At the time, she herself was immersed in a deep pool of calm. She’d spent the day as a guide, overseeing Alice and Paulette while they tripped in the lifeguard tower, and that had given her a kind of satisfaction and clarity that made her feel as if all this—the project, their mission—was the solidest foundation for human understanding ever devised. And good. Purely good. If she’d ever had doubts, she had them no more. Both women had gone deep and never experienced any sort of crisis that couldn’t be cured by a gentle roll in the waves or the embrace of the sun, though at one point Paulette had become agitated by the shore crabs when she went down to dip her feet in the surf and saw them for what they were—monsters, that is, flesh-eating monsters—but that passed and she calmed down and slipped into an ecstatic state that lasted out the day.

After dinner Joanie went out to sit by the pool with Corey, trying to give him a little attention. He was fine, she kept telling herself, having the time of his life with the other kids, running from one thing to the other, catching fish, roaming the jungle, setting up an aquarium in a five-gallon pickle jar Carlos had given him and falling off to sleep each night as if he’d run a marathon, but still she felt the smallest nagging thread of guilt. And so she was sitting with him, drink in hand, the sun setting behind them, just listening to what he had to say.

“Did you see what I caught today?” he asked. He was drinking a Soldado de Chocolate, a kind of Mexican Yoo-hoo, and his lips were dark with the residue.

“No, what?”

“It’s in the aquarium.” A week earlier he’d hauled the pickle jar across the gleaming tile floor and positioned it on the big table in the center of the patio where everyone could admire it, and ever since he’d devoted himself to maintaining its contents, scraping the algae off the glass the minute it appeared, changing the water, adding or deleting specimens depending on what wound up in his net that day. “I mean, didn’t you look?”

She shook her head. “I was guiding today.”

And now—not for the first time—he asked what that was like, guiding, and if anybody had flipped out. “It was Alice, right? And Paulette?”

“Nobody flipped out,” she said, “if that’s what you want to call it. It was peaceful, beautiful, really.”

He was silent a moment, swirling a dark fan of liquid round the bottom of the bottle. “What I don’t get is why you have to do it at all. Dad keeps saying it’s for research, so you can tell if the pills are going to help crazy people get better, right?”