Everything seemed to disappear with them, the whole nature of the house and its sounds and smells and meaning. Polly could not comprehend that Papa and Dee were not in the corner of her eye, behind a door, that they weren’t the breeze that moved through a room or the footsteps on the ceiling. Sometimes she thought she saw them in the hall or on a sidewalk, dissolving in the sunlight, close enough to touch her. And when they couldn’t, her grief was as fresh and as physical as walking out of a warm room into a cold one. This time, she knew no one was hiding. They were gone, and the only way to keep them was to store them in her mind.

In the long, bleak confusion that followed their deaths, no one paid much attention to Edmund and Polly. Arnold took them to a movie that first night, while the bodies were being taken away, and cried through the whole thing. Papa had been his oldest friend through love and murder and poetry, cases of wine, years of arguments about gods and art.

No one made Polly or Edmund go to school. No one made them do anything or talked about any of it. And even earlier, after the body on the beach, only Dee had tried to help. Put your memories in a box, she said, good and bad, and pull them out when you need them, or can bear them. Or keep them hidden away, but know that it’s up to you.

Maude came back, along with Papa’s brother Ansel. Rita, who vanished after the party, returned several times and took most of her canvases out of the greenhouse. Papa and Dee came back, in a way: They were in the last pretty jars Dee made, trapped by Merle’s cork stoppers.