The doctors told me I was lucky to be alive, but that I would never walk again.
T-11 complete.
I remember the number because it was the only thing in that room that didn’t seem to be lying to me.
I was still in the hospital, trying to come to terms with my new life, when my wife, Katherine, placed Amelia into my arms, picked up her suitcase, and said:Three years of physical therapy, twice a week, in a clinic that smelled of rubber mats and other people’s hope, and in year three the money ran out on the same afternoon the doctor stopped saying “some patients.”
I remember driving home — Ray drove; Ray always drove — and Greta, six by then, asking from the back seat if I was sad, and me saying no, and Greta saying, “Okay, but your face is.”
That night I built the first reacher.
