Tia Rosita was right, she thought. Ree-lif.

Rosita collected her prescription twice a month. Twice a month, Teresa took one off the top. Rosita did not seem to notice the thievery, or if she did, she did not suspect Teresa. And Teresa did not dare take more, for fear of drawing attention to herself.

Still, she lived for these moments. The pills seemed to detonate inside her, tiny explosions of purity and peace. Words like loneliness and loss began to make sense to her; she realized for the first time that they might not be permanent or universal.

When she was sixteen one of the boys she had come to think of as her brother, a rangy twenty-year-old named Ruy, took her out to the empty margin of the tidal dam and showed her a fistful of pink-and-yellow spansules—the same kind Rosita got from the clinic.

She could not help herself. She grabbed. Ruy pulled his hand away, laughing; a cloud of sea gulls whirled up from the concrete pilings. “Right,” he said. “I thought so.”

She stared covetously at his clenched fist. “You can get those?”

“Many as I want.”

“Can I buy them?”

“Acaso.” He shrugged loftily. Maybe.

“How much?”

“How much you got?”

She had nothing. She had been going to the charity school up in the North Floats, where her English teacher called her “a good pupil” and her art instructor called her “talented.” But she didn’t care about the school. She could quit, she thought, get a job, get some money… acaso.

“When you do,” Ruy said—walking away, heartbreakingly, with the pills still imprisoned in his hand— “then you talk to me.”

But Rosita, older and more gnarled but no less vigilant, wouldn’t let her leave school. “What kind of job are you going to get? Be a whore down by the mainland, like your sister Livia?” She shook her head. “Public Works is pulling out of this place, you know. Too many uncertified people. No documents, no green cards, no property deeds. You’re lucky you have a school. Maybe won’t have one much longer, you think about that?”

But it was Rosita’s anger and not any practical consideration that deterred her. She stayed in school, maintained her habit, and ignored Ruy when he taunted her with his apparently endless supply of drugs. Until, one day, her art instructor complimented her on a collage she had assembled. She had a real talent, he said. She could go somewhere with it.

It was a strange idea. She enjoyed putting together collages and sculptures, it was true; sometimes it felt almost as good as the pills made her feel. It was almost as if someone else were doing the work with her hands, some part of her she had lost in the fire, maybe, making its presence felt. She would abandon herself to the work and find that hours had passed: it was a good feeling.

She had not thought of making money with it. It looked like an outside chance. Still, she packed a bag lunch one Sunday and hiked along the pontoon bridges to the mainland, to the art galleries up the coastal highway. The mainland frightened her. She was not accustomed to the roaring of trucks and automobiles; in the Floats you saw mostly motor launches, and those only in the big canals. And there was the eerie solidity of the ground beneath her feet, rock and sand and gravel wherever she turned.

She examined the artwork offered for sale in these landlocked places. Crystal paintings, junk sculptures, polished soapstone. Most of it had come from the Floats and was considered—she inferred from the way people spoke —a kind of folk art. Some of the pieces were very good and some were not, but she realized with a degree of surprise that her art instructor had been right—there was nothing here beyond her talents. She lacked the tools to tackle some of these projects, but the work she had done with scrap metal salvaged from the dumpboats was as good as at least half of what she had seen that day. Possibilities here, she thought.

Two weeks later she carried three small pieces across the pontoon and chain-link bridges to a place called Arts by the Sea. She showed them to the owner, a woman only slightly younger than Rosita. The woman was named Mrs. Whitney, and she was skeptical at first, but then—as Teresa unwrapped the oilcloth from her work—impressed. Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “Such mature work!” She added, “For someone your age.”

“You’ll buy it?” Teresa asked.

“We sell on commission. But I can offer you an advance.”

It was, Teresa learned later, a pittance, a token payment; but at the time it was more money than she had seen in one place.

She took it to Ruy and offered him half of it. He gave her enough pills to fill up both her cupped hands. That night she took two.

Ree-lif. It flowed through her like a river. She rationed herself to one a night, to make them last, and worked in her spare time on another sculpture for Mrs. Whitney. Mrs. Whitney paid her almost double for it, and that was good; but Ruy’s prices had begun to escalate too. She paid but she hated him for it. Ruy had become suddenly important to her, and she acquired the habit of observing him. He moved down the pontoon alleys swaggering, his bony hips thrust forward. “Muy macho,” Rosita always said when he struck these poses at home, but out here there was no one to deflate him. He hung around with his similarly hipshot friends by the graffiti-covered tidal dam; she had seen him dealing pills there. One afternoon—nursing her hatred— she cut classes and followed him halfway to the mainland, to a tiny pontoon shack listing in the North Floats, a gasoline pump gushing out bilge into the dirty canal beside it. Ruy went in with his hand on his wallet and came out clutching a fat paper bag.

She summoned up all her courage and, when she was certain Ruy was truly gone, knocked at the door of the shack.

The man who answered was old, thin, hollow-looking. He peered at her a long time—her mouth was too dry to speak—and said at last, “What the fuck do you want?”

“Pills,” she said, panicking.

“Pills! What makes you think I got pills?”

“Ruy,” she said desperately. “Ruy is my brother.”

His expression softened. “Well,” he said. “Ruy’s little sister cutting out the middleman.” He nodded. “Ruy’d be pissed off, I bet, if he knew you were here.”

“I can pay,” she said.

“Tell me what you want.”

She described the pink-and-yellow spansules.

“Yeah,” he said. “If that’s what you want. It’s a waste of money, though, you ask my opinion.” He rummaged in a drawer in an old desk at the back of his single precariously listing room; she watched from the doorway. “You might like these better.”

They were small black-coated pills in a paper envelope, maybe a hundred in all. Teresa regarded them dubiously. “Are they the same?”

“The same only more so. Not just pain pills, hm? Happy pills.”

Flustered, she gave him her money. It occurred to her during the long walk back that she might have made a fool’s bargain, the pills might be coated sugar. Or worse. That night, in bed, she was not sure whether she should try even one. What if they were toxic? What if she died?

But she had run out of Ruy’s spansules and she dared not pilfer more of Rosita’s. The need overcame her reluctance; she swallowed a black pill hastily.

Pleasure spread out from the pit of her stomach. It was, gradually and then overwhelmingly, everything she could have wanted: the satisfaction of a successful piece of artwork, the satisfaction that came from being loved, the satisfaction—this perhaps the best of all—that came from forgetting. Afloat on her mattress, rocking in the slow swell, she might have been the only person in the world. She loved the new pills, she thought. They were better. Yes. And one was enough. At least at first.

She lived happily with these arrangements for months, selling enough work to Mrs. Whitney to keep her supply up, idling through the days—she had begun to take a pill each morning too—as if they were hours. She felt she could have continued this way indefinitely if it were not for Ruy, who had been cheated out of his immense profit on the cheap pink-and-yellow spansules and who had discovered her arrangement with his supplier. He retaliated by leading Rosita to Teresa’s pill box, concealed behind a broken floorboard under the bed. Tia abuela Rosita was both angry and hurt, and made a demonstration of washing the pills down the Public Works conduit one by one. Teresa was so shocked to see her store of happiness flushed away that she displayed no emotion, merely packed her things, took what remained of her gallery money, and left.