The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  A weird, sunny mood in the car, as if they hadn’t heard Rita howling for hours or seen blood dripping from her hand. The drive was new to Edmund, and Papa took the long way to point out the navy yard and the place where the British had packed Americans onto a ship and left them to starve in the Revolutionary War, skulls and bones crowding the shore of Wallabout Bay. People found vertebrae instead of seashells, crabs hiding in skulls. Then the swoop and darkness as they entered the city, the noise and blurring traffic when they emerged from the tunnel. They parked the car and carried their bags to the apartment on Bleecker, a bedroom and an office in the back overlooking scrabbly gardens, black-and-white tiled floor in the kitchen, clanking radiators. Polly and Edmund were put in Papa’s office, Polly on the padded window seat overlooking the garden—she barely fit—and Edmund on the small sofa. There were piles of books everywhere and old movie posters with Papa’s name as writer and producer: The Tempest, The Amber Queen, The Window.

  They took the subway to the museum. The doctor’s office was on Eightieth and Third, and Papa pointed west and said they’d all meet at noon in the south wing of the Met.

  “Where?” asked Polly.

  “Begone,” he said. “We’ll find you.”

  How, thought Polly. But they made their way west and Edmund ran up the massive steps. The guard at the door looked unhappy. “Our mother is inside,” said Edmund. He put a quarter in the donation jar and looked levelly at the man, who waved them on. Polly was humbled by this ability to bullshit.

  They saw Egyptian mummies and armor, naked women and angels and crosses, paintings about gods and violence. They were in the Asian section when Polly felt a hand mashing down on her head, twisting: Papa. Dee led them around the corner to a case with patterned cloth and jewels; she pointed to a gold belt buckle with a roaring lion and they read Papa’s name—he’d found it on a frozen body buried in the mountains of Russia, in 1911.

  Papa showed them all the stories hidden in amber and bone and marble as they moved through the galleries. Every civilization dealt with insanity and every story was an echo, an inherited memory. The oldest were about the father and the mother gone, a child starving, a beast waiting in the back of the cave. Or a false mother, or a trickster, or being lost—all these things happened over and over. This was why everyone wanted to hear fables and see horror movies: People like being reminded of their old fears, the idea that life had once been worse. The best stories—the birth of the sun and the moon, trickery and transformation, theories for the night and day and winter and summer—both explained and reassured: It won’t always stay dark, it won’t always stay cold, it’s all happened before. Some cultures preferred these comforting stories.

  “Not the Aztecs or the old gods,” said Dee.

  “No one loves the old gods,” said Papa. “They ate their children. Mean fucks, every one.”

  They walked through a warren of offices in the basement and left the Scythian albums with a man who kissed Dee on both cheeks and touched her ponytail.

  After they got off the subway at Astor Place, Edmund and Polly split a plain corned beef sandwich and Dee ordered a Reuben, saying that she’d never be able to finish it. Papa, who chose latkes and soup and a pastrami sandwich, ridiculed her when she did. Back at the apartment, Papa said he and Dee needed a nap in their dusty bedroom, just as they did at home. He gave Edmund and Polly the key to the front door and told them to walk around.

  Downstairs, four Italian men were playing chess in front of the store next door. Papa called the place a social club. “Are you with the old lovers, then?” asked one man.

  For whatever reason, they nodded.

  “They’re magic, you know. You the same types?”

  They nodded again, like idiots, and the old men laughed.

  That afternoon, while Papa watched the news—riots, more people being shot—Dee distracted them with treasures from the apartment’s small safe. They played poker with animal teeth and gold and silver coins and old cards. When Dee phoned and heard Rita was still hysterical, and still in the house, she and Papa decided to stay a second night. Hiding out, said Papa. It would be their anniversary in a few days, said Dee, and they needed to celebrate anyway. She took the children up to Altman’s for pajamas, new shoes, pants and shirt for Edmund, a new dress for Polly. At dinnertime, Papa hailed a cab. Dee wore a dress and a necklace and a fur coat, things she kept in the city, for fancy nights. At the restaurant, Polly and Edmund stared at the indoor trees and a pool and the people while Papa and Dee each ate a dozen oysters and gave them sips of Champagne. Scallops and crab, veal and potatoes shaped like roses, asparagus spears tied with orange peel, a baked Alaska. Dee said that the first time she’d met Papa it had been over a fancy meal on Fifth Avenue, but that when they’d married twenty years later, they’d done it in a courthouse, and eaten sausage and apples on a dusty sidewalk afterward. The world was filled with all kinds of good food.

  After Rita stabbed her hand, she told the doctor that it was an accident. She lied well. But while Polly and Edmund were in the city, she slashed at her wrists with nail scissors, and the hospital didn’t argue about keeping her. Jane and Merle took hours cleaning up the bathroom, trying to figure out what to do next.

  Nevertheless, Rita was back in a week, sunny, calm, with bandaged arms, and the household stayed quiet through the spring. Rita set up her easel, but no one left her alone in the greenhouse. They all came up with things to do. Jane washed the glass panes and planted tomato seeds, Papa sorted his finds, Merle fixed the pavers, Dee ordered fresh clay and went back to making pots, keeping Rita company. Even if it kills me, she said.

  In late May, Dee celebrated her eighty-eighth birthday, her beiju, which she said was a special year, especially if you were Japanese. Or a Cornish potter, said Papa, who made Merle grill steaks. Steaks were Merle’s one culinary glory.

  “What happened in Papa’s special year?” asked Polly. Dee’s birthday began every summer and his, at the end of August, ended it.

  “You moved in, sweetheart.”

  Dee’s daughter Maude visited for the birthday and dragged Polly and Edmund through marshes and along rainy beaches looking for birds. She gave advice to everyone, and she and Dee quarreled off and on for a week. Maude spent most nights in the city, visiting old friends, and Papa broke up the quarrels by teasing her about her days as a wild child. Variety, he said, was the spice of Maude’s life.

  For her birthday on May 29, Polly asked for lobster. Rita joked about it all one morning—“Have the lobster, little girl”—until even Merle asked her to stop. Rita talked about what she’d like for her birthday, in September, and though they probably all dreaded the idea of being together that long they nodded and smiled.

  “When is your birthday, E?” asked Dee.

  “March,” said Edmund.

  Polly had just taken a bite of ice cream, a beautiful Dee concoction with fresh strawberries, and she linked this moment with a kind of brain freeze. She watched, unable to swallow, as ice cream melted in her mouth and she thought over the horror of no one celebrating your birthday, no one knowing. What had they done instead? Dee’s lips opened in clear rage.

  “You forgot your child’s birthday?”

  “Darling,” said Papa. “Don’t.”

  Rita was oblivious, scraping her bowl. Edmund didn’t look sad, didn’t look anything. Dee pulled herself up, swaying, so old and so angry. “Edmund, come with me in the kitchen, and we’ll plan your birthday. A little late, but all the better.”

  Polly asked Jane once if Rita realized how much Dee hated her. Jane thought Rita knew, but she wasn’t sure the emotion was hate. Disgust, disdain. Dee loathed Rita for being a bad mother, for not controlling her mind for other people’s sakes.

  A week later, for Edmund’s belated celebration, they went up the Sound to an old, beautiful house with a real sand beach, owned by a friend named Mr. Porter. It was being restored—there were men on the roof, men on ladders. Dee planned to have Papa’s retirement par
ty there at the end of the summer, and for Edmund’s birthday, she’d somehow managed to pick a day that Rita planned to spend in the city, meeting her agent and a man from a French gallery.

  The house was built high above the Sound, with a flower garden below it, and below that a series of hedged rooms with fountains, a true interlocking maze with tall yews. The hedges were neglected, but still dense enough that the people who walked inside were mostly invisible from the higher house, except for the center, next to the large dry fountain. There were smaller fountains in different corners of the maze, vine-covered stone animal heads—a horse, an elephant, a camel, a lion—that Dee had sculpted for Mr. Porter back when she’d been strong enough, before she’d taken up pottery. She’d seen fountains in Rome like this when she was young, and she’d sketched the heads as lizards ran in and out of the statues’ eyes and mouths.

  There were no lizards on Long Island, but the magic of all this green, the way a person became invisible in the strange growing walls, did something to Polly’s mind, led to decades of dead plant tags, a private mythology, and a false sense of what a garden could be.

  Mr. Porter’s grandchildren, who lived with their parents in a smaller place up on the hill, were a little older and slightly predatory. Edmund and Polly ran through the big house’s stables, but eventually the fear of what would happen if they were caught was overwhelming. The Porters commanded that Edmund and Polly help collect tent caterpillars and put them in a marble trough on the side of the stable. The girl pried at Polly’s legs while she was up in the tree, reaching for the caterpillars’ tents. When the boy lit a match, and as the pyre of writhing worms shot up above the trough, Polly and Edmund raced down to the beach and hid in the maze, then parked themselves between Dee and Papa, who commented on the smoke and got the truth.

  “The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout,” said Dee. “I hope they have nightmares.”

  “Those children have problematic eyes,” said Papa. “Learn to recognize the look.”

  The Porters did not reappear, but Edmund and Polly sensed that someone was always watching them—from behind a corner, from the sea, from a hole in the hedge, from the eyes of Dee’s animals. They ran around the gutted, echoing mansion and wallowed in the still, cold salt water with Lemon while Merle and Jane lolled on a blanket, sometimes kissing, and Papa and Dee read. Papa had brought his rowboat down that morning, and at dusk, at high tide, he rowed Edmund and Polly the two miles back to Stony Brook, as all the lights on the shore flickered on.

  Papa and Dee talking, pulling them along through this dreamtime summer. Polly, seeing it in stanzas decades later, was sure, on every waking, that her memory was clear. She could hear the steady rhythm of the oars, Papa’s voice with an accent, but not old, answering their random questions, both silly and earnest. His advice, moving over the water and under the moon, mixed with splashes in her mind: What to do if you’re lost in the mountains? Find water and follow it down. What to do if you see a large bear, as Papa had in Mongolia and Montana? Play dead. What to do if you fall into deep fast water, a riptide or a river? Let it take you until you see a chance, try to stay on your back, feet in the current. What to do if you have an enemy and want to act in anger? Wait and do it right. What to do if someone is lost, but not dead? Find them. What to do when they had children, as they would? Love them. The glinting silvery head and eyes, old shoulders pulling them home.

  7

  Monday, July 1, 2002

  On Monday morning, Ariel reached the big bend, as the Yellowstone, which ran north out of the park, turned east toward Livingston and the prairie. Bodies mostly float spine-up, legs dangling, but when she rolled in the current her limbs stretched out and she moved down a deep channel on her back, two feet under the surface, eyes open and facing the filtered sun, strands of hair or the occasional fish or boat or duck body blocking the light. The shadow of pelicans, a speckle of sculpins, her own water bottle keeping up a quarter mile back.

  People still said disappeared. Polly was careful to stick to this etiquette, but she thought drowned, she thought dead. Lost. There was always a moment when a Search and Rescue operation became a recovery operation, though this point was usually a quiet reality days before it was announced. People could survive weeks when they went missing in the mountains, but although no one who’d gone into a river like the Yellowstone had ever been found alive after two days, telling a family to drop a fantasy of a wounded but breathing loved one on a riverbank was not the business of the searchers. Polly, for some doomed Drake project, had researched the mechanics of drowning, and she noticed that these were not the kind of facts that disappeared with the bicycle accident. Nor were they truly facts. If no one survived, who knew if the lungs burned as they filled or if the brain screamed in pain? The great mysteries of life, unanswered. Polly knew a body would rise only when the gases inside built up, and she knew a body would eventually turn into a kind of soap known as adipose. But before the body stage, at the end of the person stage, they were all stuck with the wonders of the imagination.

  Ned was up and getting ready to go on the river again but Polly stayed in bed for another few minutes before morning sounds chased her downstairs: a flicker mistaking their metal furnace exhaust for an aspen with larvae, a neighbor whacking weeds at dawn, and the helicopter on one of its last scheduled tours. She was so tired she saw crackles of light in the corners of her eyes, and her brain felt grainy. She chugged coffee, rebuilding some sort of agenda as she shuffled around in an old nightgown, recoiling a little from the floor she hadn’t swept, the dog hair, garden dirt, the stickiness of old spilled box juice. She found her previous day’s list on her mounded desk and searched for something to cross out, then added:

  swimming lessons

  go looking

  food for Delgados and Maude’s picnic

  argue with Jane

  She added sauces, etc. to restaurant and an exclamation mark to her previous cleaning line, then scribbled:

  get Maude

  deal with Graham

  In the yard, a flash of color caught her eye. At 7 a.m., Merle was drinking coffee in the chilly sunlight, reading while wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the house to wake. Having reached a plateau of boredom, he’d decided to fill their house with bookshelves. He was already measuring walls when they left him with the children to meet the search boats.

  On day four, the machinery of drowning still included the helicopter and the county boat, a dozen rafts and drift boats and a dog team from Flathead County. A Yellowstone County crew arrived with a big motorized craft to give the Park County teams a break. Harry didn’t much like them; bad blood from a case years ago, reawakened by a comment about Ariel becoming Yellowstone County’s problem soon, anyway.

  Polly, dropping Ned off at the Carter’s Bridge take-out, happened to hear this. She was standing off to the side, studying the high, cave-dappled rock face on the east side of the river. If she watched for long enough, she would see something move, or something watching back. That much rock felt like the ocean, filled with invisibilities—something lived within every crack. The night before, a huge black Mordor-style cloud had opened up above the upper valley and Yellowstone Park. The river would rise and turn an opaque milky brown again, and Ariel’s body might be lifted and dropped by this new surge. Some riverbanks would have to be searched again.

  Ned swung a leg into Harry’s boat, and she felt a blast of tenderness.

  “What are you going to do before the shit hits the fan?” he asked.

  The shit included cleaning and Maude’s late-morning flight. The next day Polly would prep at the restaurant for the first time in months because everyone wanted parade day off, and then it would be Maude all the time for the rodeo, the picnic, the party.

  The men pushed off and the river sucked the boat away, Ned looking uneasy as Polly took off her shoes and waded into the river to her ankles: melting snow, pure and simple. You didn’t avoid the river, even though it was silve
r, loud, brutal. Of course it killed people, and of course she should bring her children back to play near it, and float on it. Polly watched the surface roar by and wondered if the deep pools beneath felt still and green. Once a diver found a body upright after two weeks in a fifteen-foot-deep pool—was Ariel standing under these boats, waiting?

  Ned was worried Polly would go out for a walk and forget to come in, as it were. She’d wandered a few times that spring, and he always found her walking along the river. Didn’t everyone walk toward the water? She hadn’t felt lost. Polly took the dogs back down to the area near the baseball fields and saw three heads in the osprey nest, which made her feel smug. She’d have to tell Jane, who didn’t need to know that Polly had also wondered whether one had been blown out, pecked to death by siblings, neglected by the mother, who preferred the others. Nature, tooth and claw.

  No one needed to know every little thing that went through Polly’s tattered mind, just as Ned didn’t need to know about this walk. Polly was here to find Ariel, and she made it a half mile downstream, climbing rocks and going under fences, before she realized she was going to be late for Helen’s swimming lessons. She jogged back across the golf course with the dogs to make up time. A man yelled at her, and she gave him the finger. This gave her the energy for a final burst of speed, even though she was wheezing when she remembered where she’d left the car.

  It was still only fifty-five degrees at 9 a.m. when Polly unswaddled Helen’s beautiful goose bump–covered body and walked her—fat tiny feet on Polly’s sneakers to protect them from the cold crumbly concrete—to the edge of the pool, telling her that the water would be warmer than the air. Helen’s skin turned gray in seconds, and Sam, who’d already survived this childhood challenge, catcalled from behind them, wearing a parka. But the teacher, humorless Connie Tuttwilliger, held out her arms, and Helen went to her.