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

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.