Ned grilled lamb. Polly watched Maude from the kitchen while she made a salad, thinking that they needed to get her to a doctor, because something was going on, beyond being ninety. Then the scene through the window dropped away. The world turned green, as if it were made of water, and she saw a door. Polly ran down the hall and through the map, circling mountains and leaping over rivers, tricked into looking in all the wrong places while something awful was happening that she should prevent, while Dee called to her from downstairs—something was burning, and now everyone was yelling.

The smoke alarm sounded. Polly gave Ned a big smile as he jerked the oven door open.

“You’re tired,” he said, throwing pistachio cinders into the alley; Polly had been toasting them for the salad. “It’s been a while. Don’t fret.”

Liar. Polly shooed magpies away until she was sure they wouldn’t burn their beaks or their feet on the smoking nuts.

“Where’d you go?” asked Ned.

“Into the map,” she said. “Rita’s map.”

After dinner, Sam brought out his family tree again, but Jane and Merle were off with friends, and Maude and Josie and Harry were leaving to visit Harry’s mother, who was just back from seeing a new grandchild. How lovely to have babies born, said Maude to Josie.

Sam, miffed, pointed to the empty circle above Jane’s name. “Your grandmother can fill that in,” Maude told Sam.

“Can she?” asked Polly.

“Of course she can,” said Maude. “Just because she doesn’t talk about it doesn’t mean she doesn’t know.”

“Is he alive?”

“I believe you know the answer to that question,” said Maude. Harry was helping her to the door, and looked back at Polly, shaking his head in confusion.

Where to begin a story? Polly had hauled her childhood along through life without examination. She’d relied on it being there if she needed to find it, but she disliked navel-gazing, even before she needed to pretend her head felt just fine. Biographies bored her, and she connected most bouts of self-examination with depression.

But the past had become much more interesting since the accident, once she worried she was losing the ability to bring it back, once she caught herself having the urge to make things up. She needed to find a balance between what she’d remembered, what she’d imagined, what she’d forgotten to consider, and what had been knocked out of her when she bounced on the pavement. And it started with Jane’s blue lovely eyes—no one else in the family had those eyes—and Jane’s invisible mother.