“Even with a positive prognosis, Helen lived in fear of this unseen thing: a fleck of DNA washed downriver for generations, insignificant on its own, but attached to the underbrush of her shores, a red tide.”

“She realized how affected she had been by the scene of the two police officers on the front porch the night her mother died. It was as if everything that came after had to pass through that moment.”

“The singing grew louder. The regulars were lost in a moment that didn’t include Helen. She was no longer at the bar. Inside the dark hold of The Shanty that night, it was 1975, and she was home, lying in bed in a pink nightgown. Down the road, the regulars were drinking, falling in love, and singing to a song on the radio about cars and highways and being born to run.”

“She wasn’t sure what it meant, but it made her think only about the cancer inside her, that heretic bean lodged in her lung from which her untimely death was growing.”

“Looking back, she thought how reckless it is to make life-changing decisions still caught up in the commotion of youth, with no sense of what your future self might regret. It was years before she realized that, and by then it was too late.”

“Even if an earthquake were to strike at that moment, and the ground open up, and the dance floor fall into the sewers and the crumbling crust beneath the streets, Helen felt as if that moment might live on, maybe as an impressionistic painting in the home of someone in Pacific Heights who has a party one night where a guest notices the picture on the wall—an ecstatic, undulating mix of bodies harmonized, bringing forth a gale of color.”