“She wouldn’t have taken them off, any more than the preserver,” said Connie.

Polly slumped home, feeling like a softening balloon. Cousin Hans, who looked more and more like an albino crow, had taken Maude to lunch, a true community service, and Merle and Jane planned to hike.

“This wasn’t easy on your mother,” said Merle, redundantly.

Boy howdy, thought Polly. She went outside, because it was eighty degrees and clear, soft and lovely, and her family was alive. Who were they to know their allotted time or even, sadly (in Polly’s case), what time, day, month it was at any given moment? If she lay on her back in the yard—which she did now, Sam and Helen and the other animals finding nothing odd about it—she saw mountains, swiveling tips of trees, clouds scudding by at a hundred miles an hour. Birds, a roofline with a loose shingle. If she turned her head to the right, she could see the old dog Pearl looking in the garden for the old dead cat. Cats weren’t meant to predecease their dogs, just like women weren’t meant to leave widowers, and children weren’t supposed to die at all. If she turned to the left, she could see the new cat watching a chipmunk with the other dogs, all of them still immune to time.

Sam lay in the grass next to Polly, seeing how long he could bear the feeling of an ant on his skin. Helen wandered off with a bowl and a bucket and a hose to her corner of the garden. She liked to form the clayey soil into mud animals—mostly variations on dogs or rabbits—then say a spell to make them come alive. It involved throwing the finished sculptures into a bucket of water with great force, while saying voilà and some gibberish. Polly had given her the idea, because she remembered Dee doing something like this once.

Find something, save everyone. Helen lifted her arms, dropped them, started an argument among her creatures. She had so many theories and worlds and Polly worried about the way they’d quietly dissolve over the years, fall away after reckonings with real life. Forgetting her own over the years felt like giving up, even as it happened, and she didn’t want Helen to lose the magic. Polly could just barely remember grasping the pattern to time, days and weeks and seasons. She could not recall her baroque rationale of how locks, toilets, cars operated, let alone sex and birth. She remembered death and her ideas about Frank and Evie, and the weird magic of the map, but nothing religious, no glimmer of that kind of a higher god, a soul beyond trees and sky. They hadn’t been that kind of family.