“I’ve no idea,” said Papa. “Maybe the real things she was upset about. What would you draw?”

“A map of the world,” said Edmund, who only ever drew maps.

“Go practice on the sidewalk,” said Papa. “Make sure you add some live things.”

They used the stubs of Rita’s pastels, but it was hot, and inchworms dropped from the dogwood. Polly made her continents too large, Edmund too small. He used a squirt gun to clean away their mistakes, which meant a wait—not long at all, because of the heat—while the sidewalk dried. Their minds wandered and they whined their way into the kitchen, where Dee worked on a tomato sauce, rolling back and forth between the table and the stove with the rolling stool she’d begun to use. Polly sensed her lack of patience, but it was so, so hot outside, and Papa finally found a scroll, an actual stretch of uncut soft paper—he had every sort of object in his office—and stretched it out on the bumpy table on the front porch. He showed them drawings in an old bestiary and a children’s atlas with bright trains flying over mountains.

Polly and Edmund ridiculed the atlas, but they were doing the same childish thing. How could they show the north and south poles, the sky and the water and the stuff boiling under the rocks, all on the same page? The bestiary showed creatures that had never existed, leopard women and sea monsters and single-eyed men. Papa said to try their best and disappeared with Dee for their daily nap in the bedroom at the end of the hall. When Merle and Jane were away, and Polly ran down to Dee and Papa’s room after a nightmare, she would watch them for a moment before she woke them, and wonder why they looked so young in the dark, until they opened their eyes and let her climb in. We’ll give you a good dream, they’d say. Don’t worry anymore.