Things Polly couldn’t know, even with the best mind on the planet: That Thomas Ward really had lain on a garden path in a quiet yard in Hue, with ants marching by as he died; that for some reason he hadn’t felt pain, or fear, and the last thing he saw was a beetle climbing and bending a blade of grass. That Polly would develop a script for Drake that would finally work, and she would make silly money with him and see Italy with her family and get food poisoning in the Rome airport. That Josie and Harry, who would end up eloping to Fort Benton after their third wedding date was derailed, would have thirty years together. That Merle would start writing poetry again, and Jane would like it. That the man and girl Polly had watched in the city when she was little—the people she thought were Frank and Evie—had thought they recognized her somehow, too. That Graham would die a few months later as a passenger in a car accident, lost on a bad turn to the Columbia River. That when Jane, who had always known what Ivor had done to her mother, realized who he was that night at the party, and Papa had asked if she wanted him left alone, she said she wanted him dead. That Maude wouldn’t make the trip the next year or go to the tribute in New York; she would fall and hit her head in late September and die a few hours later without waking up.

That there was no way around any of this.

After dinner, Polly went out to the garden. Jane would think she was having a spell but really she was watching the bats as she let herself go back to a moment in Stony Brook. Maybe it had been in June, while Rita was in the bin, maybe a day in July, rainy just like today. They were in the attic, arguing about how to put together Dee’s spinning wheel—Dee had tried to learn weaving during the months after she’d shattered her leg. Jane had taken them to Sleeping Beauty the day before, to get them away from Rita, and watched them sneer at the fear in the faces of the less worldly children around them. This had been one of the stories Jane had tested on them, admittedly not a myth about flood but about another wall of nature, a garden and thorns.

“Touch it,” said Edmund in the attic. “See if it changes us.”

The creak of the wheel. “You try,” said Polly.

“All right,” said Edmund. “Now switch dreams.”