At Easter, Polly overboiled eggs and spilled dye everywhere, but she worked on her attitude and was reassured by the idea that she’d always been a flake. She’d put a tray of something in the oven, sit down to work at the dining room table, remember she needed to move the sprinkler, and head outside. Once there—sometimes forgetting the sprinkler mission—she’d start looking at her plum tree for evidence of blossoms, and she’d keep doing this until the smoke detectors rang and smoke billowed through the windows she’d forgotten to shut. The worst moment of confusion came during her thirty-year-old sister Millie’s visit, when Polly looked down at the child next to her on the hospital bed—Helen—and wondered how Millie could be in two places. The second worst came when Polly called Sam “Edmund,” and everyone left the room in tears.

Polly painted half of her tiny study dark blue before losing interest. Sometimes she sat at intersections for minutes, and sometimes she power merged. She’d nearly backed over an elderly woman in the Costco parking lot in late May. Vinnie Susak, Ned’s former law partner, gaped through the window at Peake’s as Polly accelerated through a stop sign into oncoming traffic a week later. That was it for the car for a while.

Polly had ocular migraines for the first time in her life—jewel-like, kaleidoscope patterns that got in the way of reading but didn’t hurt—and she’d watch the show spread from a hard diamond to a fractal whirligig. At other times, she’d drop into a dream, a film instead of a painting, memories moving in her brain like a current. During these spells—she liked the Victorian weirdness of the word better than seizures—she’d see wonderful or horrible things, true moments and others that couldn’t possibly have happened. She fell off the end of the picnic table on May Day after a single glass of wine, having simply lost any sense of where her body was, but usually she’d just freeze in place. “Just give her a minute,” said Ned, now used to watching his wife dream with her eyes open. Sometimes she could hear him say it, even if she couldn’t speak. “She’ll come right back.”

No one anticipated any sort of brain cell death spiral; the doctors said these small, mostly peaceful pauses should become less frequent. Polly needed a few months to recover and should ideally avoid future impacts. Some glitches might persist, executive function issues. Her first impulse would no longer be her best.