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mind, even the loss that plagued Tess. In late winter, Tess had experienced a medical convergence of appendicitis and bowel obstruction. The emergency surgery had saved her life, but her lifelong condition of synesthesia abandoned her in the aftermath.
    â€œI can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your wonderful multisensory world,” said Rocky. “But remember? Len said that anesthesia does weird stuff to people.” Len was Tess’s ex-husband, a retired surgeon. “It’s a poison, and it ran laps in your bloodstream for five hours while you were in surgery. The docs told you that surgery on your intestines should not change a neurological condition, that your synesthesia could return at any time.” Nothing that Rocky said sounded as consoling as she wanted it to. She hoped that her friend’s Buddhist approach to life might offer a buffer to sadness.
    â€œYou have no idea how rich my multisensory world was. This is like seeing the world through a black veil and constantly wearing thick leather gloves. It’s not your fault. There’s no way for you to know. You’re right. I should try not to catastrophize,” said Tess, unconvincingly.
    Cooper chewed a piece of wood, securing the stick with one large black paw. He trimmed the stick to his satisfaction and delivered it to Rocky.
    â€œYou want me to throw this, big guy?”
    Cooper kept his eye on the stick and slowly backed up, bumping into a low stone wall that serpentined through the yard.
    She heaved the stick as far into the surrounding woods as possible. It bounced off a tree trunk, and Cooper was there before it even hit the ground. The faded prayer flags suddenly fluttered to a burst of sea breeze.
    â€œDealing with tourists takes a special kind of finesse with the human condition that you may not currently possess, despite being a psychologist,” said Tess. “If you want to deal with animals, you have to learn how to deal with humans again. May I remind you that you have lived here since last October, and some of these tourists have been coming back every summer for fifty years? They could show you amazing things about Peaks and about continuity.” Tess stretched her arms over her head, and her slender body moved like beach grass. “You look like a storm is hovering over your head, and I suppose it is. Stray children don’t show up every day.”
    â€œI guess we’re done talking about my job and tourists, aren’t we?” said Tess.
    â€œYes. Did the distraction help?”
    â€œA little,” lied Rocky. Natalie’s voice had already hummed into the marrow of her bones.
    S he did not remember exactly when Bob had first looked at her, dreamy-eyed from sleep, night crust in the corners of his eyes, and said, “I can see a baby of ours.” It was during the year before he died, in the innocent months when Rocky never contemplated life without him, when they woke entangled, talking of children. The idea had pumped low and insistent in her belly. “I can see a baby too,” she had whispered, and she had pulled his hand to cup the soft pouch below her belly button, where a baby would grow if there was one, which there had not been. If Bob hadn’t died, she would be thirty-nine years old, a baby in her arms, and Bob would be an unbearably proud, strutting father at the ripe age of forty-three. Instead, he was dead. He got to be forty-two forever. She was a thirty-nine-year-old widow. And someone out there in the world believed she was Bob’s daughter.

Chapter 3
    R ocky held out for three hours before calling Isaiah to say that she had to talk to him and that she’d meet him at his office in the Public Works Building. She had walked the circumference of the island and ducked into a narrow path called Snake Alley. She moved a lilac branch out of the way and trotted along the dirt path, with Cooper twenty feet ahead of her. Alleys were really