The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  “She’ll turn up someday,” said Harry. “That messy human shell.”

  Disappeared, Polly thought, looking at a long femur. Almost no one truly managed it. And now it came to her, all those hints of family murders wavering up for air.

  “Maude, is this the man from the car? The man who killed Asta?”

  “Why on earth would you think that?” asked Maude.

  “Several reasons,” said Polly.

  “I wish it was,” said Maude. “But sadly, no.”

  Jane didn’t hear this; she’d run off after the children because Helen was screaming at Sam, enraged about some injustice.

  “What if I said I’d cancel the party unless you told me about Asta?”

  Maude smiled without futzing with her hair or another tell. “I’d say you were a manipulative little girl. The story is horribly simple,” she said. “Asta met a bad man and she died because of it.”

  “Did she know him well? Or was it only chance that they died together?”

  “Oh, he didn’t die for years,” she said. “Despite our hopes and dreams, as it were.”

  Graham would probably live for decades, too, thought Polly bleakly. “So he was no better than the man who abandoned her? Please give me his name.”

  Maude seemed to think about it, then shut her eyes. “Ask your mother. I will tell you that he was drunk and driving. He’d beaten her earlier that day and he left her to die in the water. He could have saved her, and he didn’t.” She opened her eyes again. “Just a bad man,” she said. “That’s all it takes.”

  It was the Fourth of July, the night with the best fireworks. Ned and Drake put their shovels and brushes in the truck, and Harry stretched out his tarps while the rest of them bundled in blankets and watched the show in the river valley below. Merle held Sam, Helen was on Maude’s lap, and Jane bounced up and down to stay warm. Polly’s eyes went wonky with the first few explosions, and she backed up, as if ten feet would make a difference, until she was near Ned. A firework for every body in the river, she thought.

  On the way back, more bits of Maude’s past: the wooded lot where an arsonist had burned her favorite roadhouse bar, the lane to what had been the last whorehouse, the place where Asta had boarded her pretty Thoroughbred. Every familiar road or house was a lost world, like every photograph.

  “I’m not sure why I wanted to come home,” said Maude. She started to cry, but, being Maude, she stopped immediately, and began being shitty to Merle about the way he was driving.

  The list of the day, at the end of the day: a last stab at pretending there was some sense of order to the universe.

  memorial: brisket, flowers, basket for cards

  passage to have read?

  pick berries

  photo boards

  cook cook cook

  sleep

  Polly gave up, threw the notebook on the floor, and reached blindly for the stack of books on the bedside table. Jane was coaxing her back into reading, as if reading were medicine. When Polly pointed to her pile of manuscripts, Jane had said, “All shit,” and went to the library for a stack: Dorothy Sayers, Oliver Sacks, Nabokov, Elaine Pagels.

  Polly could tell that Jane was trying to disguise her theme. “I’ve read most of them,” she said.

  “Read them again,” said Jane.

  Tonight, Polly flipped open Speak, Memory, skimming along until she reached

  Aunt Pasha’s last words were: “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo-voda.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Polly, dropping the book on the floor.

  “The idea was to read,” said Ned.

  “Please don’t patronize me.”

  Ned stared at her for a minute. His face was tired and angry, and his pretty gray eyes were bloodshot. He was brown all over, and when he rolled over to face away, the scars on his back showed white. Harry said they’d been swimming on these hot days of searching, and this reminder that Ned gave her a reason to worry annoyed Polly even more. But when Ned got up to tell Sam to turn off his light, she picked the book up again, and read a few more pages, until she hit

  The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

  12

  Summer 1968

  Despite the fact that no one was talking to her, Rita paced up and down the hallway, looking at what the children had drawn and the books they’d left on the carpet. She knocked on Papa’s door and spent an hour inside, murmuring. Art books and copies of National Geographic pressed open to giraffes and orchids climbed up the margins of the hall. Rita used Polly’s chalks to trace new mountains and islands, seabeds and clouds. She brought out her valise of oil paints, stowed under a bench in the greenhouse, covered with clay dust. She began to paint the ocean.

  Merle left in the Ford to visit his brother in Boston, and the next morning Edmund and Polly both woke up with his cold. Jane was getting ready to defend her thesis and planned to go to the city apartment to try to keep her mind clear, to be away from Rita. Now Jane said she’d stay, because Dee was fragile and shouldn’t be near sick children.

  Dee was offended. Jane left, but any sense of getting away with something dissolved. Dee said they needed to spend the morning sleeping. She said if they took a long enough nap, they’d have three dreams, not necessarily happy but not terrifying, either. She gave them each a bowl of sherbet, put cold wet cloths on their foreheads, and shut their doors. When Polly tried opening hers five minutes later, Dee’s voice whistled down the hall: “No.”

  So they fell asleep. Edmund’s dreams were always about jungles, and he did have three. Everything in the first was gold and fragile, leaves breaking as he brushed by chasing a turtle. The second was cluttered with spots of color, as if he were trapped in a soft, moist Christmas tree, and it was talking to him. In the third the jungle was his bed, leaves crackling and whispering out of the wood frame, telling him a tiger was coming, but not to worry.

  Polly’s dreams? Jane being plucked from the roof of the apartment building by a giant eagle, Polly riding on a train in a snarled tunnel that became the maze from Edmund’s birthday party. In the last, she looked into the sand at a jellyfish, then realized it was a watching whale’s eye.

  When Polly woke, she smelled toast. Rita was living on toast and cheese and Dee’s underripe fruit—it drove Dee wild that Rita would touch her plums—and there she was in the open doorway, still in her nightgown, staring at Polly as she ate her toast.

  Rita floated off.

  Edmund’s voice: “You should go away. You don’t want to get sick.”

  “I’m immune,” Rita said. “Silly duck. I need your feathers. I woke up needing them.”

  “Promise you’ll give them back.”

  “Of course,” said Rita.

  Back in Polly’s room she reached for the second bunch, not even looking down at the little girl in the bed.

  “They’re mine,” said Polly. “Dee wanted us to have them.”

  Rita shrugged and took the feathers from the window. “You’re all fucking crazy,” she said.

  She left, slamming her bedroom door, and a minute later they could hear Dee on the stairs.

  “I see she was here,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll make more.” She led Edmund and Polly downstairs and plopped them on the couch and draped them with new cold washcloths.

  When Arnold arrived, he said, “Hearts,” and they all sat down. Dee dealt. She told them to study the faces and symbols, warlike and malicious and sidelong and seductive, and they spent an hour in shifty delight, cunning and joy, before their throats and lungs burned again, before they remembered they were sick. They had never truly looked at cards (just as they had never truly looked at dogs, feathers, berries), or considered what they meant. Clubs were originally clover leaves, spades were pikes. The jack of clubs was Lancelot, the jack of diamonds was Hector, the queen of hearts was Judith (not t
hat Dee bothered telling them that story).

  “Look at the blood on his sword,” she said, running a finger over the face of the jack of hearts. “And look at her beauty. Her hair is blowing, and you can hear trumpets. You should be playing euchre instead of hearts, E, look at those jacks and aces. But Polly has the suicide king, and you will not shoot the moon.”

  Polly stared at the king of hearts. Charlemagne, according to Dee—why would he stick a sword in his head? Dee said that he was only brandishing it, that over the years, printers muddled the image until it looked as if he was plunging a sword into his brain.

  Arnold was supposedly helping to plan Papa’s retirement party. Really, he and Papa and Dee sat on the porch and talked for hours, drinking better wine than usual. One-eyed May loved one-eyed Arnold and ignored Polly and Edmund when he was around. Man and cat could look in and out at the same time, said Papa. When Arnold learned about Edmund’s nightmares, he drew a tree on his hand. Polly wanted one, too, and he drew a vine.

  Rita was moving too quickly again, singing to herself, darting around the house. To no good end, as Dee put it. Steer clear.

  Rita tied the bloody feathers into a bouquet that dangled above her door. She’d begun to paint flying things near the tops of the canvases, above every continent: pterodactyls and hummingbirds, bats and a World War I–era airplane, all topped by stars, clouds, curls of wind like the wind on old maps. She added sharks and sailfish and jellyfish and eels, dangling in the southern Atlantic: Papa explained that eels traveled to the Sargasso Sea to mate and floated together in a huge mat, in the center of the Atlantic, a place where slaves and horses were dumped when ships were becalmed on their way from Africa to America.

  Rita put heaven on top, above a layer of polar ice and white bears—no angels, but birds with halos—and hell below Antarctica, the bottom of which was blue ice, and made of skeletons. Her half-finished Jabberwock was reaching for a penguin chick. Lowest of all, a black-red skim of hell and lava, gray outlines of ghosts and more feathers on a devil.

  Papa was amused. “Do you believe in hell?” he asked Rita.

  “Of course I do,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “Myself am hell,” he said. “Did you ever hear that phrase?”

  That afternoon, Rita drew phases of the moon and sun, burnt landscapes of deserts, white-blue mountains. She left Dee’s moon where the children had drawn it, but it now hung over an orchard, in what was becoming Central Asia. Rita added bright dots, red and orange and purple, to the trees. The Garden of Eden, she said, but she drew no snake and no people. She drew pyramids in Egypt, and mounds in Mongolia, but when she began a jungle, a greener Asia, she did not draw her husband, sleeping on the path of Edmund’s dreams.

  After Rita finished the jungle the next day, just after Arnold left, she ran away with Papa’s Volvo. Edmund and Polly, sicker than ever, were propped up at the kitchen table eating coddled eggs when they heard the engine start. Papa looked up from his paper, and went back to reading.

  “Will you call Bennett?” asked Dee. Bennett was the Suffolk County police chief.

  “I’m too annoyed,” said Papa.

  “How will I take the children to the doctor without the car?”

  “They’ll be fine. We’ve all survived worse.”

  Fevers are different when you’re young. For an adult, any second’s physical status is a gray area, because nothing in your body is ever entirely right. When you’re a child, the baseline feeling of wellness is so profound that any variation—a sunburn, an itch, gas—is intolerable, mind-boggling. Sometimes an adult gets a glimpse of this past paradise—swimming, a moment before orgasm, tasting food—but small damages coat mind and skin and muscle with a kind of indifferent hair shirt. To healthy, first-world children, the body is an absolute, and discomfort brings collapse.

  Their fevers were hallucinatory, and Dee fretted and gave them ice cream and baby aspirin and honeyed whiskey water and propped them up for games of gin. Out of the corner of her eye Polly was sure, over and over, that the horse on one of Papa’s Chinese paintings was running across the wall, that the flowered curtains on the glassed-in porch, meant to shade it from the sun, showed faces flowing out of the patterns as they moved in a breeze from the window, a closing door, someone passing. Ten years later, tripping in college, she would think of these days.

  May and Lemon took turns on their beds. There were new feathers in their windows from Dee, orange and turquoise. Polly didn’t know where they’d come from and Dee claimed she didn’t, either. May went back and forth between their rooms, soaking up the heat of their fevers, window to window, and at dusk Dwight took up position in the crab apple tree. Polly and Edmund heard teatime, and puddy, and evil, pretty girl and storm. They had begun to like him, and think of him as theirs.

  When it was dark, Dee rubbed Vicks on the children’s chests and opened their windows wider, because they were hot, even if the night wasn’t.

  “Look at the stars,” said Dee. “See the largest, just over the crab apple?”

  Edmund did, but Polly said she only saw a blur. A spinning night world, a blind milky eye. The lights in her room were a blur, she explained, and the words on her posters were blurs. Dee panicked and called for Papa, who crouched in front of Polly in the hall, holding a hand close and moving it far away, while Dee went on about how they didn’t have a car, because of damn Rita, and couldn’t they get legal custody, and would they need to call an ambulance, and how awful it was that she hadn’t simply taken the children to the doctor.

  Papa smiled at Polly, who rocked on her small toes in the green of the hall. Gray-blue eyes, old brown skin. He lifted his glasses off the top of his head and slowly lowered them onto Polly’s nose. Suddenly the world glittered, even from a distance: She could see Rita’s waves, and swaying trees, clouds ghosting above and rain falling on low mountains. Dee pointed to Rita’s jellyfish and eels and Polly saw them begin the long swim to the Sargasso Sea, to all the bones of horses and slaves. Her eyes filled with tears. This was too much, thrashing, drowning horses and black children and a continent of eels waiting to devour them.

  After they’d comforted her, and said they’d buy her eyeglasses, Polly insisted that Dee was making the world wake up. But why, and to what end? What would happen? Papa said Dee only wanted them to be better, and that helping them imagine more meant helping them know more. “Dee is not magic,” he said. “She is reality pie.”

  Dee laughed and said she wanted to be a myth.

  It was all bushwah, Papa said in the morning, after Arnold arrived and they used his car to go to the doctor. Polly and Edmund each got a shot of antibiotic in their butts. Merle found Rita a few days later. She’d darted around Manhattan, bug in the light, selling paintings. Edmund pushed his trunk against his door the night she returned.

  After the night of the blurred night sky, everyone understood that Polly was blind as a bat, so nearsighted that when they took her down to the harbor, she couldn’t see the swans, or the large schooner moored to the dock—she thought it was a building, not a boat. Merle made an appointment with the eye doctor but they missed it and the next for one emergency or another. Polly didn’t care, because people would only ridicule her at school. Rita, who never seemed to be listening to any of these conversations, took Polly to the greenhouse, arranged her canvases, and asked her to say what she could see from five feet, ten feet, twenty feet. She’d scribble down notes, let Polly wander off, and rework the paintings.

  “Well, they’re beautiful,” said Dee, when she saw the canvases. She gave Rita $50 for a small oil that might have shown a bird. Dee finished her vases, which were about eighteen inches high, plum colored, with blue and green and gold vines that seemed to run from one to the other, linking the two. She asked Merle to cut some corks for the tops, in case someone wanted to use them for storage. Polly asked if Dee would make one for her, and Dee said Polly would have these someday.

  It was still hot, and almost unbearable in the upstairs bedrooms.
They spent a chunk of every day lounging outside on a frayed, brightly colored quilt with Lemon, who lay on her back panting, and sometimes with May, too. One afternoon, Polly, with her fuzzy vision, was slow to realize that Dwight the parrot was on the blanket next to them, and he and the dog were nose to beak, Lemon cross-eyed and seemingly paralyzed. A second later May floated through the air and dropped onto Dwight’s back.

  Edmund ripped the cat away while Polly grabbed the shrieking parrot. She ran him down to the witch’s house, and Dwight talked to her the whole way. He said watch the cards, dear, watch the crazy lady, be nice to the boy, a lifetime of advice along with dumb dog, pretty hair, turn on the news, tell them to go away.

  When she reached the witch’s porch, Polly put Dwight down and felt his breast and back for blood, and asked him if he was okay. Tell them to go away, said Dwight again, this time to the closed door.

  Polly knocked. “Thank you, dear,” said a voice. “But go away.”

  “The cat jumped on Dwight,” Polly called. “I think he’s fine. Please don’t kill my cat.”

  Mags Mags Mags, said Dwight.

  The woman said nothing. Polly backed down the porch steps and watched from the lane. The door opened and Dwight hopped inside. Polly ran home and found Edmund on the stoop, May sitting next to him.

  “Is he dead?” he asked.

  “No.” Polly sat next to him. “I didn’t even see any blood.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “No. She wouldn’t come out.”

  They both thought about what that might mean. Polly flopped back and May crawled on her chest and purred. Polly turned her head to see past the ball of fur and watched blood ooze down Edmund’s back, through his torn shirt. She made him go upstairs to Dee, who said that they needed to go in for stitches and antibiotics. She admired his bravery but cat wounds were beyond her. Papa drove. Everyone knew them at the hospital.