He looked so young—no beard, freckles between river scratches. “Do you want to go home to Seattle and wait there for your parents to return?” she asked. Vinnie’s brother and sister-in-law were traveling in Italy, and not volunteering to fly home to deal with their son’s trauma.

“No,” said Graham, still not looking at her. “I left for a reason.”

Polly drove off carefully, wondering what horrible thing had happened to Graham in Seattle, and thinking of how sad it was to have something happen here, too.

In the dark, on Saturday night, the world fell apart again when Helen had a nightmare. Sam had already come to Polly and Ned at midnight, and so Polly climbed into Helen’s bed. Maybe, two by two, they’d get some sleep.

The earth cracked open, said Helen. There were things inside. She wanted to look for Ariel.

Polly said “Sssssshhh,” and “I love you,” and shut her own eyes, wondering what Helen had seen. The cruelest thing, now that Ariel was probably lost forever, was that she was already on her way to being forgotten. She would now mostly make people think of their own dead or of things they should have kept doing in life, because they’d been reminded again that they were lucky. They would bring food, write notes, try not to say the wrong thing, and not allow themselves to think their way down to the dark, where Ariel’s family lived now.

Polly dropped away from everything and saw Ariel’s body unfurl underwater, arms and hair spinning like a pale seaweed weather vane, like car lights around a wet curve at night when Polly was a child stretched out on the back seat of the station wagon, passing stores and streetlights out on Long Island as Jane and Merle headed home from a party.

4. Spring 1963

4

Spring 1963

Polly, who had known many people killed by water, and who now had a problem sorting the past from the present, was born with the name Apollonia Asta. Merle Schuster had been in a poetic phase, and Asta was the name of Jane’s dead mother. Those cursive As and Ls took Polly years to master.