Merle left in the Ford to visit his brother in Boston, and the next morning Edmund and Polly both woke up with his cold. Jane was getting ready to defend her thesis and planned to go to the city apartment to try to keep her mind clear, to be away from Rita. Now Jane said she’d stay, because Dee was fragile and shouldn’t be near sick children.

Dee was offended. Jane left, but any sense of getting away with something dissolved. Dee said they needed to spend the morning sleeping. She said if they took a long enough nap, they’d have three dreams, not necessarily happy but not terrifying, either. She gave them each a bowl of sherbet, put cold wet cloths on their foreheads, and shut their doors. When Polly tried opening hers five minutes later, Dee’s voice whistled down the hall: “No.”

So they fell asleep. Edmund’s dreams were always about jungles, and he did have three. Everything in the first was gold and fragile, leaves breaking as he brushed by chasing a turtle. The second was cluttered with spots of color, as if he were trapped in a soft, moist Christmas tree, and it was talking to him. In the third the jungle was his bed, leaves crackling and whispering out of the wood frame, telling him a tiger was coming, but not to worry.

Polly’s dreams? Jane being plucked from the roof of the apartment building by a giant eagle, Polly riding on a train in a snarled tunnel that became the maze from Edmund’s birthday party. In the last, she looked into the sand at a jellyfish, then realized it was a watching whale’s eye.

When Polly woke, she smelled toast. Rita was living on toast and cheese and Dee’s underripe fruit—it drove Dee wild that Rita would touch her plums—and there she was in the open doorway, still in her nightgown, staring at Polly as she ate her toast.

Rita floated off.

Edmund’s voice: “You should go away. You don’t want to get sick.”

“I’m immune,” Rita said. “Silly duck. I need your feathers. I woke up needing them.”

“Promise you’ll give them back.”

“Of course,” said Rita.

Back in Polly’s room she reached for the second bunch, not even looking down at the little girl in the bed.

“They’re mine,” said Polly. “Dee wanted us to have them.”

Rita shrugged and took the feathers from the window. “You’re all fucking crazy,” she said.

She left, slamming her bedroom door, and a minute later they could hear Dee on the stairs.

“I see she was here,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll make more.” She led Edmund and Polly downstairs and plopped them on the couch and draped them with new cold washcloths.