Borderlands: the banister, the fringe of grapes on the porch, the tide’s limit on the Sound, the edge of the woods, bedroom doors. When Jane and Merle came back from visiting Rita, the children could hear most of their story through the grates: Rita was mad, mad, mad as a hatter. She wouldn’t draw, for the first time in her life, and she sat on an iron-barred balcony and yelled at anything that passed below—squirrels, nurses, other loonies. When her mood shifted, she went to bed with her eyes screwed shut. The hospital could keep her for another two weeks, at most. She certainly couldn’t go back to her in-laws’ house.

“She’s burned her bridges,” said Merle.

“Really only the garage,” snarked Jane. She sat at the dining room table and wrote many drafts of a note to Rita’s estranged family. Estranged, thought Polly, while Jane struggled with her wording. They watched her address the envelope, seal it, stamp it.

No one mentioned what the letter meant for Edmund, and he went to his room. Papa had given him an old record player, and now he played his two albums, over and over, right through lunch: Camelot and Sgt. Pepper. Polly’s open bedroom window was next to his, above the crab apple, and she became dizzy with fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and stops my mind from wandering. Or was it wondering? She got things wrong, often. She’d looked for isles at the movie theater before she saw the word aisles one day. You couldn’t ask about everything. Now she made her way outside to the grape-covered porch and watched Papa teach Lemon to sit, stay, lie down. He finally walked into the house, and a few minutes later new music floated down from Edmund’s bedroom window: Vivaldi.

When Papa brought Edmund downstairs for a sandwich, they all walked out to help Dee in the greenhouse. Papa moved Rita’s paintings to one side and Polly and Edmund arranged Dee’s bowls and water and supplies before they lost track and started poking around. They found a wood wine box that held pieces of broken stained-glass windows Papa brought back from Europe after the war, the first war. Most of the ancient lead solder was gone, and the crate was filled with ragged jewels, a red wedge that might have been a lip or puddle of blood; a gold sliver born as a dagger or an angel’s halo or the tail of Saint George’s dragon.

Dee lifted a piece and showed them an air bubble. Polly put her face close and saw small cities, dark woods, and wild animals.

“If you break it, you’ll let the old air out,” said Papa. “Maybe there’s a plague germ in there. Maybe there’s a last breath from someone shot by a longbow.”

“You’re so full of garbage,” said Jane, who was sweeping.