The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  That afternoon, Papa picked some of Dee’s roses and walked down to Mrs. Maw’s house. Polly and Edmund skulked behind, assuming the door wouldn’t open for him, either.

  But it did. When Papa came out a few minutes later, he said he’d asked Mrs. Maw if she’d like him to have the cat put down. She said no and wanted Papa to give Polly something as a thank-you, a pretty embroidered handkerchief. When Papa explained the scenario, she opened a drawer and pulled out a small ivory pocketknife for Edmund.

  Polly wanted the knife.

  “She has no hair,” said Papa. “She wears a turban. In her head, she’s still young, and she wants to stay that way in other people’s minds. She’s not like us.”

  As penance for giving Edmund and Polly a cold, Merle said he’d stay home when Dee and Papa and Jane needed to go to a friend’s birthday party in the city. No one suggested that Rita was up to the task.

  Jane was apologetic and said she’d change her plans.

  “No,” said Merle. “Let me. Have some fun.” He kissed Jane—not many things made Polly happier—and sent her off. He made them a real breakfast, frying bacon and eggs, hashing some potatoes on the side. He wiped the counters, and did the dishes, and even swept the kitchen floor. He would write for a while, he said, and they should go upstairs, since they were sick and it was raining. He didn’t care that Edmund, who avoided whatever floor Rita was on whenever possible, didn’t want to go. “Get your butt up there,” said Merle. “You can shut the door to Papa’s office. You can lock yourself in, for all I care.” But he patted Polly, as if it was a joke.

  Upstairs, Rita was cleaning her brushes, still in her bathrobe. “Is everyone gone?”

  “Dad is here,” said Polly.

  “I know that, silly,” said Rita, going down the stairs.

  The hallway was wet and shiny, overwhelmingly green and blue, oceans and sky, just like the world. They could hear Rita below in the kitchen, laughing at Merle’s jokes. When she laughed again, Edmund touched both hands to his head, to his earaches, and together they walked to the end of the hall, to Papa and Dee’s door, and shut it behind them.

  The bedroom was on the left, with open pocket doors, and a dressing table covered with Dee’s things was in the center room, under a window looking out on the green cloud of the dogwood tree. Papa’s study was to the right, behind another set of pocket doors. You could see a strip of the Sound but the real show was what lay on the sills, nothing glittery, but still strange: the bone whistle (be careful who you call, said Papa), tiny statues of round women, a sperm whale tooth, an aqua shot glass with red dots and the words Two Dot, a disintegrating piece of celluloid, and a curly lock of dark hair, dangling from his cantilevered desk lamp by a blue velvet ribbon.

  Polly and Edmund were still woozy and weak. They flopped on the sofa and looked through Dee’s jewelry box, all the different drawers with pearls and earrings, baby teeth and stones; one tiny silk bag was filled with lumpy rough diamonds. They heard footsteps on the stairs, whispers and giggles, sliding furniture. The study door rattled and a minute later Rita’s door clicked shut. Edmund tried to push the door to the hall open, but it was blocked—they could see the blue wood of the dresser that held the towels.

  “We could climb out the window,” said Polly, looking at the top of the dogwood.

  Edmund shrugged. May, a glowing orange caution sign, looked back up at them from the grass and Dwight preened himself on a branch above her head.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Edmund said. “Where would we go, anyway?”

  The laughter from the hall ended, and the pins on the map in Papa’s study jumped to the rhythmic slam of Rita’s bed striking the other side of the wall. Polly and Edmund retreated with their books to the bedroom, where the bed was dented for two bodies, one heavier and longer. Edmund took Papa’s side, Polly took Dee’s, and they read and faded off into daydreams and other thoughts that weren’t as good, not so much about people who made walls rattle but about people who went to see doctors for tests. There were pill bottles all over Dee’s bedside table.

  “I don’t want her to die,” said Edmund.

  But they knew she would. They knew endings and other old truths Jane and Merle wouldn’t speak about but Dee and Papa could: that the world needed monsters, even if it made it hard to walk through the dark; that the oldest horror story was the beast in the back of the cave, and that babies giggled when someone pretended to eat them because being eaten was the oldest fear. That vines could see nearby trees, that people had always drunk too much, and you couldn’t blame yourself if they did; that people had always gone mad, and sometimes it wasn’t malevolent. That you couldn’t fault anyone for pretending there might be good news. That people sometimes died without pain. That you had to treat your memory like a violin and play the bits you liked so that you wouldn’t forget. That your lizard brain made you jump at a snake or a spider, and that people inherited this fear and the special landscapes of their own dreams, some aching for forests, some loving hills or deserts, snow or rivers. That Polly and Edmund would always know the right thing, and they would always at least try to do it. That they weren’t fools: They knew that people had to die, make room, and that when you died, you disappeared. The world didn’t hurt anymore, and you didn’t worry anymore.

  It was dark when they heard someone move the dresser. Downstairs, Merle left out glasses of milk and grilled cheese sandwiches. They could hear him talking in Rita’s room, but they didn’t see him until the next morning, when Dee and Papa and Jane returned, and Rita moved on to another continent, singing as she drew long hills, seas of trees. She was so good when she was painting, so sane. She let them powder Dee’s broken pieces of stained glass and add it to the paint for the ocean, so that the water glittered as if it were full of krill and silver fish. Sometimes she tucked Edmund in even when Jane returned, even on nights when Dee wasn’t in the hospital.

  13

  Friday, July 5, 2002

  At 4:00 in the morning before Maude’s party, Polly found herself young again, standing in the hallway at Stony Brook in front of a section of Rita’s map. Polly was worried that if she looked too hard at the wet paint, she’d find dead faces. Instead she saw a beautiful beach, a shack and scrub trees, a woman and a man coming out of the water and lying down together on the warm sand. In the dream, Polly was surprised: She couldn’t remember Rita painting these figures. They were so unlike her.

  When Polly started to wake, she clung to what she saw, because it was so much better than thinking of Ariel. Downstairs, she studied their two Rita paintings as if she might find the faces there, but the paintings showed what they’d always shown: origami-like birds and a portrait of two children. The couple had never been painted, and now they disappeared again. The dream was a dream.

  A list for a difficult day:

  lessons

  everything for memorial done by 2:00

  party: chairs, tables, forecast before tablecloths or bouquets

  photo boards—enlarge or give up? Sic Drake on Maude

  Sam family tree

  At the pool, the children practiced jumping from the edge.

  “I’ve picked some passages for the memorial,” said Connie. “I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to read them myself. I might have to ask someone else to do it.”

  “That’s nothing I would be good at,” said Polly, drying Helen off.

  “No, I want you to read them now.” Connie pointed to her backpack on the far side of the pool, a girly shade of purple. “Main pocket,” she said.

  Polly walked over and unzipped the pocket. She looked down at a switchblade, a can of mace, and a can of antiperspirant, and unfolded a sheet of white ruled paper. At the top, in irregular spiky handwriting:

  Everyone who knew Ari trusted her. She made people feel safe and happy, and we all assumed we would have her around forever.

  Connie had scratched out to take care of us at the end of the last sentence.

  I know it is harder for her fa
mily, but she was my friend from daycare on, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I understand this takes time. I have in the meantime reminded myself to abide by His teachings.

  “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”

  “What do you think?” said Connie. “Will everyone freak out?”

  Yes, thought Polly. She would try to gaze off into the clouds for this part of the memorial. “Forgive him for what?”

  Connie stopped acting as if it were a game. “For whatever he did. It’s his fault.”

  “What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to be forgiven for what you want to do to him?”

  “I would never,” said Connie. “It’s just that it’s on my mind, and I’m supposed to talk about what’s on my mind.”

  “I think you’re supposed to talk about anything that will help the family, and anything that’s true and good to say about Ariel.”

  Connie’s face was stiff.

  “I’m sorry,” said Polly, “but I think the last thing you want to talk about is who might be at fault.”

  “Mr. Susak is going to make him come to the memorial, and I’m going to watch his face. I told Mr. Susak I’d quit watching the kids if he didn’t tell me why Graham moved here, and he said Graham hit and killed a girl crossing a street. I guess they were going to charge him with negligent homicide but it didn’t stick.”

  Polly watched Helen float on her back. “When did this happen?”

  “Six months ago. He gets his license back today or tomorrow.”

  “Maybe he’ll finally leave,” said Polly. “He should leave.”

  “You know Harry wants to kill him,” said Connie. “And Drake, of course.”

  “People don’t go around killing people,” said Polly.

  Polly didn’t know that Ariel’s life preserver had been found the night before. As it happened, the person who found it in a willow tangle on an island downstream from Pine Creek was subsequently arrested at a fishing access site for smoking marijuana. Already, in 2002, this wasn’t an arrest most police were eager to bother with, but Cy was forced into it. He’d been dealing with a fender bender at the Mayor’s Landing take-out when a young man named Shane Bobbin pulled up, his raft haloed in smoke. Shane, waving a red Stearns preserver in the air, swallowed his joint as Cy watched.

  Shane Bobbin said he’d found this preserver high in a thicket on the island where Graham said he’d frolicked with Ariel. Cy did not listen to specifics and assumed that the preserver was marooned by high spring water from an accident the summer before, like the poor Yellowstone Park drowning victim’s leg. Shane pointed out that the preserver was unbleached by the sun, without a year’s worth of wind-borne dust or bird shit or leaves. He planned to keep it—it was at least a $50 model—but the blotch of blood near the neck killed the urge. So it was timely that he’d run into Cy. In a way.

  Cy bagged the preserver, which fit the description of the one Vinnie bought for Ariel, and arrested Shane for possession. Cy knew he’d been remiss: He hadn’t followed up on Connie’s or the family’s comments about Graham. He didn’t entirely trust Harry’s assessment about the bruise or cut on Ariel’s face or arm or the marks on her hand or wrist, despite Harry’s considerable training. No one understood the power of the river. People always wanted an explanation, and they always wanted someone to blame. But an accident was an accident. Blame God, thought Cy. Blame a long roll down the river. Even now, the blood, the cut and bruised face—maybe she’d fallen. Why expect the boy to remember everything?

  In the morning, Cy reconsidered after another call from the Delgados, who insisted again that their daughter had not been in love with Graham, and as far as they could tell never dated him. Ariel sometimes went out after work, but unless she was with the Berrigans or Connie or Drake, she was always home by 7:00 or 8:00. Cy tracked down some of the rafters, and one now mentioned hearing Graham razz Ariel about her fear of the water, holding the preserver above her head, teasing. They didn’t seem like a couple.

  Cy sought out Connie at the pool, soon after Polly shot off into her full, rich day, and Connie said her bit again: Graham was a murderer. She went on about Ariel’s fear of water and missing shorts. Cy was relieved when his radio went off, telling him about an altercation at the corner of Second and Park.

  By coincidence, the attorney assigned to represent Shane Bobbin at the morning’s hearing was Vinnie Susak. Vinnie listened to Shane’s story, recommended he plead not guilty, and left the courthouse at 8:15 a.m. He walked into Graham’s building and dragged Graham out of his bedroom and down his shitty soiled hall and stairs, screaming that Graham was going to visit the Delgados and apologize. The elderly neighbors called the police, and when Cy reached Vinnie and Graham, they were on the sidewalk across from Peake’s, with Ned in the middle, and Vinnie saying he was going to use his prosthesis to beat his nephew to death if he didn’t do the right thing.

  Vinnie refused to explain his rage to Cy, who sent him off and followed Graham to his apartment—a squalid, airless hole—to ask about the preserver and the bloodstain. He listened to the basic story—Graham loved Ariel, and they’d kept it a secret because her parents wouldn’t understand—and new explanations: Ariel threw the preserver into the brush to prove a point, but before that Graham remembered her falling on the beach, though he couldn’t remember blood. It was when they’d first gotten out, when people were still around—hadn’t anyone mentioned it? Everyone was drinking. Graham had wanted the others to go away.

  Cy left, unhappy. He needed the autopsy results, but he knew the medical examiner’s office in Missoula was short-staffed.

  Ned, arriving home, gave Polly a dramatic account of the fight and absolutely no information on causation. Vinnie and Nora would not be coming to Maude’s party; Vinnie would require a quiet cabin in the woods after the memorial.

  Meanwhile, Polly and Ned needed to get on with the day. They set up the roasting box in the backyard, and Polly put the brisket for the memorial into the bottom oven to reheat. Before the box was opened and Ned carved the pig, they’d go full gout: the mixed blessing of the oysters, piles of cold shrimp from the Gulf with different sauces, gougères, fat stinky cheeses. She’d baked the tarts—apricot and plum, one gooseberry in a nod to the Swedes—early to make way for the backup pork shoulders, potato gratins, and roasted tinfoil-wrapped packages of beets to be tossed with green beans and aioli, which would offend a certain contingent. She made an especially lively chimichurri for the same reason. Sam trimmed beans and Helen looked for bugs in the flat of blackberries they’d serve with their own raspberries and the real cake Polly had ordered, a tower of vanilla and ganache with the numeral 90 in a nicely archaic font.

  Chairs out, tables out, and then Polly was left with the things she’d avoided. The family tree Sam was supposed to bring to school in the fall was problematic for a number of reasons. Sam muttered about “roots,” and Polly knew his teacher probably wanted some shallow yet earnest examination of immigration, not the magpie nest that had gone into making him. She gave him a fancy notebook and printed out some prototypes, but the first loop-de-loops Sam came up with looked like a family vine in the style of Escher. Another attempt reminded her of the trees Rita splashed onto the wall in Stony Brook, before she’d been hauled off to the bin. Dryads, with vine-like limbs.

  Sam expressed despair over this snarl of names, and they all trooped out to the alley house. Sam and Polly watched Jane draw a beautiful tree, a marvel of clarity and design. Contents would come from Maude, and what Maude didn’t know, the extra layers of complexity—who, why, secrets—real secrets, as opposed to garbage—would come out or not at the party.

  But back in the house, Maude was still singing in the bathtub. Helen sat by the door, memorizing the words. Sam didn’t mind disappearing into his room, and Polly let the project drift away again, too. It took Drake to move things along. Maude, he said, talking through the bathroom door, t
he photos are all you’ve talked about for weeks, and yet you avoid looking at them. If it’s too hard, let’s leave them out.

  Maude exited the bathtub, foraged for food in the refrigerator and made her way into the dining room. For the next two hours she moved back and forth from the photo pile to Polly, Jane, Merle, the children, even Ned, sliding through different lives with anyone who would listen. Eventually everyone left the dining room, leaving Maude alone with her dead.

  “Is this too much?” asked Maude.

  “No,” said Polly. “You’ve had ninety years of being photogenic.” She called for Drake, who was out on the porch, trying to come up with the right words for the memorial. He came inside and stood patiently while Maude dithered again, and when she reached a pause, he grabbed the stack and headed to the copy shop.

  Try to tell a story of a family in photographs, thought Polly. Just try. When the boards were done, the largest of a hundred photos would show Maude with her father, sitting on the same porch. You could see Dee’s shadow as she held the camera, and Maude’s legs were moving and blurred. Maude’s father was thin and the smile he was giving was all for the photographer. A second photo, probably earlier, showed the couple—had he been Dee’s husband, yet? Maude claimed they’d “lived in sin” for some time—sitting on the lawn with friends, tiny new trees staked behind them and the frame of a new building, the greenhouse that had burned before Maude was even born, the source of Helen’s broken glass and maybe Helen’s pretty rock. And a third photo, taken on a Los Angeles beach in the early twenties, Maude and her brothers splashing in the surf and Papa and Dee on either side of small Asta, swinging her above the water. They’d been in their forties then, and Dee had looked pretty good, but Papa had been a long, cool drink of water.