Edmund was already in his room, arranging his notebooks, coming up with some grand plan for his glorious fourth-grade year, when Polly saw that Papa and Dee hadn’t taken the car. She ran upstairs to their room, because of course they’d overslept from their nap. And because the note on the door had been left for someone tall—Merle—she didn’t see it. She knocked and went in, and they were as always when they slept, young looking, curled up together, his arm under her head. May lay at the foot of the bed, watching Polly, who crept closer and waited for someone to move.

She called for Edmund, who came to the doorway but no further.

17. The Beginning of the World, 1968

17

The Beginning of the World, 1968

The beginning of the world: According to Jane, it was a mother, a baby’s skin reaching the air, the air itself.

Water, said Papa. Skin and air are not the beginning of the world, just the beginning of the story.

The beginning of Papa: a village in southern Sweden in 1878, in a farmhouse five miles from the ocean. He’d loved his mother, been terrified of his father.

The beginning of Dee: an orchard town on Lake Erie in the spring of 1880. She’d loved everyone always, she said, even when she’d left them. She’d had more than one life, too.

Polly and Edmund, listening to Papa and Dee in the car on the way to the Met in 1968, wandering through halls of ruined worlds. Everything was larger because they were smaller back then, passing objects that were once people, explanations of the world, the night and day and winter and summer: eggs, monsters, fire spurting out of mountains, a woman walking out of the sea, an old god biting off a child’s head. So many stories were about the mother or father dying, and the child left alone. It doesn’t happen so much anymore, said Dee, but when it does, you must remember you are surrounded by other people. She didn’t admit that they might not be the people you’d choose.

Polly believed then, and she was more or less right, that Papa and Dee willed this to happen, floated off into the air, turned to smoke and memory. Like a fairy tale, like a myth, they’d lain down together and stopped, changed nature, become air. Magic, despite the ambulance, the police, Jane sobbing, people talking about enough morphine to take out a five-ring circus. Dee’s pancreatic cancer meant she was down to weeks and would be in increasing pain; Papa would not abandon her to a hospital and had no interest in being on the planet without her. He had at points in the past failed her, but not now.