They mail-ordered olive oil and fancy perennials. They bought a lot of midrange wine and novels they never read. These sorts of decisions and expenditures set a pattern, and they danced in and out of debt. Their friends all loved food and wine and the occasional joint, memories of hallucinogens, music. They shared books, teacher tips, pink-eye medication, Ariel as an employee. They trusted each other without confiding too much, and when Polly had her accident, all these people helped.

Mostly, though, Ned and Polly worked. When they bought the businesses on the ground floor of the Elite Hotel, they leased the larger bar, which faced the brunt of the town and its tourists, but kept the restaurant and its small entry bar. Until the accident, Ned cooked three days and two nights and worked two bartending shifts, a Monday to mop up from the weekend, a Friday to start it right. Polly had helped on heavy nights, handled most of the specials prep, and dealt with the accounting.

But no more. Polly’s problem after the accident, really one of her largest problems, was an inability to prune what she saw and what she thought, to stop her brain. She was both too easily distracted and too attentive. When she’d gotten out of the hospital, she’d gone on a looking binge. Ned brought her photography and gardening books, stacks of Sotheby’s catalogues he found at the local Goodwill store, piling them everywhere as a hedge against her glitches in language. Polly spent one unnerving afternoon flat on her back in the yard, watching trees encroach on clouds. There hadn’t been much to do but observe.

But she had always looked too hard at things. When she was little, in a decade of assassination and riot and war, people couldn’t always scuttle her away from the news, but everything—books and records and magazines and calendars—played into some grand theory in her brain about lost people. Her dead aunt Evie gradually looked more and more like the woman on the cover of Durrell’s Justine, and her dead grandfather Frank became a doctor in LIFE magazine. Jane had framed an image of a phoenix, a Persian fresco, from a magazine, and hung it in the bathroom—a golden bird, rising in front of a black sun. It didn’t look reborn, it looked as if it wanted to scorch the world, and it became another tile in her mind, so that later when a neighbor had a parrot, she suspected it was a phoenix in disguise. Bird books, art books—the world was filled with strangeness. Gorillas playing flutes on the cover of terrifying Stravinsky albums, Chinese horses and Ray Charles, soldiers dead in the Southeast Asian mud, corteges on television instead of parades or cartoons.