The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  It was louder, colder, stranger right next to the launchpad. Polly clutched Sam with one hand and covered her eyes with the other, walloped by the way the fireworks seemed to run like water. Ned pulled her away, closer to the river, and she thought about how the water near the osprey nest would be changing color with every explosion. Maybe she could find Ariel this way, watch until the girl was revealed by colors, ashes and spent paper falling toward her face.

  Polly and Jane lugged the sticky, exhausted children back to the car, while Merle half carried Maude. When Polly finally fell asleep, she saw Ariel rolling slowly, gently, onto her back, to face the falling lights. And it was true: Ariel was counting stars, upright and just below the surface, toes skimming the cobble. She twirled gracefully through a deep, gentle channel, with nothing to bounce against, nothing to cause more bruises, and that evening rose again until her face reached the cool air, startling a heron whose chicks were squabbling over the flayed corpse of a garter snake. Ariel moved down the center of the river like a swan, sometimes regal, sometimes spinning like a toy, but even though she passed the wedding party with Polly’s round objects, nobody but the heron noticed her.

  9

  Wednesday, July 3, 2002

  Maude talked of going birding in the morning, yet she was not an early riser. She would wake at 10:00 or so, drink coffee with a pastry (carried up by Sam or Helen, who came out of their post-rodeo funk to argue over who won the honor), bathe, and have lunch with distant relations. Sam and Helen would fetch the right pillows for the right chair, find her glasses, haul her huge purse between points A and B. Maude arrived with a stash of Bicentennial coins that she called silver dollars and doled out spottily. Sam thought they were insanely valuable, but Ned looked them up and found they were worth $1.38.

  Lunches would be followed by a nap, more coffee, another outing.

  Maude was therefore not awake when her grandson Harry arrived to pick up Ned for a day on the hill at the Poor Farm. The river was full of searchers from other counties, and Harry had possession of a rented portable ground-penetrating radar machine for only another three days. He needed to return to the dig.

  Ned was still in the shower. Polly wanted to go with them. She wanted to dig far from the river, the kitchen, people she loved.

  “Nothing is where it’s supposed to be,” said Harry, looking into the refrigerator for half-and-half. “So far, beyond that first grave site, a building foundation, an orchard.”

  “What else is there to worry about?”

  “More dead people,” said Harry. “Frankly.”

  The dogs and the children were at the front window, staring at something. Polly checked and saw Graham standing awkwardly on the sidewalk.

  “Should I ask him in?”

  “Not on my behalf,” said Harry, blowing on his mug. “I asked if he wanted coffee and he said he had no addictions, which annoyed me, and so I left him out there.”

  Polly went out. “Hey,” she said. “You got rid of your eye bandage.”

  “I had to walk to the clinic to get my eye checked,” said Graham.

  “Any lasting damage?” asked Polly.

  “I think there is. It still hurts.”

  She wanted to say, Don’t you feel lucky? Aren’t you stunned that you’re alive? Aren’t you underwater in a different way, drowning in grief? Aren’t you at least a little guilty to still be breathing? Both eyes were clear, the whites without a hint of bloodshot, Graham’s face without a hint of expression. His scratches were scabbing over. “Why don’t you have a car, anyway?”

  “I was in an accident,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He didn’t say it as a plea for kindness. It was a shutdown, a Fuck you, Mom line.

  “Harry won’t be long,” said Polly, deciding not to offer him anything. She walked back toward her house. Her children, who hadn’t budged from the porch, were staring at Graham like ghost children planning his death. Even the dogs hadn’t greeted him.

  “What’s the deal with Graham not having a car?” she asked Harry.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is this about the bad thing that had happened in Seattle?”

  “What bad thing?” asked Harry.

  Polly and Helen were leaving for the pool when Drake walked through the gate an hour later, carrying a bouquet for Maude—they had planned to go for lunch—and another tote bag of Hollywood blather. Polly, forgetting about the lesson, had told him she could work, but Drake claimed to find the whole outing interesting, though his face dipped when Helen explained why they were taking a walk first: to look for Ari, of course. The three of them took the path along the river with the dogs. Drake had never noticed the osprey nest, despite floating by it a dozen times in the last four days. It was a little like the time he said he’d never seen the grapevine on Polly’s porch, after two summers walking underneath it.

  At the pool, Helen plopped right into the water now, a happy otter. At the far end, the city’s athletic director was training the season’s lifeguards, all teenaged and female and buzzing with Drake’s presence. He made it worse by waving to them.

  “Did you ever play a lifeguard?” asked Polly.

  “Never.”

  “You won’t lead Maude on at lunch?”

  “I’m being led,” said Drake. “I’m being used, but pleasantly. She wants me to know her stories. She thinks someone, someday, should do justice to all the shit she and her cousins got up to. Or the earlier stuff, all these strange stories about her mother and her father and her stepfather.”

  “Jane won’t want anyone knowing most of it.”

  “I’m invited to your picnic, and I know your beautiful mother will give me the stink eye the whole time. I won’t tell her secrets.” He waved to Connie, who pretended not to see him.

  Polly went to the edge to tell Connie about Helen’s nightmare—boiling pool water—and Connie hissed that it was humiliating to be seen in a bathing suit.

  She’d spent every summer morning in a suit for years. “Connie, you look great.”

  “I know how I look.” The girl’s face was dusty pink, a flush over queasiness.

  Drake and Polly buzzed through script turndowns, as usual without acknowledging that there were only ever turndowns: Irishmen in Mexico in 1848, a romantic comedy about ecologists, a murder drama about cooks (though Drake found the number of available murder weapons compelling). He still liked a story about a predatory bartender; he was at this point attracted to anything that could be filmed in Montana and incensed that no one wanted a second fly-fishing movie.

  The lesson was over, and Helen trotted up, dripping. While Polly dressed her—the drill involved sheltering a toddler’s body with a towel while you pulled up pants, avoiding the funky locker room—Drake went to the pool edge and gestured to Connie, who was pretending that she was having a deep thought on the far side. She crossed with as much of her body submerged as possible. Polly watched them talk. Drake touched the side of Connie’s face and kissed the top of her head.

  All this while the teenagers gaped. Back in the car—a wet child, slavering dogs; it didn’t matter to Drake, who’d grown up poor in a shitty part of Spokane—Drake said, “I wanted to tell her I was sorry. She lost her best friend.”

  Polly only then realized she had not thought to do something that simple.

  That afternoon, while Maude and Drake drank mimosas and toured the county in the Porsche he usually kept hidden in his Mission Creek barn, Polly tossed chunks of butter around like playing cards. She steamed the chard, warmed the Bolognese, bickered with Jane about the proportion of butter and flour in the béchamel. She started batches of gingery molasses cookies, the easiest dessert option. She checked the clock, doomed to forget what she’d seen with each tray, but Helen followed her with an old alarm clock, one with a beating paddle that Ned had helped her take apart and put back together. When Maude was delivered back to them, Polly asked her to grate some cheese, just out of curiosity, but Maude wandered away to play cards with Sa
m. She would cheat, and then she would sneak upstairs.

  They made the pasta dough and wrapped it to rest, put water on to boil, and cleared the counter again to set up the Atlas machine. They let Helen crank until it bored her, and the house was soon draped with handkerchiefs of pasta, Tibetan flags, drying white stockings. An hour later they were done. Merle took the pans to the restaurant to bake off.

  “Easy peasy,” said Jane. She’d been on a rant about the idea that Merle wanted to look at property outside of town, the better to have chickens and goats and other character-building animals for their grandchildren. “Maybe the problem will melt away.”

  They were sitting outside, and they could hear Maude snore through the upstairs window. Jane kicked into the inadvisability of drinking when elderly while Polly doled out the small harmless fireworks, coiled snakes and pooping chickens, cheap-ass tiny tanks and expanding pagodas. She wanted to purchase bottle rockets, smoke grenades, sixteen-chamber cakes that would vibrate the town.

  Melt away, troubles as lemon drops—Jane, raised by old people, said things like this often, usually ironically, bits of the Jazz Age or Depression or even Edwardian slang, Dee words and musical phrases: lovey-dovey, criminy, rabbiting on, tempest in a teapot. People had druthers, things were done right off the bat. Why are you piddling around? When Helen had drawn a perfect circle the day before, Jane said, “Aren’t you the bee’s knees.”

  Helen was listening to them from her own little corner, an abandoned area in the garden where Polly was trying to kill off horseradish, and where there had once been a greenhouse. Helen liked finding old tin plant tags and forming the clay into castles, and she knew to watch out for glass and nails. Now she sat on her dirt heap and watched her bowl of ice cream flatten and pool, something close to fear in her face. Polly thought of the classic childhood question—could people melt to death?—good for lava situations and dissolving witches. Would Helen think Ariel melted into the river? If Ariel wasn’t found, that might be the best thing. She could become clean bones, like river stones.

  “Let’s sweeten up,” Jane said. “Let’s enjoy the day, go down early and set up. We don’t want to rush Maude’s nap.”

  In the hammock Sam was visible as one leg and one arm, a fluttering comic visible, held up high. Everyone had a way of solving the problem. Helen’s theory was that Ariel is melting. Sam would read her away. Shazam! Bop!

  Every fucking moment since Ariel vanished was framed around what Polly worried the children would remember. The colored stink of the last of the smoke bombs wafted past the staked tomatoes and the things they’d collected for the picnic—blankets and card tables, camp chairs and tin plates, cups, coolers with half a case of Champagne and the Caesar salad, a crate with half a case of Nebbiolo, cheeses, and bread. Ned would bring the lasagna from the restaurant in a hotbox, which would give him a chance to arrive last.

  “Let’s go,” Polly said. “Sam, put your comics in the house or they’ll blow away.”

  “I’m perfectly comfortable,” said Sam.

  That was a Merle line. Polly flipped him out of the hammock.

  They left a note, loaded one wagon with Helen and her pirate ship and blankets and glasses, the other with supplies, and headed off. A certain giddiness took hold, and when they reached the street Polly started to run, towing the wagon. Helen clutched her ship and shrieked with some wiggling combination of joy and fear. Jane and Sam, struggling to hold three dogs, sprinted, too, but as soon as they were out of sight of the house, they all slowed down.

  The streets were quiet. Half of the town was eating dinner before the second night of the rodeo and the other half was at a concert at the park’s crumbling pastel band shell. The sound of a swing band fluttered up the river with the smell of grilling meat. They kept the dogs on leashes until the far side of the bridge, and when Jane released them, they all ran onto the island and ducked under the chain blocking an overgrown two-track. The Sutton Ranch ran all the way from this wedge up to the area of the Flats where Harry was surveying. Back when this was the narrower channel of the Yellowstone, the Suttons had built their own bridge, gone in a flood in the fifties, to connect to the rest of their land and an old road that now dead-ended at the river and ran along the edge until it turned south to the Poor Farm and Swingley Road.

  Everything that was frayed in life evaporated in the face of beauty. Polly and Jane and the children followed the two-track through green grass, the vault of tall cottonwoods opening to a view of the river, a sandy area, a stone foundation of the old ranch house, gone decades earlier in a fire. The beach was wide and shallow; upstream, the kids climbed on the five-foot dynamite-carved boulders of the ruined bridge’s base. Downstream, they could see the metal of an old diversion dam, long useless, and Polly, who’d seen car bodies in that stretch—old cars were sunk for decades to reinforce ranch banks—told Sam and Helen to steer clear.

  The shrinking channel was perfect, barely a part of the river but not yet funky with algae. Sam worried about how the minnows within it would be trapped and started digging a deeper outlet to the river, herding fish through this temporary gate. Jane and Polly set up Helen’s pirate ship so that she could tow it with a length of surveyor’s string in six-inch water, and she pulled it back and forth to flush the remaining minnows while making suggestions. Sam should make her a new island; someone should blow on the sails, or splash and provide some waves.

  The light was almost the yellow of the Midwest during tornado season, with a big black cloudbank to the northwest, and Polly tried to guess how quickly they’d have to leave if there was a storm. No wind, not even warning puffs, nothing to disturb the spiral of fighting crows and magpies a hundred yards downstream. She fretted about the dogs, but they were staying close. Polly plopped down on the warm sand, exhausted.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” said Jane, sitting next to her.

  “I’d love to,” said Polly.

  “Seattle. Or even Butte.”

  Polly had already shot ahead to Spain, but she said okay. She lay back and saw some raptors, unidentified. It was a busy afternoon. “What kind of hawks are those?”

  “I don’t think they’re hawks,” said Jane. “Vultures? Buzzards?”

  Helen was crawling in front of them, pushing at Polly’s feet. They watched her pry up one rock, choose another and roll that.

  “What are you doing?” asked Polly.

  “Ari could be small now.”

  Jane lay back on the sand and covered her face.

  When the cars arrived, they set up the tables, smeared on sunblock, opened wine. Harry was beginning to relax, Merle was looking at insect husks in the shallows and listing all the smaller creatures Helen and Sam could find in or near the river over the course of the summer: stoneflies, freshwater crayfish, tiny worms. Josie and Drake were skipping around, telling Sam and Helen where and how they should divert the trickle of the upstream channel. Maude hadn’t been ready to leave the house, and Ned would win the errand of fetching her when he brought the lasagna from the restaurant.

  But when the Civic bumped up, and Polly and Jane ran to it—somewhat animated after tequila, willing to forget most of the frantic, sad week—Ned climbed out, looking rattled. When Merle helped Maude out she put a hand over her face, still leaning against the dusty car, and looked straight up at the canopy of cottonwoods. Polly stared at her ancient throat, a strangler fig with a mysterious life at the center, a marvel of survival.

  “Isn’t it beautiful here?” said Polly, with a hesitant edge.

  “It is,” said Maude. “I’d forgotten that part. My sister loved it here. I suppose it’s possible that’s why they were on the bridge. But I think she wanted to get home, and this was the shortcut. She wanted to get out of that car, away from that person.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Polly.

  “My mother died here,” said Jane. “Going off the old bridge. I wanted to see it, and Maude wanted to come here again.”

  “I will admit that it�
��s all harder than I thought it would be,” said Maude.

  Almost nothing in life pissed Polly off more than not being part of a perceived secret, but everyone else rolled with it and ignored her until she came around. Jane sat quietly with Maude while the others opened wine, worked on stream diversion, took turns with Maude’s binoculars. By the time Polly pulled the tinfoil off the lasagna, thirty layers in the end, the whole thing a miracle of salt and fat and flavor, Maude was talking about her cousins and gambling, about the trip to New York for Papa’s tribute in the fall, about everything but death. They ate their delicious unpicnic-like meal, Maude picking all the anchovies out of the salad, Ned and Harry scavenging them. They sat with the tables perpendicular to the river so that they could all see both water and trees, swallows from the facing cliff diving for insects. Jane kept looking downstream at the bridge and the narrow road, and Merle switched their plates so that she would face west, instead of in the direction of Asta’s death.

  After they ate, Maude showed them the stone foundation of the ranch house. There were parties here, in a bunkhouse farther downstream, whenever the elder Suttons were away. If the police came, there was the city-county divide to cite at the first bridge, and the family bridge, gone soon after the house burned in the fifties, had been easily blocked. Before World War II, there’d been a warren of roads over on this now-abandoned south side of the river, more ranches, lost towns, Prohibition liquor drops and stills, the operating Poor Farm. They played cards and Maude’s stories grew more baroque. Drake encouraged her, but everyone else did, too, and Jane kept her temper.

  Helen pulled on Polly’s hand. “When are we going to look?” whispered Helen.

  So Polly filled her glass and they took off with Ned, doing their best to find happier things. A den for an otter or a mink, owl pellets with whole skeletons, quartz pebbles, petrified wood. They showed Helen a car body, an Oldsmobile from 1930 or so, and then Polly put her to work drawing another map, this one on a patch of fine, flat sand.