Now, though, pictures sometimes scrolled around her even when her eyes were shut—a ribbon of color and random objects, usually beautiful but sometimes terrifying—and if she concentrated on a painting or photograph, she sometimes went inside of it, the way she had as a child. She saw the leaves in a van Gogh orchard and the graying wounded hands and feet of Holbein’s long strange Christ. When Vinnie, an amputee from a forest fire–fighting accident in college, tested a new, unclad prosthesis, Polly was as fascinated as the children by the titanium and the hinges. She felt as if her eyes could enter any surface: the ground, the river, closed curtains, flesh. Sam ripped a hole in his leg in late May, and Polly, remembering another little boy, could not stop seeing his interior after he was stitched closed again.

Ariel, lost, would have the run of Polly’s mind.

Few people seemed to believe her when she described this issue, certainly not her mimsy neuropsychiatrist, and so Polly was pleased when she was weirdly good at finding morels that spring in the river bottomland, the cream-colored honeycombs glowing up when you were right above them. Polly was the only one who found dozens, and the only one who didn’t trip over submerged branches. She wanted to stay for hours, getting sunburnt, getting lost. Josie and Harry, Vinnie and Nora, Ned and Ariel and Drake and the kids tagged after, everyone getting a little drunk. Only Graham hung back and sat by the river, resentful and embarrassed, stealing looks at Ariel, her red-gold hair flashing through the trees.

When Polly went in for her first full cognitive testing, six weeks after the accident, the woman who administered the test wore a tight black T-shirt with black jeans and black lace fingerless gloves. The Testgiver (capitalized and one word in the leaflet Polly was given) was young, but she had gray streaks in her hair and her arms were doughy and profoundly pale, the pale of no sun, ever. Polly watched her and tried to imagine the life behind all this—the gloves, no sunlight, the CBGB look coupled with a face that couldn’t love music, or drugs, or anything wayward on the planet.

The experience was innately hostile. When Polly made stupid, self-disparaging jokes, the woman took notes. When Polly misunderstood instructions, the woman said, “No need to be defensive.” Four hours of general knowledge, definitions, story problems, arranging blocks, repeating series of words and numbers, looking at an image for fifteen seconds before drawing it from memory. Polly’s reaction time was measured, and she was given a hundred-question yes-or-no psychological test: Do your parents like your siblings better than you? Do you use dirty talk sometimes? Are you afraid of the dark? Do you believe in evil?