The where and how of the fall had become a game. Polly loved to track versions: Dee had tumbled down a hill in Granada, she’d fallen out of a barn loft in Montana, she’d been looking at a man on a street and rear-ended another car in Los Angeles. Everything, always, was about having Polly and Edmund look at a map, having them know where the world was. The children would touch a shark tooth on Papa’s sill, and he’d say Crete, or Cape May, and they’d add a pin to the map in Papa’s study. A bone whistle: Persia. A piece of pottery: Lesbos. All your life long, said Dee, you must love your home but see the world. Papa claimed that the accident happened when Dee lifted a rock and fell into a tomb, that a slab cracked as she stood on it, and she’d fallen into time and onto bones. Don’t look under rocks, he said, as they pried pill bugs from hiding places. A whole world might open up underneath you.

But the truth was probably the story Jane told them: In a cave in Morocco, during one of Papa’s digs, Dee stepped into the wrong direction of darkness and fell a long way. As she dropped, she held tight to a small ivory moon she’d just discovered. Merle snorted at this detail in the story, but Polly and Edmund didn’t have a problem believing it—if they imagined falling in the dark into some unknown place, they squinted their eyes and clenched their hands, so why wouldn’t a person do it if they were truly falling?

“I’ll tell you a secret,” said Papa. “She’d gone off to pee and stepped into thin air. When I reached her she was proud she hadn’t pissed her pants.”

In both versions, Dee never made a peep until they got her into the truck and bounced into town.