The main point of the day was to hang canvases on the walls of the long upstairs hall, over the mess Rita made before she was taken to the hospital. When Dee drove into the yard, Papa was overseeing two students who’d arrived with a truck. The canvases, which reached the ceiling, would cover most of the splashes Rita left behind and fill the gaps between the bedroom doors. Normally—the wrong word when discussing Rita—Rita painted shapes that looked like origami or sand seen through a microscope, and both the shapes and the canvases were small and precise and lush in a way that reminded Polly of Dee’s Russian or Turkish carpets. But after a quiet week, they heard her wander up and down the hall. No one came out, all of them holding their breath, and when it was finally light they saw wet red hills that looked like a roller coaster and awkward blue trees lurching across the walls like Matisse dancers. Jagged teeth at the top and the bottom might have been mountains or hell. Rita said that random circles, like blobby polka dots, were the planets, listening to the water.

“Jesus, Rita,” said Merle.

“I can’t see real things anymore,” said Rita. She threw one pot of acrylic paint the length of the hall, hit Merle in the head with another, and locked herself in her room. Jane pried Rita out at lunch, but when Rita saw what she’d done she lay on the ruined Persian runner and cried. When she did not stop crying, Merle called her art dealer to see what she might have taken. Jane sat with Rita, and Papa called a doctor, and Dee loaded Edmund and Polly into the car and took them to a matinee—Doctor Zhivago, not childish crap, said Dee. She requested extra butter on the popcorn, whispered explanations of Russian history, and said it was good to leave the others to wait for the little men in white coats. On the way home, Dee thought to explain that this meant doctors, not miniature men.

Dee and Papa didn’t see the point of repainting the hall or replacing the runner if Rita would be coming back. The only thing Rita liked to do, and usually did well, was paint. Thus the tall, white canvases, touching the spattered ceiling. If she was going to throw paint around, said Papa, they might as well catch it. The students carrying the canvases were nervous, but Papa probably made them that way at the best of times, even when he wasn’t warning them to mind every fragile thing they maneuvered past in the cramped house. He loomed, and evidence of the bizarre was all around them in the other paintings and sculptures in the house, spears and bear skulls, the amused old lady, the green parrot on the grapevine at the entrance, telling them to go home.

“What will she draw?” asked Polly.