Papa and Dee talking, pulling them along through this dreamtime summer. Polly, seeing it in stanzas decades later, was sure, on every waking, that her memory was clear. She could hear the steady rhythm of the oars, Papa’s voice with an accent, but not old, answering their random questions, both silly and earnest. His advice, moving over the water and under the moon, mixed with splashes in her mind: What to do if you’re lost in the mountains? Find water and follow it down. What to do if you see a large bear, as Papa had in Mongolia and Montana? Play dead. What to do if you fall into deep fast water, a riptide or a river? Let it take you until you see a chance, try to stay on your back, feet in the current. What to do if you have an enemy and want to act in anger? Wait and do it right. What to do if someone is lost, but not dead? Find them. What to do when they had children, as they would? Love them. The glinting silvery head and eyes, old shoulders pulling them home.

7. Monday, July 1, 2002

7

Monday, July 1, 2002

On Monday morning, Ariel reached the big bend, as the Yellowstone, which ran north out of the park, turned east toward Livingston and the prairie. Bodies mostly float spine-up, legs dangling, but when she rolled in the current her limbs stretched out and she moved down a deep channel on her back, two feet under the surface, eyes open and facing the filtered sun, strands of hair or the occasional fish or boat or duck body blocking the light. The shadow of pelicans, a speckle of sculpins, her own water bottle keeping up a quarter mile back.

People still said disappeared. Polly was careful to stick to this etiquette, but she thought drowned, she thought dead. Lost. There was always a moment when a Search and Rescue operation became a recovery operation, though this point was usually a quiet reality days before it was announced. People could survive weeks when they went missing in the mountains, but although no one who’d gone into a river like the Yellowstone had ever been found alive after two days, telling a family to drop a fantasy of a wounded but breathing loved one on a riverbank was not the business of the searchers. Polly, for some doomed Drake project, had researched the mechanics of drowning, and she noticed that these were not the kind of facts that disappeared with the bicycle accident. Nor were they truly facts. If no one survived, who knew if the lungs burned as they filled or if the brain screamed in pain? The great mysteries of life, unanswered. Polly knew a body would rise only when the gases inside built up, and she knew a body would eventually turn into a kind of soap known as adipose. But before the body stage, at the end of the person stage, they were all stuck with the wonders of the imagination.