Papa was amused. “Do you believe in hell?” he asked Rita.

“Of course I do,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Myself am hell,” he said. “Did you ever hear that phrase?”

That afternoon, Rita drew phases of the moon and sun, burnt landscapes of deserts, white-blue mountains. She left Dee’s moon where the children had drawn it, but it now hung over an orchard, in what was becoming Central Asia. Rita added bright dots, red and orange and purple, to the trees. The Garden of Eden, she said, but she drew no snake and no people. She drew pyramids in Egypt, and mounds in Mongolia, but when she began a jungle, a greener Asia, she did not draw her husband, sleeping on the path of Edmund’s dreams.

After Rita finished the jungle the next day, just after Arnold left, she ran away with Papa’s Volvo. Edmund and Polly, sicker than ever, were propped up at the kitchen table eating coddled eggs when they heard the engine start. Papa looked up from his paper, and went back to reading.

“Will you call Bennett?” asked Dee. Bennett was the Suffolk County police chief.

“I’m too annoyed,” said Papa.

“How will I take the children to the doctor without the car?”

“They’ll be fine. We’ve all survived worse.”

Fevers are different when you’re young. For an adult, any second’s physical status is a gray area, because nothing in your body is ever entirely right. When you’re a child, the baseline feeling of wellness is so profound that any variation—a sunburn, an itch, gas—is intolerable, mind-boggling. Sometimes an adult gets a glimpse of this past paradise—swimming, a moment before orgasm, tasting food—but small damages coat mind and skin and muscle with a kind of indifferent hair shirt. To healthy, first-world children, the body is an absolute, and discomfort brings collapse.

Their fevers were hallucinatory, and Dee fretted and gave them ice cream and baby aspirin and honeyed whiskey water and propped them up for games of gin. Out of the corner of her eye Polly was sure, over and over, that the horse on one of Papa’s Chinese paintings was running across the wall, that the flowered curtains on the glassed-in porch, meant to shade it from the sun, showed faces flowing out of the patterns as they moved in a breeze from the window, a closing door, someone passing. Ten years later, tripping in college, she would think of these days.