Jane, who was getting a master’s in history and mythology, planned to write her thesis about natural disasters and legends, though Papa thought she should focus on the universal nature of the flood story, and not get into variations. In the corner of her bedroom, above her typewriter, she’d hung a hand-drawn timeline of floods and volcanoes and earthquakes throughout the world, with bubbles of tiny handwriting for details. Sometimes she helped Papa with his research, tracking down versions of stories through the ages, trying to determine which were earliest, how they’d blended and changed across times and peoples, how they’d lasted.

Papa, surrounded by pens and books and bones at his desk, would let Edmund and Polly flop around on his old velvet sofa. He showed them crows dancing in the yard and pointed out that they seemed to perform for May, the one-eyed cat, who watched from a tree or climbed farther to the roof. He had maps on his walls, a poster of spinning souls, a photo of a tattooed Scythian mummy who’d been buried with her horses. He’d dug her up, and said he wished he’d let her be.

The bookshelves were topped by photos of Dee’s children, Maude and David and James, taken in Montana and at all the archaeological digs they’d traveled to with Papa after their own father died. In most of the photos they were holding Papa’s daughter Asta, the youngest. When Asta died young, Papa and Dee raised Jane, too, and Polly envied those photos: Jane at Polly’s age on a French beach, in a Greek temple, riding a camel in a desert. And yet she’d had no mother. Polly knew even then she was lucky, that her parents might be half drunk and at odds half the time, but they were alive, and they did essentially love each other, and they certainly loved her, and they weren’t like Rita.

Everyone told Polly she should help Edmund, but she was already doing so. They moved through their days with an almost British disregard for the chaos around them, barricaded together in one of their rooms or hidden in the arbor or down by the Sound, watching to see what was revealed when the tide moved out. Over the next few months, they were almost always within six feet of each other but never touched, except for two fights. But Polly was fascinated by Edmund’s thick hair, the moles on his forearm, the way his skin would flame in bad moments.