Every morning they made breakfast. Pancakes and bacon or Denver omelets, Izzy dicing bell peppers while Martha whisked the eggs. Izzy still wasn’t much of an eater, she seemed even thinner than when they’d first met, and Martha thought including her in the ritual might bring her along. Nothing made Martha hungrier than cooking. She hoped the feeling was contagious.

They made breakfast, they made lunch. Martha tried to create patterns of normalcy. They started a garden behind the trailer, working the hard ground. Spades and shovels, the thin shade of a patio umbrella.

“What grows out here?” Izzy asked.

Martha had a gardening book she’d bought at a garage sale in town. Desert Abundance. She put Izzy in charge of research, figuring out what they should plant.

“Something colorful,” Martha said. “Let’s brighten the place up.”

That’s what they talked about while they worked and cooked—Izzy’s discoveries from the book. Martha had so many questions, she wanted to know how Izzy felt about everything that had happened, but she knew she couldn’t push.

“California poppies,” Izzy said, turning a page. “Evening primrose.”

They made lunch, they made dinner. Martha took some time off from work. She called Sam and told him not to come over, not yet. She didn’t think Izzy was ready to meet anyone new.

Tanner would be out of prison soon, too, if he wasn’t already. Martha felt him somewhere out there, then stopped herself. That wasn’t a feeling. That was the madness of the room, phantom pain.

At night Izzy slept restlessly, as if running from danger. Martha wrapped Izzy in her arms, holding her close.

They drove into town for groceries and when Martha turned the corner of the cereal aisle, Izzy was gone. Martha hustled her cart to the end of the aisle and up the next and then left it and ran through the store, frantic, calling Izzy’s name. Out on the sidewalk, Martha finally found her in front of the thrift shop next door, looking at something in the window. It was a movie camera, a small black box with a squat little lens and a metal crank.

“You have to let me know if you go somewhere,” Martha said, breathing hard, her body heavy with the adrenaline crash.

Izzy took her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just never seen one like that.”

Martha talked the shop’s owner down on the price, even got her to throw in a couple of boxes of film. Izzy loaded the camera in the restroom and on the drive home she turned the crank and began shooting out the window. Within seconds she stopped. Martha heard it, too. The sound of the camera whirring was the same as that other woman’s camera back in the room. It made her heart rise into her throat. She looked at Izzy, who was a little pale now, swallowing hard. Then Martha popped a cigarette and perched her elbow on the window and said, “Film me driving, like Steve McQueen.” She gave her best hard-assed squint out the windshield. Izzy smiled and said, “Ali MacGraw,” and started shooting again.

They expanded the garden. The work felt good, solid and physical. Sometimes Martha looked up from digging to see Izzy filming her with the camera or shooting a close-up of a seed dropping into a hole or a bird stepping lightly along the edge of the trailer’s roof. At night they sat out on a pair of metal patio chairs and Izzy arranged candles to give enough light for the lens to pick up Martha’s face. It seemed Izzy was more comfortable talking from behind the camera. She told Martha about the detention center, about her mother and father, about a friend named Vince, whom Izzy missed. She wondered where he was now, how his life had changed over the past two years. And sometimes they talked about the room, stepping lightly like those birds on the roof.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Izzy said one night, lowering the camera to her lap. “Why I attacked Miss Shepard. Why I cut her face. I was so angry.”

In the unsteady candlelight, Izzy turned the camera’s lens, slowly, something to do with her hands. Each turn made a soft click, the lens locking into place and coming loose again.

“I was going to kill her,” Izzy said.

“But you didn’t.”

“But I was going to. I’ll never forget that feeling. Like finally falling over an edge. That’s what scared me the most.”

Martha remembered that feeling when Danny attacked the college boys, her own unleashed desire to see them punished for their intrusion. She knew that edge, but now she understood it was possible to step back.

“You can leave that anger behind,” Martha said. She reached over and took Izzy’s hand. “I left it back in the room. You don’t have to carry it with you.”

“Do you ever think about him?” Izzy asked. “Tanner? I hear him all the time. I turn and can’t believe he’s not there.”

“Look at me.” Martha waited for Izzy’s eyes. “You’re here now. We’re here. We’re not back there, we are never going back there. When you feel it, just grab something.” She squeezed Izzy’s hand. “Your camera or me or a handful of dirt.”

Izzy squeezed back, nodding, but Martha recognized that familiar wavering in her eyes. Izzy was still partly there, in the room with Tanner, in an art gallery in Los Angeles, a weapon in her hand, Jess Shepard on the floor at her feet. She was scattered across time, and Martha wasn’t sure how to help pull her back together.