The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  It was odd, said the police, and Papa agreed. But when a drunk wants your boat, and says he rowed for Brown, and you’d rather not continue talking to him, you let him go. Mr. Dewitt was in a bad mood, and he was putting Papa in one, making him miss his own party. Understandably, he wanted to head back in, and when Mr. Dewitt wanted to continue his boat ride, Papa asked to be brought near shore. There was still some light, and if someone saw him wet, it’s because he became wet in the course of getting out of his boat. He drove the children home and changed before he returned, and if he had not mentioned this at the outset, it’s fair to say that he was not proud of having driven children after so many cocktails, wet, and that he was annoyed by the whole irksome episode. They could check with Mr. Galante, the poet, or Mr. Schuster—he’d seen them on his return. And of course all the people who were still awake at the house when he brought the children home. He hadn’t seen Mr. Dewitt again until the children found his body. An awful thing for them to see. He didn’t know how Mr. Dewitt managed to drown, but the man was a drunk, out of shape, used to calm rivers, not blustery waves.

  As Papa showed them out, he said, I’m ninety, sirs. I’m flattered that you think me capable of murder. He moved like a very old man when he opened the door and shook their hands.

  The next day, a Sunday, the relatives said goodbye. Maude was virtually liquid, her eyes coursing with tears. Everyone took to a corner. Polly read all of The Horse and His Boy and Edmund read two new Hardy Boys mysteries from Maude. Papa stayed in his study but with the door open, pacing about, so that he was framed against the window at the end of the hall whenever Polly came out of her room. Dee managed to get out of bed and wrote letters in the kitchen, warm in the sunlight, letter after letter. She said her treatment always made her feel ill for a few days.

  Monday was a blur, the first day of school. It was better going with Edmund, but Polly still worried about her clothes, about pencils, notebooks, which door to enter. Dee was up and cooking when they got off the bus—chicken and biscuits, because she said a full potpie was beyond her. Edmund chopped carrots and parsley and Dee applauded his precision. Polly chopped an onion, complaining, and set the timer for batches of biscuits. Papa spent the day cleaning out his office at Columbia and gave them each gifts: Roman coins, a bone whistle and beads, glass bowls. When Jane and Merle came home and they ate dinner, the world was almost normal.

  Papa carried Dee up to bed that night. He wouldn’t let Merle help, though he was nice about it. On Tuesday, Papa and Dee went to the city for a doctor’s appointment and brought back Chinese duck and sauce and thin pancakes. After Papa carried Dee back upstairs, she sent Polly and Edmund to find boxes in the attic, things she wanted to see again. They forgot what they were doing while sorting through compasses and photographs and rock specimens, pricking their fingers on the spinning wheel and pretending to change into one of Papa’s statues. Then they heard the thumping cane, and hurried down, and spent the rest of the evening with Dee, Polly sitting in bed next to her while Edmund played solitaire on the floor, May sometimes knocking cards into the wrong pile. Polly helped sort through jewelry cases and photos while Dee fretted that she should have gotten this chore done when Maude and the aunts were in town. There was not enough time in the world, Dee said while they tried to match earrings, find every pearl from a broken string. Try to never be bored. She told them stories, wandering in time and between people, about all the places she’d been and they should visit, cities and oceans she’d seen with her father, Walton—unbalanced but in a different way than Rita—and others with Maude’s sweet father Lewis before he died young, of malaria. She’d had two great loves; she’d had such luck.

  Mostly, she talked about Papa, her sweet Henning, her oldest friend, twenty years of knowing each other through many hard things even before they married. After they’d each been widowed, Dee took the train to Los Angeles—he was forever meeting her at a train—and he drove her around town in his fancy car, took her to dinner and to gardens and gave her too much wine. She always called him Hen, a silly name for a scary man, and he always called her Dulcy but that night he teased her with Dulcinea, her full name. It meant sweetness but it was a name for tilting at windmills, meant for a windy place, and when they drove to his beach cottage that night and went swimming in the ocean, it was as if the water were a magic potion. The world changed, and they were in love. That was all, and it was everything.

  She snapped her weak, knotted fingers for emphasis, just a whisper of a sound.

  “Shazam,” said Edmund, putting down the cards and climbing up on the bed.

  “Abracadabra,” said Dee, kissing Edmund. “Life is good,” she said. “Try not to forget that.”

  Nothing seemed wrong, or more wrong than usual, but that night, through the bedroom wall, Polly heard the wavery edge of Jane’s voice as she talked to Merle: “Something’s going on. They aren’t telling the truth about the doctor.”

  On Wednesday, Papa and Dee planned to be in the city again, and said they’d be gone until dinner. Jane was in class until 5:00. Merle was supposed to meet a plumber at 3:00 at the house. Once again, he welcomed an excuse to skip teaching, and said he’d be home when Polly and Edmund got off the bus at 3:30. Papa got up early to make a better breakfast, a Swede spread. He peeled their soft-boiled eggs, spread raspberry jam on their toast, and gave them $5 of belated school-starting money. They kissed Dee, in bed with coffee, and bopped off in relative happiness.

  But the plumber called Merle at the college office to cancel, and with a rare free afternoon, Merle shopped for a good bottle of wine and a big bag of clams, in hopes that Dee would be up to cooking, because though Jane tried, she wasn’t Dee yet. He stopped at a bookstore and bought a novel by John Fowles, and he didn’t forget the children, exactly, but he did forget to check his watch. He was still walking to his car in the village, laden with bags, as they climbed off the bus at the house.

  Polly poured herself some milk, found the cookies, spread out the envelopes and magazines from the mailbox. Edmund covered an apple with peanut butter. Polly wondered what Dee and Papa would do in the city, besides visit the doctor. She thought of the old men on the sidewalk, with their endless chess game.

  Edmund was already in his room, arranging his notebooks, coming up with some grand plan for his glorious fourth-grade year, when Polly saw that Papa and Dee hadn’t taken the car. She ran upstairs to their room, because of course they’d overslept from their nap. And because the note on the door had been left for someone tall—Merle—she didn’t see it. She knocked and went in, and they were as always when they slept, young looking, curled up together, his arm under her head. May lay at the foot of the bed, watching Polly, who crept closer and waited for someone to move.

  She called for Edmund, who came to the doorway but no further.

  17

  The Beginning of the World, 1968

  The beginning of the world: According to Jane, it was a mother, a baby’s skin reaching the air, the air itself.

  Water, said Papa. Skin and air are not the beginning of the world, just the beginning of the story.

  The beginning of Papa: a village in southern Sweden in 1878, in a farmhouse five miles from the ocean. He’d loved his mother, been terrified of his father.

  The beginning of Dee: an orchard town on Lake Erie in the spring of 1880. She’d loved everyone always, she said, even when she’d left them. She’d had more than one life, too.

  Polly and Edmund, listening to Papa and Dee in the car on the way to the Met in 1968, wandering through halls of ruined worlds. Everything was larger because they were smaller back then, passing objects that were once people, explanations of the world, the night and day and winter and summer: eggs, monsters, fire spurting out of mountains, a woman walking out of the sea, an old god biting off a child’s head. So many stories were about the mother or father dying, and the child left alone. It doesn’t happen so much anymore, said Dee, but when it does, you must remember you are surrounded by other peopl
e. She didn’t admit that they might not be the people you’d choose.

  Polly believed then, and she was more or less right, that Papa and Dee willed this to happen, floated off into the air, turned to smoke and memory. Like a fairy tale, like a myth, they’d lain down together and stopped, changed nature, become air. Magic, despite the ambulance, the police, Jane sobbing, people talking about enough morphine to take out a five-ring circus. Dee’s pancreatic cancer meant she was down to weeks and would be in increasing pain; Papa would not abandon her to a hospital and had no interest in being on the planet without her. He had at points in the past failed her, but not now.

  Everything seemed to disappear with them, the whole nature of the house and its sounds and smells and meaning. Polly could not comprehend that Papa and Dee were not in the corner of her eye, behind a door, that they weren’t the breeze that moved through a room or the footsteps on the ceiling. Sometimes she thought she saw them in the hall or on a sidewalk, dissolving in the sunlight, close enough to touch her. And when they couldn’t, her grief was as fresh and as physical as walking out of a warm room into a cold one. This time, she knew no one was hiding. They were gone, and the only way to keep them was to store them in her mind.

  In the long, bleak confusion that followed their deaths, no one paid much attention to Edmund and Polly. Arnold took them to a movie that first night, while the bodies were being taken away, and cried through the whole thing. Papa had been his oldest friend through love and murder and poetry, cases of wine, years of arguments about gods and art.

  No one made Polly or Edmund go to school. No one made them do anything or talked about any of it. And even earlier, after the body on the beach, only Dee had tried to help. Put your memories in a box, she said, good and bad, and pull them out when you need them, or can bear them. Or keep them hidden away, but know that it’s up to you.

  Maude came back, along with Papa’s brother Ansel. Rita, who vanished after the party, returned several times and took most of her canvases out of the greenhouse. Papa and Dee came back, in a way: They were in the last pretty jars Dee made, trapped by Merle’s cork stoppers.

  On a Monday a week later, Polly and Edmund got up together and dressed and went off to school on their own. Polly wrote Edmund’s excuse note, and Edmund wrote hers, and they both used the handwriting they’d learned from Dee and Papa. At night they could hear Merle and Jane talking about moving back to Michigan, to be in a different place. Really it was just the same as five years earlier, running away after Evie’s and Frank’s deaths. Polly remembered thinking this, and being angry, but she doubted it would make a difference if she argued. Rita’s brother arrived from Boston. He was nothing like Rita and he clearly didn’t approve of her, or believe in her madness, but Edmund, who refused to stay in a hotel with him, talked about running away. He’d found Papa’s keys to the apartment in the city. No one would expect them to go there. The old men on the sidewalk would help them. They could take one of the diamonds from Dee’s jewelry box and a bag of her late plums to eat, and then they’d come up with a new place and a new plan.

  But before Edmund could convince her to disappear with the key, before Polly could argue with her parents, they took Edmund away: Rita and her silent, resentful brother, a brown car, bound for some unimaginable place. Polly couldn’t look at his face as he walked down the stairs and the sidewalk, guess his despair, think about the fact that he might have believed that she and her family lived on in the house he’d loved on Christian Avenue, as if he’d never been there.

  Rita wouldn’t kill herself until he was ten.

  18

  Sunday, July 7, 2002

  Polly poured a huge whiskey before she went to bed, a big brown Ned-sized drink, and fell into dreams, literally. A whole night of teetering on edges: She was in the attic, watching Papa help Dee out of the car, she was falling from a horse, seeing the underside of leaves as Edmund looked down at her, she was lying on leaves watching a sky shedding snowflakes, she was at her bedroom window, watching Dee and three children make a pile of icicles.

  Ned was having his own dream, doglike twitches and muttering. The wind made the house creak and Polly pulled an extra blanket over both of them and drifted away again. She was small, lying on a beach next to Dee, who was young and wearing a bathing suit and telling Polly important things while Papa swam in the background. The sense of falling started again—waves made the ground erode under Polly’s body, but Dee held on.

  When Ned woke up to an empty bed, he walked downstairs to find the door open and Polly in a blanket at the picnic table.

  “Poll?”

  “I’m just saying hello to Dee,” said Polly. “She’s only here for a minute.”

  “Give her my love,” said Ned.

  The earworm of the morning, thanks to Maude, who was humming in the bathtub:

  Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea

  silver buckles on his knee.

  He’ll come back and marry me,

  pretty Bobby Shafto.

  Polly paused by the bathroom door a half hour later. If Maude couldn’t get out of the tub, or fell, would she call for help? And if she fell, how long would it take her to recover, to be able to get on a plane? Polly felt a little cold around the gills. She bent closer to the door and heard:

  I’m just wild about Harry, and Harry’s wild about me . . .

  Maude splashed. “I can hear you looming out there,” she said. “And I’m quite all right.”

  Polly retreated. She was passing the stairwell window when a thunk startled her. A ball hadn’t shattered the glass. She looked down at Ned, smiling, and Sam, stricken and clutching a tennis racquet.

  “Hey, Rapunzel,” said Ned.

  “Hey, what?” said Polly.

  “Push down your hair.”

  Sam thought this was very funny.

  Maude doc appointment

  Maude rebook flight?

  dinner—Szechuan?

  float

  There was no getting around the original list: Maude wanted to go on a float; she thought they’d see some birds. What sorts of snacks should they pack? And should they bring wine, or something more assertive? The mind reeled at the possibilities.

  Polly headed off to walk the dogs and stop at the restaurant for supplies. In the alley, she paused politely: two rabbits having a standoff, neither of them budging. She honked and they shot into her garden. She hated them, gently, as she drove on to the restaurant, wondering at any deeper meaning.

  She was foraging for ice and something edible when Graham entered the kitchen and stood next to her. Polly did not quite scream. She did, however, think, Look, an actual murderer. He seemed larger—was that a trick of his new title, or was it because he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and more of him was revealed? The river injuries were fading, but Harry’s marks were iridescent: purple and yellow, a tinge of green. Now the scrapes on his face and throat looked different to her, as if they might have been made by a woman’s nails, and she wondered if his scabbed knees had less to do with saving himself than from raping another human on the shingle.

  “You owe me money,” said Graham. “Eleven hours, plus your party.”

  She noticed he was holding car keys, and through the window she saw a running Jeep. “Of course,” said Polly.

  He followed her into the kitchen, as always, a little too close. Polly waved to an arriving pastry chef. She hated that she was relieved to see someone. “Are you happy to be driving again?”

  “Sure.”

  “You saved up?”

  “My father promised.”

  “What, if you stayed out of trouble?”

  He shrugged; he wanted her to speed up.

  “In Seattle, you knew the girl you hit, didn’t you?” said Polly. “People said you were upset, that it was traumatic.”

  “I didn’t know her very well,” said Graham. He was wary. “Of course it was traumatic.”

  “It’s strange that you happened to hit someone you knew at all,” said Polly.
“Maybe she turned you down, too?”

  “No one’s ever turned me down,” said Graham.

  Polly found the check and put it down on the counter rather than handing it to him. “You killed a girl with a car, you killed a girl on the water. I’m hoping you’ll be hit by a fucking train.”

  “That’s not true. And you’re crazy. Everyone knows you can’t think straight.”

  Polly watched him, waiting him out, while a deep flush covered his face, darkened the marks.

  “It’s not true,” he said again.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Polly.

  Graham lifted a stool and smashed it onto the floor, picked up the check, and walked out. Polly told the pastry chef not to worry about it.

  Polly took the dogs to the river, climbed down the bank, and stayed there by the water, in the sunlight, while the dogs splashed and sniffed and her heart slowed. She looked around for a place to lie down, but it wasn’t that kind of stretch. She flipped a rock, Helen style, and stared down at some sort of larva, gray and shiny and wriggling.

  The dogs shot by after a small furred animal, and a smell of musk floated past. Maybe a mink, but not a skunk, thank god. Invisible animals scrabbling around her, all the things she didn’t usually notice screaming to be seen, when all she could see were dead girls leaving their swing sets, ponies, dance floors, velvet chairs or dirt-poor houses for twirling cars, for spinning rivers, for appointments with shitty humans. If you were a girl, so much of life was down to luck, walking home at the wrong time, with the wrong man behind you. It came down to your mother picking the wrong second husband, to errors of trust, to bad timing.

  None of it had happened to Polly. One man in the hallway of the Thompson Street apartment building when she was four, the Porter girl at the beach estate, one time when she almost didn’t lie to get out of a strange-eyed date’s car in high school. His eyes reminded her of veering away from Rita’s eyes, and maybe she’d veered away from crazy all her life afterward, maybe knowing Rita had made her just wary enough.