Polly, already scared of still, deep water, imagined riding on Papa’s rowboat and looking down at a ghost forest. She liked the part where Perdita’s knights, one played by Papa’s youngest brother, knelt in front of her—Polly could talk Edmund into playing a knight. At the end, when the queen was about to sacrifice herself, Perdita’s face became huge and her teary eyes looked out at them. Her lips moved. Dream me, said the titles.

“Jesus,” said Merle, who hadn’t seen the movie before.

Papa left the room. Dee had Edmund pull her out of the soft couch to follow him.

“Wasn’t my sister something?” said Arnold. “You know, half those knights died in the war, but not your uncle Per. He’s still playing cards in Montana. He’ll be here for the party.”

In the fall and winter and spring, Papa went out rowing on the Sound two or three times a week. Most mornings in the summer and early fall, he swam. Dee called him a real swimmer, a fish, and Merle’s warnings of pollution annoyed him. Life had polluted him for a full eighty-nine years, and he wouldn’t do without the pleasure of water. In a concession, he used a hose to rinse off in the yard, something that never failed to stun Polly and Edmund: Papa, unflinching, voluntarily covering himself with what felt like ice water. Once he screamed when the water hit to scare them, and they heard the witch’s door slam. He swiveled and stared at her door and put his thumb over the hose, so that it jetted almost to her doorway, flushing the poor green parrot.

Once a week, Jane and Merle drove Edmund and Polly to the ocean beach across the island. They would pair off by age; Polly and Edmund checked back only for food and small traumas. They built sand kingdoms, not just castles, and Polly had a store of scenarios she wanted them to act out: princesses in towers, dragons, Sleeping Beauty. In return, she played war. Which she didn’t mind—Merle found toy wooden bows with rubber-tipped arrows, and a sword for Polly that wasn’t as nice as Edmund’s but was easier to swing. Sometimes they simply lay half in the water, feeling the tug of the ocean, pretending to be dead soldiers in Normandy. They’d watch the sand form around their bodies and wash away underneath, until the sucking feeling unnerved them. They’d tug each other around in the water, curl up in fake foxholes, pretend to be medics and stitch each other up. They never mentioned Vietnam.

And then, abruptly, they’d become sick of each other. One day in mid-July, Polly wanted Edmund to stand at the base of the dogwood tree, hold his cavalier’s hat against his chest, and say, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”

“No,” said Edmund. “I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”