The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  “Or,” said Harry, “you can look harder and face it. That’s what works for me now.”

  It. He didn’t mean the word that way. Polly watched him crouch near Ariel, then move around to the other side of the girl’s body and crouch again with his face close to one of Ariel’s hands. He did not touch her or move her. Polly would have to tell Drake that in that way, the scene was like a movie. In every other, not: the loveliness around them, the quiet, the way that Harry hummed. When Cy and Shari Swenson arrived, the second night of fireworks had just begun, and Polly huddled by the river facing the explosions rather than Ariel’s body.

  Polly truly looked at Ariel only in that first minute, and never her face. The girl was on her side, arms mangled and dropping away unnaturally. Her belly was swollen, feet gray, T-shirt up under her armpits but the bottom half of her black bikini in place. Now, as they waited, Polly’s eyes slid over Ariel’s thick red-gold hair, stretched over sticks and pebbles, matted with leaves and riverweed but still bright. In Polly’s childhood book of Arthurian legends, dead lovelorn Elaine’s hair looked like that, spread out on a wooden boat, a floating bier. Which was ludicrous—Ariel had not died, willfully, of grief.

  “Is it harder or easier if it isn’t a murder?” she asked.

  But Harry shook his sad, bony, handsome head. “I’m not sure it matters,” he said. “Especially if someone’s young.”

  In the bed, in the dark, Polly asked Ned why this would happen again. At least it wasn’t strangers finding Ariel, he said. Out of all the bad, this was good.

  She tried to erase what she’d seen, and then she gave up and tried to remember. But in the morning, she would forget to ask Harry why he was looking at Ariel’s hands.

  The dream of the night, with some competition, had Polly towing a rowboat down a flooded cathedral choir, past walls of indigo and green stained glass that showed faces and houses and animals and everything in the world. She tried to pick her favorite pane as the boat, paneled with more glass, bumped and gouged her leg and fish followed the blood.

  The other dreams were shorter. Polly lost her keys, lost Jane’s dog, lost herself on a forested path in a glowing city. Each time she jerked awake and remembered Ariel was dead.

  “Honey,” said Merle. It was 8:00 in the morning, and he’d watched Polly stand by a window for five minutes. “What did you see?” he asked.

  The vanished, she thought. Putting the feeling into a word made it stagy, took away its lightness and the sense of an endless pattern.

  Ned was already at Peake’s, dealing with a failed compressor, a dishwasher and waitress calling in sick. The overwhelming nature of the everyday, grinding over death, despair, and holidays like a glacier. Merle gave Polly coffee and she knew he kept an eye on her while he flipped sausages, cracked eggs, served up a massive breakfast for people who had no obvious appetite. Jane was still in bed, the kids huddled and quiet by the television.

  “Do you think we should check on Maude?” Polly asked. Maude, drunk and not sweet after Ariel was found, a bullhorn voice and fragile bones staggering around their kitchen until Ned and Merle helped her up the stairs.

  “I heard her make it to the bathroom and back an hour ago,” said Merle. “Don’t worry about her and go easy on your mother today.”

  “Well, sure,” said Polly. But Jane was no delicate flower. “Didn’t she sleep?”

  “It’s hard. She can’t help imagining her.”

  Polly’s glitchy brain shot through images: Ariel’s hair, the woman near the break wall in Michigan, the man on the sand in Stony Brook, Rita and her own private ocean.

  “Her mother,” said Merle. He almost snapped. “Asta.” He was looking through the bread bag for slices without mold, a reminder that Polly couldn’t manage the simplest things.

  “Who died in a car accident. With someone. No one ever mentioned that part.”

  His voice softened. “Who was trapped in a car after an accident and drowned.”

  Polly’s skin shimmied. “How did you expect me to know that, if you hadn’t told me? If I’ve never been supposed to talk about it, because it upsets her?”

  “Don’t be angry,” said Merle. “Janie’s never said it upset her. She was fine last night, before the girl.”

  The girl. “Aaargh,” said Polly, bursting into tears. “Jesus, Dad.”

  She went out to the garden and dug up a rosebush she didn’t like, a sacrifice: The rose was hot pink with no scent. It attracted aphids and frosted to the ground each year. Polly’s ratty brain sought and garbled King Lear—Why should thou have life, and her, none—and when she threw the bush in the trash she felt infantile only because she’d have preferred to spray it with gasoline and light it on fire.

  Ariel crowded back around her head and Polly pushed her away. She ran back in the house to make a list:

  Ariel’s shorts? the man in the car? Ask cousins about Asta?

  Merle by then was measuring for bookshelves and talking to the kids, who had seen a monarch butterfly the day before, about metamorphosis and the difference between a chrysalis and a cocoon, and how completely different any of it was than, say, molting a carapace. He said that butterflies remembered the aversions they’d learned as caterpillars, despite an intervening existence as undifferentiated goo. Polly was considering what this meant when Maude’s cane rapped on the floor. It was possible that she’d been rapping for a while, but Polly ignored this call for help and ran back through the yard to the alley house. Jane was still in bed.

  “Mom,” said Polly. “Mother.”

  “I should never go near the water,” said Jane. “I can’t stop thinking of my poor mother drowning. Did you know she was almost as young as Ariel? I can’t bear it.”

  Jane covered her face and wept, and Polly sat with her. What could she say? Live through this? Remind her of how much worse it was for the Delgados? Some things aren’t survivable.

  But Jane knew all this. Polly wanted to ask about the death Jane owned, about Asta: Was the other person in the car driving? Did they live? Did they leave her to die?

  Instead Polly said, “I love you, and I’m sorry.”

  Jane pulled a pillow over her face.

  Everything meant too much, again. Back in the main house, Polly heard water running in the tub upstairs, and the coffee machine was empty; Maude was ambulatory. Merle walked through the kitchen, dangling a measuring tape. “She’s been on the phone. She invited the Duerrs and the Kings tomorrow night. Since Ariel has been found, she said.”

  “She’s not easy, is she,” said Polly.

  “No.”

  Merle puttered off, willfully oblivious, his own carapace hardened. Polly felt as if she’d been glazed with some mild form of novocaine. If this were a normal day, if she were still thinking clearly, what would she be doing? It was the Fourth of July, and there were no swimming lessons, even if Connie could have handled giving them. People were supposed to be happy, and Sam and Helen might still want to try to be happy. Polly had to think up something normal.

  Upstairs, Maude was singing. Polly finished the card she’d started twice, pulled the extra tray of lasagna, the one in the nicest pan, out of the refrigerator, picked a large bouquet of roses and delphinium, clematis and astrantia, stuffed it in a fancy tequila bottle, and set out for the Delgados’ house.

  When Harry talked to Ariel’s mother, Inez wanted to see her daughter’s body and wanted to know if Harry or Polly were able to recognize the girl. She wanted reassurance, but Polly wondered in what way. To know that Ariel hadn’t been untouched, or maimed? After five days in the water, she’d been just barely human. Ultimately, Cy would take a careful photo in the hospital morgue to give to the family.

  Harry told Polly to visit with the family when she dropped off food. Josie said call first, leave the dish at the door, and run for it. Polly didn’t know these people well enough to see them in their probable state.

  Polly drove carefully, missing only one stop sign, to the Delgados’ big new house in a subdi
vision in the hills. She parked in a driveway full of cars, but the house showed no sign of life. She knocked tentatively, looked around, and slid the dish and a card onto the stacked firewood. She was halfway down the sidewalk when the door was ripped open. Inez looked out at her, and down at the pan.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Funny how no one wants to linger.”

  Polly walked back up to the house. Inez Delgado, usually haughty and beautiful, was now gray skinned, bundled in sweaters, sinking into a big chair but calm. Polly had brought some photographs—Ariel in the garden, with the kids and dogs, with a glass of wine (Polly wasn’t going to fret about the Delgados’ religiosity). They talked about the memorial the next day, what food people should bring and which of them might speak. There would be a private funeral, once the state lab returned the body.

  Connie sat in the corner of the room, picking at fading bouquets. Two of Ariel’s sisters came and went. Everyone but Polly had sent lilies, and while she and Inez talked about Ariel—her sweetness, her silliness, her intelligence—Polly watched an ant climb out of her bouquet and hesitate at the bottom of the tequila bottle. Connie reached over and crushed it.

  When Inez asked about Ariel’s body, Polly, in a half-truth, said she’d looked away. By the time she left, she understood that Ariel hadn’t gone out with “that boy.” The notion that anyone thought Ariel had done so bothered the Delgados. Perhaps the boy would clear up the conflict? Their daughter wouldn’t even touch wonderful Drake, who liked her so much. They’d tried telling Cy, but could Polly tell Harry?

  Polly said she would. It was amazing, how people still wanted Harry to be a cop.

  Connie followed Polly out in silence. When they reached Polly’s car, she only asked one question. “Was she still wearing clothes?”

  “Yes,” said Polly. “Bathing suit, T-shirt.”

  Connie started to cry. “What about her shorts?”

  “Maybe they came off in the water,” said Polly.

  “She wouldn’t have taken them off, any more than the preserver,” said Connie.

  Polly slumped home, feeling like a softening balloon. Cousin Hans, who looked more and more like an albino crow, had taken Maude to lunch, a true community service, and Merle and Jane planned to hike.

  “This wasn’t easy on your mother,” said Merle, redundantly.

  Boy howdy, thought Polly. She went outside, because it was eighty degrees and clear, soft and lovely, and her family was alive. Who were they to know their allotted time or even, sadly (in Polly’s case), what time, day, month it was at any given moment? If she lay on her back in the yard—which she did now, Sam and Helen and the other animals finding nothing odd about it—she saw mountains, swiveling tips of trees, clouds scudding by at a hundred miles an hour. Birds, a roofline with a loose shingle. If she turned her head to the right, she could see the old dog Pearl looking in the garden for the old dead cat. Cats weren’t meant to predecease their dogs, just like women weren’t meant to leave widowers, and children weren’t supposed to die at all. If she turned to the left, she could see the new cat watching a chipmunk with the other dogs, all of them still immune to time.

  Sam lay in the grass next to Polly, seeing how long he could bear the feeling of an ant on his skin. Helen wandered off with a bowl and a bucket and a hose to her corner of the garden. She liked to form the clayey soil into mud animals—mostly variations on dogs or rabbits—then say a spell to make them come alive. It involved throwing the finished sculptures into a bucket of water with great force, while saying voilà and some gibberish. Polly had given her the idea, because she remembered Dee doing something like this once.

  Find something, save everyone. Helen lifted her arms, dropped them, started an argument among her creatures. She had so many theories and worlds and Polly worried about the way they’d quietly dissolve over the years, fall away after reckonings with real life. Forgetting her own over the years felt like giving up, even as it happened, and she didn’t want Helen to lose the magic. Polly could just barely remember grasping the pattern to time, days and weeks and seasons. She could not recall her baroque rationale of how locks, toilets, cars operated, let alone sex and birth. She remembered death and her ideas about Frank and Evie, and the weird magic of the map, but nothing religious, no glimmer of that kind of a higher god, a soul beyond trees and sky. They hadn’t been that kind of family.

  Polly’s overriding theory, since leaving Long Island, was that shit happened, and you molded the mess into the next best option. Even if nothing needed to be romanticized, everything was still a wonder. But what did you say to Ariel during the dark, harsh night, your mind on a pillow of needles, brain writhing like a panicked earthworm?

  Helen’s big, clear voice: “Mom, what’s this?”

  A flicker shot overhead, followed by two peevish magpies protecting a massive twig nest in the oldest apple tree. Polly waved to Helen, delaying, and by the time she got up, Helen was back to her mud trance.

  “What did you want to show me?” asked Polly.

  “What do you mean?” asked Helen.

  Polly, feeling neglectful, watered her beans and lettuce, her fennel and cabbages and twenty tomato plants. She weeded, and she did not scream when Maude, who wasn’t usually capable of a silent approach, spoke.

  “A terrible thing,” she said.

  “Yes,” Polly said, straightening. As if Maude hadn’t been tottering drunk and raving about death the night before.

  “Your father said you had a moment this morning.”

  “I’m tired,” said Polly. “I drank too much.”

  Maude excelled in sidelong looks. She was, after all, a psychiatrist, though never the talking kind. She’d worked in hospitals back in the days of Thorazine and shock therapies and lobotomies, specializing in veterans with head injuries, and she’d authored one of the first papers suggesting that explosions damaged the brains of people with no obvious injuries.

  But there had been no prize in the past for people skills. Maude had essentially been a single parent, and her children seemed sane, but her training had come in the neurological Stone Age between world wars. According to Jane, Maude thought Polly’s damage was nonprogressive but akin to wet brain, a kind of benign fabulism with false memories. The only way to talk Polly out of them was for her to keep a notebook and check herself. Hence the ongoing battle: Polly felt as if Jane was testing out Polly’s stories the way she’d tested fables when she was a student, trying to determine which version was scariest. A game of telephone, this time with Polly’s head.

  Polly tried an evasive maneuver. “Will you help Sam with the family tree? He needs a simple one for school, and it seems like the party would be the time to ask questions.”

  “A simple one,” said Maude with a little smile. “How funny. Now tell me, do you still get those migraines?”

  “They don’t hurt,” said Polly. “Now they only cause daydreams.” A lovely, innocuous word.

  “But they must be so hard on Ned.”

  One of Papa’s better-known essays had been titled “The Emergent Past.” Polly thought she should reread it. “No,” said Polly. “I think he’s fine.” And a counterattack: “So who was the man in the car with Asta?”

  Maude looked away. “Everything needs to come from your mother.”

  “Was he driving? Was he drinking?”

  Maude arched a thin gray eyebrow, skin creasing above it, the big eye below suddenly smoother and younger and sarcastic. “Back to you, dear. Does Ned find your injury frustrating?”

  Polly started laughing. “No, I’m the one who’s angry. Everyone watching me, everyone asking questions and not believing my answers. No one believes me.”

  “Do you find that in grief your memory is even worse?”

  “No,” said Polly. “Maybe it concentrates the mind. It all feels much closer. I have so many questions.”

  Helen was watching them, and Fritz the mutt and the old poodle were watching, too. The new edge to Polly’s voice was like a special radio f
requency. Maude looked as if she wanted to retrench but Polly didn’t give her a chance.

  “Think of your own childhood,” she said. “What would your parents have not believed that you’d remember?”

  “Tricky girl,” said Maude. “Probably them having sex in the pantry, when they didn’t think we knew. My father’s face, his voice, or being carried by my mother. And you?”

  Polly started to speak but stopped herself.

  Maude waited, leaning toward her. “What were you going to say?”

  Polly thought of a lawyer’s problem: If you’re not sure you want to know the answer, don’t ask. And what was Maude searching for, here? “Dee told me something, and I wondered if you agreed. She said there were three kinds of dreams.”

  “Ah!” said Maude. “She meant lasting dreams, the kind that return. I suppose it’s as true as any theory. Do you have the same now that you did as a child? What are they?”

  “Boats,” said Polly. “Men in boats. And women in the water.”

  They were quiet for several minutes. Helen went back to her mud creatures. She was covering their heads with flower petals, tiny bits of bachelor button and calendula. Maude was watching closely, fascinated, and said her mother had done this with her when she was a child. Polly didn’t admit that she knew this already. They watched Helen line up her figures, sing some gibberish, and blast them with a hose.