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.

Ned was up and getting ready to go on the river again but Polly stayed in bed for another few minutes before morning sounds chased her downstairs: a flicker mistaking their metal furnace exhaust for an aspen with larvae, a neighbor whacking weeds at dawn, and the helicopter on one of its last scheduled tours. She was so tired she saw crackles of light in the corners of her eyes, and her brain felt grainy. She chugged coffee, rebuilding some sort of agenda as she shuffled around in an old nightgown, recoiling a little from the floor she hadn’t swept, the dog hair, garden dirt, the stickiness of old spilled box juice. She found her previous day’s list on her mounded desk and searched for something to cross out, then added:

swimming lessons

go looking

food for Delgados and Maude’s picnic

argue with Jane

She added sauces, etc. to restaurant and an exclamation mark to her previous cleaning line, then scribbled:

get Maude

deal with Graham

In the yard, a flash of color caught her eye. At 7 a.m., Merle was drinking coffee in the chilly sunlight, reading while wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the house to wake. Having reached a plateau of boredom, he’d decided to fill their house with bookshelves. He was already measuring walls when they left him with the children to meet the search boats.