Alice recognizes voices around her; she can “hear them talking, and…[can] understand what they [are] saying, but she [is] only mildly interested…like eavesdropping on a conversation between strangers about a woman she [doesn’t] know” (227). The voices are concerned that she’s been asleep for eighteen hours; Alice is not concerned and uninterested in the conversation, and she ignores them until she falls asleep again.

In her dream, she is on a beach chair watching her best friend from kindergarten. She sees Lydia and Anne, Alice’s sister, lying together as well; both are about sixteen years old. John asks her if she is ready; she tells him she is scared, but he says “[i]t’s now or never,” straps her into a parasail, and she takes off, watching the “vibrant dots that were her family” below and wondering “if the beautiful and spirited winds would ever bring her back to them” (229).

When she wakes up again, Lydia is next to her. She learns that she has been asleep for two days. Alice tells her that she’ll always love her, but she wonders if her love her resides in her head or her heart (230), coming to the conclusion that her answer as a scientist is different, colder than her answer as a mother, which she prefers.