Most days in the summer were like this, as long as Rita was away or quiet: Jane and Merle would go to classes and work, and the very young and the very old, left in the house together, would swim around each other. For Dee, Polly and Edmund would pull weeds from the brick path, soften her clay with their small, hot hands, drift down the path toward the Sound during the daily nap. They took turns holding Lemon, who was strong enough to drag them. After Edmund first moved in, he spent weeks bringing creatures and plants up for identification: sea lettuce, knotted wrack, stone hair, periwinkles, surf clams, bloodworms. He did not try to catch willets and yellowlegs. He would ask questions—why was crab blood blue, how did clams mate—and return the animals to their exact place. Merle gave intricate explanations and would sometimes try to keep a sample for his classes, which bothered Edmund. Papa, who had grown up near a northern ocean, gave more convincing answers. Dee said he made most of it up, but Polly couldn’t imagine that face lying.

Today was windy, and it was cooler down by the water, almost low tide. They popped jellyfish and seaweed pods, smacked mussels open for pearls. They waded for a while before losing the point again. They poked skunk cabbage until they caught the smell and saved a broken mussel with a shell bluer than most. But back up at the house, when they tried painting, the colors weren’t right—the olive brown they used for kelp didn’t shine, and the great curling water, green and blue and white, defeated their best attempt at translucence. They resorted to the bestiary, but their blue whale looked like a deflated balloon, ribbed with stretch marks, and the other sea creatures they tried to draw were all a flat gray, blobs that looked deader than rocks. In frustration, Polly veered toward the blues of the sky, and tried to draw the witch’s green parrot, the one that May the cat wanted to kill. But this parrot’s existence meant that somewhere there should be a tree to land on, tigers and snakes and elephants that would need grass and rivers and mountains to cross.

The whole wayward notion of time, usually pleasant or invisible, became oppressive.

“My mother will know how to do it,” said Edmund, for the first time in his life.

They wandered away from the scroll, ate the sandwiches Dee left for them, and headed toward different corners of the house. It didn’t do to spend too much time together.