The sky above them is blue and white, and the road twists back toward home. On one side is the cliffs—WATCH FOR FALLING ROCKS is the advice of the signs, although what you’re supposed to do when rocks are tumbling down upon you is beyond Rachel. Also beyond Rachel is the ocean, clattering below them on the other side, the west coast. Soon enough there will be turnoffs to larger, straighter highways, lined consolingly and claustrophobically with boxy stores and some establishments, shabby and shady-looking, that Rachel wouldn’t enter if her life depended on it. Once they hit that highway, the honeymoon will really be over. They will head home, but if they headed east—east and south—they could wind up in Savannah, Georgia, where there is a horse—though surely it is dead—with a very long, floppy neck.

Who knows what this horse is thinking about. The floppy neck is a nightmare, wrinkly and deflated like a gone balloon, giving lie to the comfort that some things can’t happen. Someone grabbed that horse’s neck with both hands and pulled, is what it looked like, downward, and it stretched taffy-like until it just hung there, too much shuddery skin, terrifying. The horse, dead almost certainly now, whatever it is thinking about, could not, it is impossible, be thinking about Rachel Nickels.

But Rachel Nickels has been thinking about the horse, the horse’s great shrivelly neck, all weekend and off and on, mostly on, since she saw this horse when she was eight years old, standing in front of a sweltering hotel before her uncle’s wedding and crying at it. This is how she managed unhappiness, piercing and undismissable, at beautiful Cogwheels. The cliffs, the whole area, have historically inspired artists and other bohemian ne’er-do-wells, and Cogwheels is some shined-up version of that story, each room a little tent, draped over heated granite floors, with buttons to press for more towels and salad and coffee grown someplace noble and fair. There is meditation, up a ways, and an infinity pool, open late. The idea is to walk the meadows and lunch on scallops and make love in the tent as the sun goes down, and they’ve done this. But the sea, spread out beneath them, in its wrinkliness, brought on the thought of the neck, and this terrible horse, galumphing closer and closer across the trampled meadow, to breathe at her and make her feel in her hands its horrifying too-long neck flesh. What could she say? She startled, several times, when her new husband’s arms, thick and hairy as the legs of a monstrous horse, wrapped themselves horsily around her on the futon in the tent. It isn’t as if, Rachel thinks with her palm on the window, she doesn’t know she’s ridiculous. Knowing you’re ridiculous is, yes, half the battle. But the other half is battling, battling with your ridiculous self.