Everyone is dead. Except Polly.
She had yearned to tell Adam everything, if only to test his love for her. But to do that, she would have been forced to share the worst parts about her marriage to Ditmars, the most shaming details. How she knew of his crimes, the people he had killed, but did nothing until she came to believe he would harm her and Joy. How he liked to take her curling iron and hold it against her flesh, demanding that she not scream, teaching her resilience until she learned to stay silent even when he gave her a third-degree burn on her thigh. How, with increasing frequency toward the end, he would choke her during sex.
And she liked it.
Not because being deprived of oxygen heightened her pleasure, as Ditmars claimed it would, but because, for a few moments, she allowed herself the fantasy of dying. It beckoned, her only real hope of escape.
Then she would think about Joy, remember that she was not allowed to die, not yet, and she would scratch and cough her way back to life, Ditmars laughing all the while.
She had managed to forget that, almost. The curling iron, the choking, what it was like to lie beneath a man, sex and death mingling, until it was impossible to identify which release you wanted more.
It all came back to her when Cath, enraged by a simple retort, leaped at Polly, knocking her to the ground. When Cath tried to put her hands around Polly’s throat, Polly felt no confusion. She knew in that moment she wanted to live by any means necessary.
They rolled and grappled on the kitchen floor, equal matches. But at some point, Cath got on top and reached for her throat again. People say they see red when angry, but in Polly’s memory, the room began to turn green, more of a greenish-gray yellow, the color of the sky before a late-summer storm. Dots floated in front of her eyes. Unlike Ditmars, Cath wasn’t going to stop in time. She wasn’t even pretending to be interested in Polly’s pleasure.
Polly squirmed across the floor, inch by inch, until they were under her metal table. Once in the table’s shadow—knowing she would have one chance, it was like holding that knife over Ditmars’s chest as it rose and fell with his snores—she bucked as hard she could, driving Cath’s head into the underside of the metal table again and again. Her only thought was to dislodge her, to make her let go.
But once again, Polly’s aim was true, her strength superhuman. Cath’s skull cracked on the third or fourth blow. She collapsed on Polly, heavier than the weight of any man she had ever known.
Polly’s first instinct was to run. She could take Cath’s keys, steal her car, drive to a bus station or train station, disappear. But she would have to run forever, sacrificing her dream of a life with Joy and Jani. And it was an accident, self-defense, not her fault. Only who would believe her? How many times is a woman allowed to defend herself? In Polly’s experience, not even once.
She had time. Not much, but enough to calm down, make a plan. She took a shower, not worrying about the clothes she was leaving behind, the blood on the dress she’d been wearing. If her plan worked, it would take all evidence with it. If it didn’t—she refused to consider that possibility. She put on her favorite dress, chose her sandals, despite knowing they were her least practical shoes. They were too pretty to lose. She fastened her rose necklace from the thrift store around her neck, only on a velvet ribbon, the better to hide the marks left by Cath’s fingers. She turned on the pilot, closed the windows, left candles burning near the curtains, made sure the pink scarf on her bedside lamp was touching the bulb. If enough gas built up before the fire got going, nothing would be left standing.
And nothing was. Except Polly.
She should have gone to Reno, after all. Might have cost her Adam, but it would have saved his life. She shouldn’t have wound Gregg up like a top, knowing he would come spinning right at her. She never planned to shoot him. Or did she? She wanted only to provoke him into crossing some line, proving that he was the unfit parent. It’s hard to remember all her beautiful plans, which ones worked, which ones didn’t. She saved herself. She saved her daughters. Everyone else was—what was that word that Adam liked to use? Lagniappe.
She is paying for her tomatoes when she hears a band at the far end of the parking lot start a familiar song. The man next to her—cute, probably ten years younger than she is, his graying hair gathered in a short, thick ponytail—begins to croon, almost under his breath. When he sees her head jerk up in recognition, he talksings the words to her: “I’d like to get to know you.”
She sees the dim interior of the High-Ho, the jukebox’s tubes glowing pink and green. The sun setting and rising over the cornfields, bigger than any other sun she has ever known. An iron bed, a quilt folded over the footboard. A silk dressing gown. A metal-top table. Room 3 at the Valley View. A slip of green paper, the scrawled order for poached eggs and rye toast carrying an erotic charge unlike any she had ever known, or would ever know again. The summer of 1995 feels like a century ago. Last August, she took Joy and Jani to Rehoboth, ignoring the Belleville bypass and choosing the old main road, the one that goes past the High-Ho. It’s a Mexican restaurant now, advertising Margarita Mondays and Two-fer Taco Tuesdays. The Valley View? Razed, leaving only a view of the nonvalley. Mr. C died in 2002, and it’s doubtful that Max and Ernest are alive, much less showing up for Margarita Mondays in a bar that’s been repainted with red, white, and green stripes, the better to resemble the Mexican flag.
Everybody’s dead. Except Polly.
Ponytail smiles at her, pulls out his cell phone and offers its blank text screen to Polly. Give him your digits, Jani would say if she were here. What could it hurt?
Oh, honey, if only you knew.
“I really would like to get to know you,” he says with the confidence born of never being turned down.
Polly shakes her head, glad for the dark glasses that hide her eyes.
“Trust me, you wouldn’t.”
Polly drives home, to the perfect house with the two perfect daughters—yes, both perfect; anyone who doesn’t see their individual perfection is dead to her—who will never know, must never know, what their mother did to provide them with their happy lives. The summer sky is a cloudless blue that seems hundreds of miles away, a towering ceiling, out of reach, higher than any bird or plane could fly.
You could even say it arches.