That afternoon Polly and Jane wrote letters. Polly knew most of the alphabet but didn’t bother with it on such occasions. Jane gave her a mug of cocoa and three pens, red, blue, and black, and they sat down to pale-blue sheets of airmail paper. When you’re three, you can write your own epic in your own hidden language, and even after you’ve faced the fact that some sort of shared code is necessary, the mystery of the original story might survive, if it was there to begin with. Polly drew careful slanted shapes with spaces and exclamation points to mark shifts in the story. She knew she should write the way she talked, rather than the way she thought, but after a few minutes the pattern strayed, and her private handwriting circled the page. She drew human figures, birds, clouds, a cave in a mountain, jagged waves and fish with sharp teeth.

“What’s all this, honey?” asked Jane.

“The people are thinking about whether to fly or swim or live on land,” said Polly. “Now that they’re someone else.” She drank some cocoa and went back to her pencils. That night she explained again, and Merle told her that dead was dead. Polly tried to talk about it again when she was eight, but then she put it away, with other childish things.

5. Sunday, June 30, 2002

5

Sunday, June 30, 2002

On Sunday afternoon, as Jane sat at the dining room table drinking coffee, her face was bleak as she read one of Polly’s lists, this one highly specific:

Party menu: Just one pig now or extra shoulders? Ten loaves, salad Nicoise or Caesar? Spuds. Shrimp, cheeses, bagna cauda, make sure oysters cancelled.

Work: Write Dan (myst in August?), give up on Helga?

Clean baseboards, toilets, windows, lights, sinks, OFFICE, sidewalks

Find Helen’s swimsuit

Polly poured Helen and Sam orange juice in pretty ribbed glasses, diner-style glasses.

“Do you know where I got these?” she asked Jane.

“From Cora,” said Jane, uneasily.

“Do you know what I remember her doing?”

Jane pushed away the list and waited.

“I remember her pouring juice into one of these glasses, and then throwing it against the wall, and going into her bedroom and crying.”

“Cora didn’t throw things,” said Jane. “Ever. Not so much as a ball.”

“You weren’t there.” Polly could see the glowing glass of orange juice, and she remembered it from the perspective of someone who was thirty inches tall, nose an inch from the rim of the Formica table, the orange ribbons as the thing took flight. Not the why of it all, but the act. She had watched Cora crying in her bed, at eye level. “I’m sure it was after Evie and Frank died.”