On a Monday a week later, Polly and Edmund got up together and dressed and went off to school on their own. Polly wrote Edmund’s excuse note, and Edmund wrote hers, and they both used the handwriting they’d learned from Dee and Papa. At night they could hear Merle and Jane talking about moving back to Michigan, to be in a different place. Really it was just the same as five years earlier, running away after Evie’s and Frank’s deaths. Polly remembered thinking this, and being angry, but she doubted it would make a difference if she argued. Rita’s brother arrived from Boston. He was nothing like Rita and he clearly didn’t approve of her, or believe in her madness, but Edmund, who refused to stay in a hotel with him, talked about running away. He’d found Papa’s keys to the apartment in the city. No one would expect them to go there. The old men on the sidewalk would help them. They could take one of the diamonds from Dee’s jewelry box and a bag of her late plums to eat, and then they’d come up with a new place and a new plan.

But before Edmund could convince her to disappear with the key, before Polly could argue with her parents, they took Edmund away: Rita and her silent, resentful brother, a brown car, bound for some unimaginable place. Polly couldn’t look at his face as he walked down the stairs and the sidewalk, guess his despair, think about the fact that he might have believed that she and her family lived on in the house he’d loved on Christian Avenue, as if he’d never been there.

Rita wouldn’t kill herself until he was ten.

18. Sunday, July 7, 2002

18

Sunday, July 7, 2002

Polly poured a huge whiskey before she went to bed, a big brown Ned-sized drink, and fell into dreams, literally. A whole night of teetering on edges: She was in the attic, watching Papa help Dee out of the car, she was falling from a horse, seeing the underside of leaves as Edmund looked down at her, she was lying on leaves watching a sky shedding snowflakes, she was at her bedroom window, watching Dee and three children make a pile of icicles.

Ned was having his own dream, doglike twitches and muttering. The wind made the house creak and Polly pulled an extra blanket over both of them and drifted away again. She was small, lying on a beach next to Dee, who was young and wearing a bathing suit and telling Polly important things while Papa swam in the background. The sense of falling started again—waves made the ground erode under Polly’s body, but Dee held on.

When Ned woke up to an empty bed, he walked downstairs to find the door open and Polly in a blanket at the picnic table.

“Poll?”