Back in her own bed, Polly thought of drawing Dee in the notebook and of dropping into the moment, seeing Papa’s drifting rowboat for the first time in years, the minnows circling her toes in Long Island Sound. Now she turned her mind from what they’d found on the beach that day, and made her child’s body walk up the beach path to the house, climb the stairs to her old bedroom. She pushed the memory to another day, so that she could hear Papa and Dee talk, hear him follow Dee down the hall, saying something Polly hadn’t understood but now guessed was sweet and dirty—the sound of it, the edge, had a small tangy vibration. The old-fashioned cadences of Dee’s voice, laughing, and the lag of her bad leg as she and Papa walked to their bedroom

Was Polly right? She’d known them so well. When the rowboat floated back into her head, she struggled awake, nudged Ned so that he moved onto his side and stopped snoring. Why these thoughts, now? The drowned man on the beach by the drifting boat—she hadn’t forgotten, precisely, but tucked it under the rest of what happened that summer, when she was eight.

Polly let herself fall back asleep. Now she was in the boat as it spun and bobbled. Ned was rowing and Polly was looking through the blue glass bottom at Ariel, who passed underneath and rose to face the moon briefly before she rolled over, fingers and toes dragging against the gravel in a shallow stretch of the river.

Polly woke again and listened to the rain. It wasn’t until the next day that a man camping on an island just south of town came into the station and said he’d seen a woman pass by the evening before, cresting the surface and waving a stiff arm. A shallow stretch, but before he could wade in she hit a faster, deeper current and vanished. He apologized for the delay but seeing her hadn’t made him want to get back into his kayak, in the dark.

6. Winter and Spring 1968

6

Winter and Spring 1968

Her good friend Edmund, didn’t she recognize him?

Polly stood near her mother and her great-grandmother on a Long Island sidewalk, on a mild day in the middle of January 1968, listening to Edmund Ward’s mother, Rita, rattle on about old friendships, and pretending this wasn’t happening. She and Edmund snuck quick looks at each other while feigning interest in the cars going down Christian Avenue or the dog on the chain, yodeling at the sight of the visitors. Edmund had brown hair and a sad, tired face. They were both seven.

Rita rattled on. When they were five or six, Polly must remember the day on Lake Michigan? They played in a creek, and there had been a puppy, and a campfire. Edmund’s father got the car stuck in the sand.