GRADUALLY SHE STARTED TO EMERGE. THE CABIN WAS THE DREAM. SHE WOKE INTO it. She did not know where she was, and even when she knew, she could not make sense of it. She could hold a tin cup, with its shallow and dented bottom, could smell the wood from the stove, the chemical salt of tinned beans, the comforting stink of living bodies, the cedar of the log walls. The air was a breathing thing, and they were in it, and nothing anymore was real.

When she woke, Bullfrog was there, and when she slept he was there, too. Ashley always beside her in their shared cot, two bodies pressed close. Bullfrog was dressed like a person. He had found clothes. He wore jeans, which were several inches too short, but still they swamped his thin legs. A flannel shirt with a torn hem and big black buttons. He gave Mara a flannel shirt, too, and she didn’t know what to do until he buttoned it gently up her chest and straightened the collar and cuffs.

She woke and she was Mara, in strange clothes. She slept and she was her, too.

She didn’t know where she’d been. She knew about Civilization. She knew about Kyle. But for those first days or weeks in the cabin she was somewhere else, too, a place she could never describe. She didn’t know if she’d ever go there again, or if she would recognize it if she did. She didn’t know if she would choose to, given a choice.

She woke and it was raining. Pouring rain, rain like she’d never heard, pounding the tin shell of the roof like they were inside a drum. It rained and rained and everything was noise, and water crept through cracks between the logs, and still they were dry, in a cabin, in a real cabin like people should be.

Mara washed her face in cool water from a bucket. Days later, when she was stronger, she washed her hair with lake water warmed on the stove. She could not push her fingers through her hair. It was a solid object. But it dried soft, and fell into strands as it dried. She gathered the empty cans strewn around their cots and put them in a wooden box. The counter was covered with mouse droppings, and these she brushed to the floor with a wool sock she’d found between the blankets, and she had rarely seen a surface so flat or smooth.

She touched the items on the shelves, delicately, like they were artifacts in a museum. A stack of dusty books, and a notebook, which was empty. Arrows. A photo, unframed, of a woman and a boy. She opened a toolbox under the bed and found packets of seeds. She closed it tightly, slid it back into the dark.

Sometimes, Mara went outside and stood in the tall grass. Looked at the trees above her, and the emptiness of the lake. Walls of bushes, prickly, with berries just starting to blush. All those branches reaching toward the sky. Then she came in and went back to sleep.