Neither Polly nor Edmund ever mentioned this later. By the weekend they went in and out of each other’s rooms, and she had read his copies of Bruce and Lad: A Dog. The following week, he was put in a different third-grade classroom, but they saw each other at recess. He was quiet, and careful, and people grew used to him without any of the crap that often dropped on a new kid. When the prettiest girl in Polly’s class teased Edmund, clearly liking him, it gave Polly a borrowed glow.

Edmund talked in his sleep, on the other side of the wall, and he picked his nose, though no more than a boy she liked in school. Rita talked to herself all night long.

Papa and Dee were very old, which Polly no longer noticed; they were from another century. When Edmund first arrived, Polly, who’d been living there for half a year, would catch him watching them—a little fear, some wonder, the same look that he gave to all the things in the house: statues and arrowheads and books everywhere. Within a week he no longer seemed to notice Papa or Dee’s tissuey skin, pale as a photographic negative except for during summer, or hear a reedy sound in their voices.

Papa was the oldest person in the house, but he was also the tallest. He’d been an archaeologist before he taught mythology at Columbia, and had a way of moving through things, of looming without it feeling like a threat. He was a Presence, according to Merle, a Fucking Piece of Work, and he was known for writing about universal stories, the way they’d evolved through cultures, about shamanism and the archaeological evidence behind myth. Dee was tiny, with big arthritic arms below delicate collarbones, and a young woman’s head of hair, still half-brown. She wasn’t shaped like an old lady, and she dressed in slacks or straight skirts instead of what Papa called old ladies’ bags. She was a year younger than Papa, who’d been born in Sweden by the ocean, both of them before cars or planes or plastic. She’d broken a leg in a fall as a child, and again when Jane was a child—one shin below her skirt hem was slender but dented—and she kept a grove of canes with different heads, of different shimmers and substances, like so many magic wands, in a pot at the front door and against a bedroom table that held her jewelry and perfume and medicine bottles. But she and Papa moved quickly, like young people, and their muscles were visible ropes, and they were sometimes drunk and silly and snappish. They did not fret over what the children ate, or whether they’d do something stupid near the road or in the water. They knew Polly and Edmund were terrified of both; why add to the humiliation?