It was past lights out when I got home. It’s strange to remember I never considered driving off toward anywhere else. I’d come to the family in search of a more essential life, and this night, the flight to town and back, the out-of-body urgency, was another sign that Dice could offer exactly what I sought. Before Dice, I never could have convinced a pharmacist to give me free drugs. I never could have bent someone else to my will.

Four times, I missed the turnoff for the dirt road, turning at the Exxon too far west and the Burger King too far east. This comforted me. Even if Lindsay and Isaac tried, I thought, they would not be able to find me. We were so far off the grid.

I parked Pear’s car by the outhouse. As I began the uphill walk to the long house, I considered how to get the orange bottles to Pear. I didn’t want to knock on Dice’s door. I stood there a moment, imagining Queen in a blur of possible states, bleeding, dying, sleeping, on the other side. I knocked. It was Maybell who opened the door a crack.

“How’s Queen?” I said, scrambling.

“Our life is ever on the wing,” said Maybell. A line from the songbook.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Pear said, opening the door wider. “Excuse me. Harmony said she would help me with the bread,” Pear said offhandedly, a weak explanation, I thought. Maybell inspected me with sour eyes.

In the kitchen, Pear squinted at the pills and nodded. She twisted the cap off one, took a pill, and then inserted it into the heel of her bread. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “You know that already.” What would Dice do if he found the pills? At that time, I most feared a scolding—in my heart I did not expect any other kind of punishment. Yet even a scolding frightened me. Words seemed to have a different weight here. I’d fallen during the love prayer: I could no longer trust my body.

That evening I lay awake in a top bunk, on one of the three mattresses made from corn husks. I strained to hear anything from Dice’s room, where Queen lay, but the sound of the cicadas and katydids and frogs covered everything. To me their sound, vast and tuneless, was the sound of the cooperating bacteria that Dice said were four billion years old. When we’re as old as bacteria . . . we will be as radically interdependent as they are. Queen’s antibiotics were distorting the bacteria’s evolution, helping create resistant diseases humanity was not prepared for.

I wondered if Dice would have let Queen die. I wondered if he wanted her to die, the way I wondered about Cassie.