
Jane paused, pen in midair, eyes in a confused middle distance. “What do we call this thing? ‘Untitled Stalking Killer’?”
“Psycho Fishing Guide,” said Polly, not joking. Drake liked mysteries and always claimed he wanted to write his own, so Polly kept an ongoing list of variations on common fates—death by cars (cars hitting walls, hitting mountain voids, dropping into volcanoes), guns (shot in the ear, shot in the eyeball, etc.), and the local rarities that got him going (a backflipping horse crushing its rider, a rattlesnake in a boat as rapids approached).
Drake’s absolute favorite way to kill someone off: falling.
Ways that Polly’s relatives had killed or been killed: mostly water.
What it meant: She had no idea, but she’d keep looking for a pattern.
At any given time, half a dozen scripts were being written or revised or planned based on Drake’s idly offered desires and curiosities. He was a holdover from the near end of Polly’s time in New York, when she’d gotten a job with a producer. Only one script she worked on was made, but it featured Drake in a role that she’d suggested—in a ream of specific notes—be much larger and central. The film made a fortune, and Drake, a nice eighteen-year-old from trailer park Spokane, won awards and became someone else.
By then Polly had bolted back to cooking, and on to Montana. Drake, to his credit, thanked Polly publicly at two awards ceremonies, which brought in some extra freelance work. Polly wondered how different life might be financially if she’d stuck it out, but it was fine. She was out of there, and happy, and Drake handled success well. He was tough but not the boy next door, smart but not British. He was beautiful without being fey, funny without apparent bigotry, and he lacked the arrogance and childhood sexual wounds of some of his competitors. He could act, and he mostly behaved.
One March day ten years later, when Polly was pregnant with Helen, she answered the door and found Drake on her porch. He was almost thirty, and after a decade on top of the pile, niggled by thoughts of a deviated septum, a yellow fatty liver, he judged that things were likely to go downhill. He wanted to disappear, and he drove around the country and decided he liked Montana.
How to pull it off? Other famous people were tucked into pretty corners of the state. Drake was no fool, and he did everything right, simply dropped off the planet. Pick a town accepting of strangers and of the strange. Make friends, learn to row. Donate to the cops, hospital, food bank, local museum; volunteer for Search and Rescue.
Drake’s sole professional issue these days was his reluctance to return to Los Angeles for work, his reluctance to go anywhere, for love, for money, for anything. He was energetic, locally. Ned fondly called him a remora after Drake spent time dreaming up a character much like Harry, an ex-cop and current archaeologist, river searcher, private eye, Romeo. He’d sucked up Polly and Ned’s life, too, though he gave up playing a chef after two shifts at Peake’s. The fall before, during elderly Maude Swanberg’s extended 9/11 visit, Drake listened as Maude unspooled stories about Papa’s years in Hollywood under the contrail-free sky of her childhood, both of them eating a tremendous quantity of Polly’s tomatoes, and dabbled in the idea of a story set in Montana in the thirties. Now he was reading Jane’s books.
Jane tossed another stack of scripts in the box. “He pays me, Mom,” said Polly.
; “He’s an infant,” said Jane.
They left for the airport.
When Maude Swanberg was a young woman, she’d been trouble, smart and wild. Her nickname was Maude Gone: she eloped with her first husband, a pretty boy from college, in 1931, but she bolted and they divorced in a friendly way the next year. These days, when no one remembered Maud Gonne, the joke fell flat.
Maude’s next husband, a childhood friend, was shot down over France in 1944, and this broke her heart. “What would you have done if your husband died when you were thirty-two?” she asked Polly once. I’d have killed myself, thought Polly. But she smiled, and she wouldn’t have, because she had children, just like Maude.
“That doesn’t mean she didn’t have a good life in other ways,” said Jane gently, as Sam blinked over a photo of the deceased hero Swanberg. Maude never remarried, though she’d survived a series of subsequent lovers.
All Polly could see in Maude’s face for the first few minutes of every visit was Dee, and now, with her new brain, Polly felt as if she could find bits of her great-grandmother, feature by feature. Everything that mattered was close to the surface these days. Maude, who had her mother’s big, soft, hooded eyes, was regal without being tall. She did sit-ups, push-ups, and walked at least a mile daily, and ideally three, in place if necessary. She wore her dense but fine hair, once red-brown, now powder-white, in a Gibson Girl cloud.
When Maude walked into the house, she did the same thing with her hand that Papa did when Polly was little, smushing Helen and Sam from the head down, pushing them joyful and squirming into the ground. Papa raised Maude after her father, Dee’s first husband, died in 1918. Both lovely men, said Maude. She believed her mother had understood her luck.
Luck, thought Polly, flashing there and back.
Usually Maude stayed with her widowed daughter-in-law Opal, Harry’s mother, but this time she wanted to stay in the house she’d been born in, on July 5, 1912—before the millions of dead boys in World War I, before antibiotics, before her mother could vote—and she insisted on taking her old bedroom, now Polly’s office. Maude, whose surviving children were in their sixties and seventies, said she loved the idea of hearing young children when she woke up. And she never minded a mess, because her mother was a horrible housekeeper. She thought it sweet that Jane and Polly kept up the tradition.
Polly followed Maude upstairs with the suitcase, taking in her spindly legs, the crumpled silk skirt, and tiny black heels. Polly could feel the fatigue in those shins, the effort of almost a century of movement.
“I worry all your good clothes will be covered with dog hair,” she said.
“I brought some easy things, dear. And sneakers. I know how it is.”
Maude needed a nap before dinner, but first she toured the garden, though she said she hated gardens, because they were the reason she’d been neglected as a child.
A joke? Polly found it close to home. Nevertheless, having Maude compliment her roses and clematis, her campanulas and the number of tiny plums on the oldest tree, the one Dee tree they’d been able to save, made Polly happy.
Maude wanted to nap outside, though she knew she’d never manage to get out of a hammock. The children dragged the most comfortable lawn chair under the old trees at the bottom of the garden and ran back up for a quilt, because Maude said she was thin-skinned.
“You can see right through it,” whispered Helen, while Maude slept.
Polly, who had spent her childhood with old people, said Maude looked fine.
Maude, to be honest, was difficult. Before every visit, Polly constructed rosy scenarios—the things they would do for Maude, the way Maude would enjoy those efforts—but things inevitably went awry. Polly chose to forget this in another spastic push for happiness, a kind of Groundhog Day of hope over experience.
Nevertheless, the forecast was idyllic. Tonight they’d have the rodeo and fireworks, the next night a picnic on the river. Maude specified a place on the island a few blocks away, owned by old family friends, which made Polly nervous. Though she very much wanted to find Ariel, she did not want to find her during a picnic for Maude. On the Fourth, maybe some lazy cousin would volunteer to cook. On July 5, Maude’s actual birthday, they’d have a party at the house for the same lazy, ancient cousins.
On the way back from the airport, Jane had fended off an attempt to once again enlarge the party and survived an inquisition. Was Jane happy, or at least content? How did she feel about her late career? Was she still in menopause? When things didn’t go Maude’s way, she retaliated with questions. Now, while she napped, Jane and Polly struggled with another request: Maude wanted to float.
They discussed this problem while Jane held Helen on her lap, drawing a floor plan of a castle named Chateau d’Helene. “Maude says it’s the last time she’ll be able to,” said Jane. “She says everything is the last time.”
Polly fretted about Maude in a boat, about everything having to do with boats, while she threw her body around for the last of the cleaning. Maude, on rising, noticed none of Polly’s efforts. They gave her coffee and cookies after her nap, and watched as she made a pretty list with Sam’s colored pens. Her handwriting was beautiful like Dee’s, and still firm.
Things Maude intended to do during her visit:
See Harry’s latest dig.
Talk to him about his life. Give advice.
Watch movies with the children.
Sort photos and identify people who will then be forgotten again.
Win at cards.
See birds, float the river, picnic.
Dabble in relatives. Give advice.
Talk to Polly about her head. Give advice.
Eat well.
Receive accolades at parade and rodeo and party.
Polly filled a Maude request for chicken potpie (“With Mother’s butter crust and all those lovely things you add? Morels, nice Italian salted pork?”) and Harry and Josie joined them for dinner. Maude drank too many gimlets while showing the photographs she’d brought to put up at the party, and lectured Harry and Josie, who she thought should stick to the idea of marrying this weekend.
“I would like to be happy when we marry,” said Harry.
“And when would that be?” asked Maude. “I’m here, now.”
“Happier,” said Harry. “Grandma, I’m a wreck. I loved that little girl.”
Merle redirected them to the living room, where he’d set up Papa’s movies. Drake had hired a researcher who’d found a few more snippets and put the pieces on DVD. Polly fled for her bats, and Harry and Josie and Ned followed. Through the open window they could hear the stagy music of Papa’s films, hear Sam read the cards out loud—“‘All lost! To prayers, to prayers!’” from The Tempest—between Maude’s editorial comments: “Half these boys died in World War I,” or “Horses were smarter, then,” or “He was the first person to film almost everything outside,” or “Wasn’t your great-great-grandmother beautiful?”
Sam kept it up with the titles. “‘O, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer.’”
Harry was crying, and Josie kissed him.
Ariel still tumbled along in the dark wet cold as Polly slept. The sense of looping was like having the spins as a drunken teenager. It was the way Polly felt for weeks after her accident, but now she knew that the middle of the night, the shaman time of true thought, was the time to give herself up to the girl, to see Ariel as she’d been at sixteen, in braces, or last week with a glass of wine in her hand. On a sled, with a backpack, in Polly’s garden, holding Polly’s baby. Polly fell through the river with her, thinking of all the lost beautiful girls who’d found themselves in water, in danger, in confusion, spinning. Asta, Evie, herself, now this.
8
Tuesday, July 2, 2002
When the alarm rang for a third time and she watched Ned’s long arm arc up to silence it yet again, Polly thought, Marriage is difficult. She pulled herself upright, flexed her toes on the carpet, and flopped back into a last sleep, a dream of
Rita, with bits of ribbon in her red hair and charcoal on her cheeks, tattooing birds into Polly’s arm. There was no pain—the birds were jewel-colored, writhing in Polly’s skin—until Rita pinched Polly and began to look like the Jabberwock.
Polly screamed, but no one heard her. Which was just as well, given that she was standing in front of the coffee machine.
Looking again: Polly had promised, and on parade day, she took Helen with her for the morning walk. The rabbit was waiting in the alley, but Polly ignored it, despite Fritz the dog’s keening.
“I bet she’s seen Ari,” said Helen, waving to the impassive rabbit.
“How do you know it’s a she?” asked Polly.
Helen was quiet after this shabby dodge. She perked up as they walked along the river and nattered about what flowers Ariel thought were prettiest, what she most loved to eat, how it was she could read so many books. By the time they reached the pool, Polly’s eyes were hot and her throat was swollen, and she wanted to flop on the stained concrete and cry like a toddler.
But Helen the mermaid, Helen the fish, was in the water before Polly was through the locker room door. Connie crooked a finger. Ah god, thought Polly, trying for numbness.
“You should find out why Graham left Seattle.”
“Do you know?”
“He won’t tell me, but he might tell you.”
“You talked to Graham?”
“We went out for coffee. I’m trying to be a good Christian.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Polly.
“I want him to admit what he did,” said Connie.
Because it was parade day, Polly was going to work at the restaurant for the first time since the accident. Tourist season, arriving with a bang and sirens, changed everything. Livingston’s hotels were full, left turns impossible, and most people wearing cowboy hats were imports. If locals didn’t own or tend a ranch, or run a realty company, they usually wore baseball hats, perhaps because of the wind. East Coast visitors who’d gotten up too early wandered around the brick downtown waiting for stores to open, peered suspiciously at art gallery windows and menus, while West Coast visitors got up late and shivered until noon. Every day, somewhere in Montana, a hundred people tried a chicken-fried steak for the first time in their lives and thought, depending on the gravy quality: Why?
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