Susan, still on mouse and therefore not going on solo, isn't doing well. She seems to be shrinking, closing in on herself, as if whatever breath of confidence there is that inspires people to normal size was leaking away. The problem is at its worst whenever she's by herself, and being alone is what the initial period of this program -- the two-day "mouse" phase -- is all about; trying to figure out why you're here, how you might plug yourself in. All the girls say that being a mouse is the toughest part of the entire experience -- sitting on the outside looking in, stewing in your own stuff, wondering over and over again how you ended up here. Susan's alone time is probably even more intense with the rest of the group out on solos, since she can't distract herself by eavesdropping on other conversations, can't lose herself in other lives.

In the end, Josh and the rest of the staff don't press the alone-time part of being a mouse all that hard with Susan, figuring that a time-out is far more critical for someone full of rage than for someone full of nothing. When we talk I notice the slightest glint in her eye, as if conversation meant belonging, and in the belonging, at least a hint of hope. As soon as I leave, though, she crumples again. Heading off with Elizabeth to check on solo sites, I look over my shoulder to see she's crawled back under her wool blanket, trying to sleep away the world.

The staff gathers early in the evening for a dinner of potato soup. Before we eat, Josh and Jonathan, Megan and Elizabeth talk it over and decide to get Susan out of her bag, bring her over to hang out with us for a while. This time she's reluctant, as if she doesn't want to lose the comfort of being unconscious; finally she sits up, wipes the hair out of her face, puts on her glasses, grabs her blanket, and shuffles over and sits down next to the cook fire. Jonathan asks her about the time she spent in the hospital, in the suicide ward, where she was until just a few days ago. "I know all the rules by heart," she says, sounding grateful for the chance to tell her story. "See, they give you this little yellow book, the rules are all in there. Like no sharps," she says, falling fast into the lingo, "nothing you could hurt yourself with. When my mom brought me flowers, she had to put them in a plastic Coke bottle." She tells us how she couldn't go outside, that in fact the only hint of the outside was a screened-in patio in the adult ward, built for smokers. "I didn't spend much time there; it just made me depressed that I couldn't go out. Especially on nice days."

She talks about how the priest from her school came to see her, but thinks the priest from the family church came only because her dad pleaded with him. "He's not the kind to come to a place like that on his own," she says, chaffed about it. "My church cares only about the adults with money, not the kids. It's so stupid. I mean, eventually the kids are going to be the adults with money." She goes on for another 20 minutes, telling us in great detail about bed checks, about the lousy food, about John, the guy who broke the lock on the back door of the suicide ward and no one even knew about it -- how he'd disappear for 30 minutes at a time, go off and meet a buddy out in the street who'd bring him bags of pot.

Late afternoon brings clouds -- cold and gray, like they were spun out of steel; while so far the most they've managed here in the desert is a few drops of rain, from the looks of it they're loosing no end of fresh snow on Thousand Lake Mountain. Just when we're sure the storm is going to get us after all, two big fingers of blue sky crack open in the west to light a band of mist lying along the domes of Capitol Reef, turning them into sun-drenched turrets and ramparts, one minute half hidden and the next rising out of the gray like portals in the mists of Avalon. It's simply incredible, a show of beauty that completely overwhelms us, and before long Megan and Jonathan are running back and forth across the hills around camp, gaining this rise and then that one, trying to see it from every possible angle. In the last of the light a rainbow begins to form barely a half mile away, one end planted at the base of Rabbit Butte and the other just to the east, in the foothills of the Henrys. It comes in stages, a few weak bands at first, swelling to something fat, complete, every color clear, as if it had been finger painted on the sky. Even Susan, who by now has shuffled back to her bag, once more sad and dejected, comes hurtling out from under her tarp. "Wow! That's the biggest rainbow I've ever seen in my life!" she says, grinning for the first time in two days.

Near the end of the show Jonathan, Susan and I stand together in a field of sage, a fresh, earth-scented wind fingering the grasses at our feet. For a long time we're quiet. Then Jonathan begins telling about his life as a professional dancer in Montreal. When Susan asks if he's ever hurt himself, he offers a curious, even outrageous response, telling her how over the years he's learned to equate gravity with love. "Every trip, every stumble, I remind myself that I'm merely falling into the arms of the earth. And so falling is no longer a scary thing." Susan looks a little confused, suspicious at first, as if he might be pulling her leg, but when it's clear he's not, she seems amused, content to roll the thought around in her head for a while, savor it. Watching her, I can't help but think of the incredible transition she's made in the past 72 hours. From the halls of a suicide ward with her little yellow rule book, kept from having even her tape player lest she decide to strangle herself with the cord, staring out through the screens of an old smoker's lounge. And now, watching rainbows firing across some of the biggest skies in America, sleeping under a tree in the dirt, having someone tell her that when gravity is love there's no danger in falling.