Now Merle and Ned snickered over a photo from that visit, the two of them surly by a barbecue, Polly’s younger siblings circling them, confused by the subtext but waiting for a fight. These days Ned and Merle could handle talking about Rita, they could talk about Tommy, and they could even handle Maude stumping downstairs, demanding a gimlet, saying one last time that it was a wonder that they’d all survived. She looked through the evidence of that survival once Ned delivered her drink: photographs from the wedding, from the trip to Spain, from bleaker moments during renovation. Polly pregnant, Sam as a newborn, the three of them in Ireland with Ned’s aunt and uncle, Helen still screaming in her fourth month of colic, Polly’s sister, Millie, caught sitting on Drake’s lap.

Drake’s researcher had found footage from Papa’s retirement party in 1968, and he’d printed out some stills for them. Polly could make out the hedge, and it seemed so ratty. No one could lose herself in such a maze. She could see the rowboat down by the shore, closer than she remembered, and it all looked very domesticated. They—Edmund Thomas Ward Berrigan and Apollonia Asta Schuster—were mostly blurs. Polly was visible leaning in behind Dee, whispering in Jane’s ear, Jane with beautiful legs and sandaled painted toes, and Edmund stood behind them, waiting for the answer to whatever question Polly had asked: When will the cake be served, can we let Lemon out of the car again, why do you think it’s too late to swim? Tonight she thought of the brief good moment it had been, rather than disappearance—the beach, the salty stink mixing with the bonfire, the crowd on the lawn moving around beautiful Jane in the turquoise shift, while the doomed man and doomed Rita, the other beauty, walked toward the edge of the water. Borderlands, liminal spaces: Papa had written a great essay on that, too, about the tilting moment in so many stories.

Polly looked up and Ned was watching her—no message, just watching.

Maybe the wall had moved, maybe the air in the glass had said something. Maybe that witch really had bitten the dog’s tail off. Love and wonder; everything goes missing but everything lives on, at least for a while, in the small kingdom of your head.