Rain was thudding down on wet grass, browning dogwood blossoms, discarded toys, the towels Jane had left on the line weighing down the cheap cord so that the laundry dipped to the grass, to the mud and whatever else. The cat darted toward the house, tail like a baseball bat, making for the broken basement window. The witch’s parrot swooped after it, playing hawk.

Nothing happened. They turned to the pieces of glass, stowed up here after the greenhouse was cleaned out for Rita. Red—would it smell like blood if they smacked it open? It would not. Polly chose yellow, and they thought they smelled sulfur. It wasn’t like either of them to destroy old things; they were far too superstitious. Maybe they thought they could grind the glass into some special paint for Rita. Maybe they thought they were freeing ghosts. They decided on a last color, the deep blue. Another crunch, and a gust through the window blew the lamp over. In the kitchen, it scattered the flour around Dulcy’s dough, and she laughed, and in Henning’s study, it swept a map of France off the wall, and they could hear him swear and then hum on his way down the hall to make more coffee, to see how she was feeling.

“I don’t think we should break the blue pieces again,” Polly said.

“No,” said Edmund.

Decades later, in the Montana wind, Polly thought about the mostly lost order of things, the hidden worlds in her brain, where everyone was still alive, the smell of Dee cooking, the wars of the face cards, the succession of plants on the path to the Sound. But the shifting creatures in the hallway map gradually gave way to the clank of Ned playing alchemist in their kitchen right now, to Sam running by or whatever spell Helen was casting in her mud kingdom.

The way Polly had hoped the world would always be was maybe not far from what it had become. She kept her eyes shut to see people she loved for a few more minutes, to move once again down the long hall past Rita’s moving map of the world, a river filling the overwhelming ocean. Then she gave up and opened them to the new green of the old yard.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Stephen Potenberg and the rest of my family and friends for their patience, love, and support, and for the thousand small things I’ve borrowed from all of them and hidden in this book. Thanks go to Martha Crewe and Janice Kimmel, for finding mistakes that are invisible to the normal eye, and to Teresa “Lilly” White, who provided forensic knowledge and humor. Sharon Dynak and all the wonderful people at the Ucross Foundation gave me a beautiful place and the luxury of time to finish this book and start another.