Rita without Tommy was unmoored, ineffectual. She’d lost her magic, said Dee. A Parisian gallery was interested in her work, and Rita’s agent kept calling, but she only drew tiny shapes with Polly’s pencils at the kitchen table, explaining that a pretty kitelike trail of triangles was actually a school of fish, a chain gang of slaves, the Virgin Mary’s pixie dust. The galleries wanted large oils, Klimt-like abstracts with haunted mosaic faces.

Rita thought she’d lost her magic, too, and wandered around the house mourning it. By the third week, sometime in February, the push was on to give her whatever she wanted, do anything to shut her up. Merle phoned the elder Wards to ask that they send Rita’s painting supplies. A huge box arrived, postage collect, but when Rita opened it, she complained about what was missing. Papa paid to have canvases and new paints delivered. She fiddled with them, and decided that the colors were wrong, and the canvases were too small. More paints, larger canvases. Dee volunteered the greenhouse. They’d only fired the kiln once since fall, anyway.

Your precious bolt-hole, said Jane. Our precious minds, said Dee.

All the conversations Polly couldn’t understand at the time. In the moment—the slush of late winter on the Sound, the dreary, fraught hours at school, the jarring change of having someone out of key like Rita around—she and Edmund moved around the periphery, in their own new world.

At the end of February, Polly answered the door on a rainy day and looked out at two men in uniform. They had dirt on their foreheads, like Rita, who’d asked Dee to drive her to church that morning. On one man’s face, a drop of rain made the ash bleed into a gray rivulet, which the man reached up and smeared as the other talked. Edmund was in the kitchen with Dee, discussing leap years, and Papa and Jane and Merle were in the city, and Rita was painting in the greenhouse.

The soldiers looked as if they’d rather no one was home. Dee told the children to go upstairs, and from the window they watched her lead the soldiers through the yard to Rita.

My father is dead, said Edmund.

But everyone told him no, not quite. Thomas was lost, a word that bounced in any child’s head. It was everything you didn’t want to be. People said missing, too, but lost meant something closer to a dog swept out with the tide or losing the keys to the world.