All the bad men, all the made monsters. Sam wasn’t going to be one, and Helen wasn’t going to fall to one.

Helen wasn’t going to fall to anything—she was shrieking at the cat for stalking a magpie, dragging the poor animal back onto a blanket to watch more of the mud magic show. When the rain began, they flipped a coin, and Helen picked the movie: Sleeping Beauty. Sam sneered until Polly said she and Ned had both liked it at the same age. She lay under them on the couch, thinking of spindles, thinking of standing by an old sewing machine, Edmund saying touch your finger. Try it. It might change us.

Had he meant: Transform? Take us out of this place, make us someone else, make the world go away? She should see if he remembered.

19. Her Oldest Friend, 1987

19

Her Oldest Friend, 1987

In 1968, Polly’s first life ended. By the fall she lost the old people, lost her friend, her house, her school, lost almost everything about the way life had been, and she’d begun a different, more hesitant childhood. She and Merle and Jane were alone together in a farmhouse in a small town in Michigan, and by Halloween Polly was waiting for a school bus to a place where she knew no one, guts gone liquid with fear. Utterly lonely.

The farmhouse they’d rented for $50 a month was surrounded by ponds, barns, orchards. She couldn’t remember anything of that winter but snowdrifts and asking Jane if she’d tried to find Edmund. In the spring new things were everywhere: fresh-hatched toads, strawberries, bird eggs. Polly draped herself over branches, watching the sky or reading horse books; she ran behind the crop duster when it sprayed sweet-smelling DDT. When the cherries were ripe, the pickers showed up in old cars, huge families packing into concrete bungalows, sleeping on thin mattresses covered with stained striped ticking. She followed them as they picked, because all the children did. She didn’t understand the jokes, but the Mexican families, having appraised the renters’ clothes and car with some sympathy, were kind to her.

Jane wrote to Rita’s brother in Boston, and he replied that his sister was hospitalized but improving, Edmund was fine, everyone was eager to forget this unfortunate period. Jane’s next letters were returned, with no forwarding address.

And so Edmund disappeared. Eight months together; nothing like a brother, but nothing like the boys she liked at school, and nothing left but a blurry photo from that first day at the beach, his face in profile, and Rita’s painting, which showed their minds, not their bodies. It was as if he had never existed, and when she tried to think of him a few months later on his birthday, she could not see his face or hear his voice.