A man lay facedown on the wet sand. They should have felt dread, but Polly wouldn’t remember it that way. They were so tired, and the world, strange for a long time, had lately been especially unreliable. They walked slowly to the body and around it, as if they were circling a museum exhibit. Ivor Dewitt’s one visible eye was open and half-filled with sand; no detail had ever been deader. Pretty violet-tinted jellyfish were marooned on his twisted white shirt, on his gray back, making him look like an iridescent sponge. A tangle of brown seaweed bound his legs together.

Blood from the cut in Edmund’s leg ran into the sand. Two hermit crabs scuttled from the body toward the pooling blood and he kicked them away. He told Polly later he was sure the crabs and jellyfish would attach to him and burrow in, change the way his body was made.

Part Three

Part
Three

15. Saturday, July 6, 2002

15

Saturday, July 6, 2002

These strange long nights. How long could she keep this up? These were memories, not dreams.

After Maude’s party, moments from Papa’s party played on a brutal loop. The cold black air, the smell of the hedge, a splash and a sigh. Polly saw the women waiting around the kitchen table, the mess on the counters still not cleared. The wet old man, Maude tragic and angry, with smeared mascara and a lit cigarette, Odile surrounding Polly and Edmund as if she were a blanket. Smoke and the curtains gusting, everyone bleary and afraid, everyone sad all over again. Papa saying, Say nothing. Or had he? Polly could feel him behind them on the stairs, softly closing the bedroom door to be alone with Dee.

Polly could see so many things: the rowboat with two men bobbing into the water, the tall ancient figure staggering out, the dead man on the beach in the morning light. But she could not see the order of all of it together, the meaning of the men in the boat and the death.