“I heard him tease her for wanting to wear it. He held it up over her head. I think he kept it away from her.”

He. Connie, spiteful and jealous, wasn’t going to utter Graham’s name.

“He wouldn’t. He’s not some monster.”

Connie studied Polly. “If he did, he wouldn’t tell the truth now, would he? She wasn’t a good swimmer. I never even saw her in the deep end without holding the side.”

This didn’t strike Polly, who was a side grabber, too, as revelatory. She liked swimming despite choking, terrifying misadventures. Water lurked, but it invited; Polly dabbled. Now she wondered if she’d ever seen Ariel swimming.

“And yet she climbed into a kayak.” A little girl was actually waving to Sam, and Polly would have preferred to watch that show. “He says they were in love.”

“She wasn’t in love with him. She felt sorry for him. And why didn’t he die, too?”

Connie rattled Polly. Pretty eyes in a flat, judgmental face, now filled with anguish. Helen was coming out of her hypothermic huddle, eyeing the alluring crew at the deep end. Sam, who couldn’t remember Connie sitting for him when he was tiny but could remember disliking her, was watching the ducks on the far side of the fence, rather than keeping track of his sister or acknowledging the waving girl.

“I’m sure he feels horrible,” said Polly. “He’ll deal with this all his life.”

“Good,” said Connie.

Since her accident, Polly had survived many tasks that had never before been so difficult—bills, grade school registration, weighing whether to take medication, not killing someone during a psych test, not saying the wrong thing to the bereaved, not burning her kitchen down—but her cleaning efforts were so intermittent and spastic that she never made any real progress. Dust customarily lay heavy on the house of Schuster-Berrigan, the kingdom of dog hair, but Polly stripped beds, put away months’ worth of clothing and handled the bathroom with broad, spray-heavy strokes, reached for cobwebs without falling off her shitty bent ladder. She’d brushed the furniture, scraped splattered condiments off refrigerator shelves, extracted bug bodies from lights. Now, she scrubbed one five-foot square of floor with Helen on her back, pretending Polly was a horse, before she sent her daughter outside to clean the sidewalks with the hose. She knocked spiders out of the garage shop vacuum and brought it inside, jerking open cabinets and drawers one by one. Sam and Helen would grow up thinking that vacuuming drawers was normal, but it couldn’t hurt in later life.

Polly wasn’t any better or worse at doing this than she’d ever been, and she lost herself only once, popping back into the here and now to wonder why she was on the floor, holding a soapy toothbrush.