Polly had friends at school, but she’d been so lonely. She took Edmund up to the attic to show him boxes of strangeness, the broken spinning wheel and treadle sewing machine and old clothes, or to Dee’s greenhouse, with its kiln and wheel, nasturtiums and jasmine, a box of glass bottles that held powders for glazes. They’d watch Dee uncork the bottles, mix potions, spin the potting wheel, light the kiln. In the basement, where Merle kept salamander and frog specimens in an old refrigerator, they’d watch Dee add bleach and soap to the old open washing machine, the water gushing from a sheet when it went through the mangle, which looked like a deadly version of Dee’s pasta-rolling machine. Dee said she’d once been distracted and put her fingers through, but nothing had broken except the tips of her fingers, which exploded and stained the sheets. She laughed, telling them this.

But mostly Edmund and Polly went down to the water. You could see a sliver of the Sound from the porch, even when the grapevines leafed out, and there was a ravine with skunk cabbage, which Polly liked to pretend was some sort of man-eating Venus flytrap. The house was on a rise off of the main road into town, Christian Avenue, and the lots were irregular and the streets were narrow and dirt, following the hill’s contour, more paths than roads. The witch, whose house was wreathed in grapevines, burned wood (rather than children, as Papa joked) for heat and let out her parrot when the weather was nice. The only times she’d spoken to Dee and Papa over the last twenty-five years were to threaten to kill their cats if those cats killed the parrot.

The name on the old woman’s mailbox, in stenciled letters, was Maw.

Edmund thought Polly was of a piece with the place, all of it so much better than life with Rita and his grandparents. The good part of his past was his father, but Tommy Ward had been around for only a few weeks since Edmund was five. By now, Edmund knew this place might save his life. The old magicians, Polly’s beautiful mother, Merle’s essential kindness, wild Lemon, given away by his parents but glued again to the end of his bed, the acrobatic cat arriving every night to lie on his chest—they all made for comfortable chaos, the people and even the walls buffers against his mother. Upstairs, when Rita muttered, the words echoed in the hall, but people were near, and his door locked.

He was sure his father would never come back.