That night, Rita emerged for the birthday party, because Jane, her oldest friend, knocked on the bedroom door and asked. She stared at her plate, pretty red hair dangling into her water glass, and finally ate the vinegary fried fish, the salad of mulberries and pomegranates and cucumber, the rice and shrimp and sausage. She handed Jane a drawing just as the caramelized apricots wrapped in pastry were being served with birthday candles. It was a pastel sketch of Asta, with swirls around her head, stars like a crown.

Jane and Papa left the room.

“Some people know how to clear a party,” said Dee. “Merle, please make me a martini. And Rita?”

“Yes?”

“The drawing is beautiful, but what are you going to do with your life?”

A flash of venom in the pretty gray eyes. Rita pulled back her red hair, poured a glass of wine, smiled at the people who hadn’t left. “I’m going to be a very, very good painter. You’ll see. And then I’m going to walk into the water and be a ghost.”

11. Thursday, July 4, 2002

11

Thursday, July 4, 2002

Sam and Helen: What things did they see that were as strange as whatever Polly and Edmund had seen? Instead of Long Island Sound or the city, they had rattlesnakes, boiling water pouring up from the ground, rivers that could mangle, cold that could kill. Sharp edges, falling rocks; lions, wolves, bears. Daily, the dozen brown recluse spiders they trapped on sticky paper in the basement and the pit bull at the end of the block. Avalanches, earthquakes. In the mining town of Butte, an adit—a horizontal shaft—opened in a crumbling street, and Polly (tipsy on Ned’s birthday) told Sam that five thousand men had died down there, and a thousand bodies were underground still. She knew, better than most people, that children didn’t forget that kind of thing.