Ned called these moments déjà you, and tried to be light, but during the night, Polly would lose the line between memory and the here and now, what had been, what should be. She was editing her story, surprised over and over in the morning to find the work was erased, and she was haunted by the in-between, true and not, the story bending once it hit her brain. Her occasional inability to distinguish what was real and what she’d dreamed was a torment at first, but she began to accept it, even look forward to it. Most of her dreams were pleasant, and she cosseted them. She wanted, in the privacy of the dark, to think about the good things, to spend time with people who were gone, to let the world be strange. During the daytime, she forced her mind to make sense, but at night, she told Ned, it was like doing mushrooms again, in the gentlest possible way, and thinking this way, indulging her strangeness for those limited hours, made her relax. She worried less about shorting out. If things got weird, she told people she needed to rest, to lie there and drift. Dreams felt true again, and often she could push them into whole stories.

But on the first night of Ariel’s disappearance, Polly saw only bits of things, none of them good. She was tangled in grass, she was in a restaurant kitchen but the stove was over her head, she was running down the hall of Dee and Papa’s house in Stony Brook, a figure following her inside the ocean-blue painting on the wall. She tried to stay in the dream but couldn’t, and when she woke up, Ariel was still gone, and Polly cried quietly, while Ned talked in his sleep about tides.

They had to remember that this wasn’t their tragedy. On Saturday morning, before Ned left to search again, before Sam and Helen could hear people blither on about how there was a chance that Ariel would be found, Polly and Ned told the children that Ariel was gone, that there would be no miracles, that she had felt no pain. Sam sobbed and wouldn’t talk. Helen watched him, not entirely grasping what had been said, and told Ned and Polly that Ariel was scared of the water, as if that made her drowning impossible.

And what had Polly said in response? A half hour later, walking along the river while Merle and Jane watched the kids, she hoped it hadn’t been the wrong thing. She sat down on a bench and watched the water pass and thought, If I sit here and wait, I’ll find her.