May and Lemon took turns on their beds. There were new feathers in their windows from Dee, orange and turquoise. Polly didn’t know where they’d come from and Dee claimed she didn’t, either. May went back and forth between their rooms, soaking up the heat of their fevers, window to window, and at dusk Dwight took up position in the crab apple tree. Polly and Edmund heard teatime, and puddy, and evil, pretty girl and storm. They had begun to like him, and think of him as theirs.

When it was dark, Dee rubbed Vicks on the children’s chests and opened their windows wider, because they were hot, even if the night wasn’t.

“Look at the stars,” said Dee. “See the largest, just over the crab apple?”

Edmund did, but Polly said she only saw a blur. A spinning night world, a blind milky eye. The lights in her room were a blur, she explained, and the words on her posters were blurs. Dee panicked and called for Papa, who crouched in front of Polly in the hall, holding a hand close and moving it far away, while Dee went on about how they didn’t have a car, because of damn Rita, and couldn’t they get legal custody, and would they need to call an ambulance, and how awful it was that she hadn’t simply taken the children to the doctor.

Papa smiled at Polly, who rocked on her small toes in the green of the hall. Gray-blue eyes, old brown skin. He lifted his glasses off the top of his head and slowly lowered them onto Polly’s nose. Suddenly the world glittered, even from a distance: She could see Rita’s waves, and swaying trees, clouds ghosting above and rain falling on low mountains. Dee pointed to Rita’s jellyfish and eels and Polly saw them begin the long swim to the Sargasso Sea, to all the bones of horses and slaves. Her eyes filled with tears. This was too much, thrashing, drowning horses and black children and a continent of eels waiting to devour them.

After they’d comforted her, and said they’d buy her eyeglasses, Polly insisted that Dee was making the world wake up. But why, and to what end? What would happen? Papa said Dee only wanted them to be better, and that helping them imagine more meant helping them know more. “Dee is not magic,” he said. “She is reality pie.”

Dee laughed and said she wanted to be a myth.

It was all bushwah, Papa said in the morning, after Arnold arrived and they used his car to go to the doctor. Polly and Edmund each got a shot of antibiotic in their butts. Merle found Rita a few days later. She’d darted around Manhattan, bug in the light, selling paintings. Edmund pushed his trunk against his door the night she returned.