When Arnold arrived, he said, “Hearts,” and they all sat down. Dee dealt. She told them to study the faces and symbols, warlike and malicious and sidelong and seductive, and they spent an hour in shifty delight, cunning and joy, before their throats and lungs burned again, before they remembered they were sick. They had never truly looked at cards (just as they had never truly looked at dogs, feathers, berries), or considered what they meant. Clubs were originally clover leaves, spades were pikes. The jack of clubs was Lancelot, the jack of diamonds was Hector, the queen of hearts was Judith (not that Dee bothered telling them that story).

“Look at the blood on his sword,” she said, running a finger over the face of the jack of hearts. “And look at her beauty. Her hair is blowing, and you can hear trumpets. You should be playing euchre instead of hearts, E, look at those jacks and aces. But Polly has the suicide king, and you will not shoot the moon.”

Polly stared at the king of hearts. Charlemagne, according to Dee—why would he stick a sword in his head? Dee said that he was only brandishing it, that over the years, printers muddled the image until it looked as if he was plunging a sword into his brain.

Arnold was supposedly helping to plan Papa’s retirement party. Really, he and Papa and Dee sat on the porch and talked for hours, drinking better wine than usual. One-eyed May loved one-eyed Arnold and ignored Polly and Edmund when he was around. Man and cat could look in and out at the same time, said Papa. When Arnold learned about Edmund’s nightmares, he drew a tree on his hand. Polly wanted one, too, and he drew a vine.

Rita was moving too quickly again, singing to herself, darting around the house. To no good end, as Dee put it. Steer clear.

Rita tied the bloody feathers into a bouquet that dangled above her door. She’d begun to paint flying things near the tops of the canvases, above every continent: pterodactyls and hummingbirds, bats and a World War I–era airplane, all topped by stars, clouds, curls of wind like the wind on old maps. She added sharks and sailfish and jellyfish and eels, dangling in the southern Atlantic: Papa explained that eels traveled to the Sargasso Sea to mate and floated together in a huge mat, in the center of the Atlantic, a place where slaves and horses were dumped when ships were becalmed on their way from Africa to America.

Rita put heaven on top, above a layer of polar ice and white bears—no angels, but birds with halos—and hell below Antarctica, the bottom of which was blue ice, and made of skeletons. Her half-finished Jabberwock was reaching for a penguin chick. Lowest of all, a black-red skim of hell and lava, gray outlines of ghosts and more feathers on a devil.