She’d put a fan on, and when she heard rustling paper she sat up: On the far wall, a large map of the New York coast, really just shoreline and islands and a world of blue ocean, was missing one tack, and the loose corner shuddered.

Ned opened one eye.

“It looks alive,” Polly said.

“It is alive,” said Ned.

They were twenty-seven now, but his face was younger with his eyes closed. Nineteen years later, but how could she not have known?

20. Sunday, July 7, 2002

20

Sunday, July 7, 2002

Ned remembered different things than Polly: a fear of burning astronauts, the funeral train, the riots in Chicago, things Polly had somehow lost. The soft suffering sounds Dee made when she thought no one could hear her, the way Jane danced when she did the dishes and didn’t know someone was watching her. He remembered Merle buying the “Hey Jude” single and thinking that the song, with its effort to comfort, was somehow for him. He remembered the things Papa said just to him, those days at the Sound when they went swimming together, about how Ned could live through all of this. He remembered being saved, even though with the loss of Papa and Dee he would be lost again.

The unknowables, always. Ned thought Tommy had had cold-colored gray eyes, but according to Jane, they were green, like Sam’s. Maybe that part of Ned’s mind had gone to black and white, except for the parrots and the stained glass. The only thing he could remember his father saying, other than “eat your dinner” and “because I said so,” was that yes, Tommy had seen and heard bombs, and he’d told Ned he’d learned that if you screamed during an explosion, it kept your eardrums from blowing.

Some things neither of them were sure about.

“Were they magic?” asked Polly.

“Oh yes,” said Merle.

“Did the cards move?”

“Probably. I’d forgotten about you going on about that, Dee making you look at the faces. When you had a fever, you made me shuffle endlessly.”

“Did the feathers move?”

“They did after May finally killed Dwight. We managed not to tell you that.”

“What do you really remember of that time?” she asked Ned, a few months in, when she’d gotten back from Montana and asked if he’d move and he had to decide whether to make that leap of faith. “What is strongest?”

“I remember love,” he said. “And wonder. So much was so hard afterward, too, but they saved me.”

Late on the afternoon of the float, after the rain and movie ended, Ned found Polly in the garden. He didn’t ask where she’d been this time.

“Oh god,” she said. “What time is it? We’re down to Chinese on Maude’s list.”