“That’s going to be their question. They’re going to want to know who we really are, so they can correct things.”

This, she wonders, is who we really are? How is he planning to draw me?

Just as the thought crosses her mind, he asks, “Do you want to sit for yours?”

“For my …?”

“Portrait. Do you want to sit for me?”

The other family members haven’t been around for that option—and clearly haven’t fared well in the absence.

“Well, what exactly does that mean, they’re coming to ‘correct things’?”

“You know,” he says, waving his hands to indicate the two of them or the house or the entire planet. “Put things right.”

Teresa hesitates. She glances again at the water-filled boots that represent his father, and sighs.

She’s 99.9 percent certain that the Visitors don’t actually exist. Frankie concocted them in a feverish dream, most likely, or fixated on something he’d seen in a science fiction movie when he was sick. The tiny part of her that thinks the Visitors might be real is there only because she, in her mid-twenties, believed herself to be the reincarnation of a seventeenth-century model. No one could have talked her out of that, at the time, and she still wonders if it might be true, so who is she to say for certain that an alien race won’t one day land on the planet?

They begin her portrait on a bright Monday morning in June. Frankie tapes a fresh poster board to a piece of plywood and anchors it to his easel in the middle of the backyard. He unfolds a TV tray for the tackle box of markers, and sets up a lawn chair for her. When Teresa has settled herself into the chair, he drapes a tablecloth like a barber’s smock around her shoulders.

She sits for an hour that first morning, another hour in the late afternoon. At the end of the day, she asks if she can see what he’s done so far, and he tells her no.

“Why?”

“Not until I’m finished,” he says. “It might interfere with the augury.”

By the next afternoon, she’s wondering why he’s covered her body. Maybe all he needs is my head, she thinks. Then she pictures her head severed, fastened to a kitchen appliance, and surrounded by knives, the word Teresa written at the bottom of the poster board. She begins to wonder how much—if any—sway she has in this process. “I hope you’re not making me look old,” she says. “Make me look like Jane Seymour. Or that actress with the eyes. Susan Sarandon.”

He selects a green marker from the tackle box. “The whole point is to be accurate.”