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water. Our closest neighbors were the Goldsteins.
    In the middle of October, I finally took Kathi Green’s advice and began to walk. These were not the Great Beach Walks I took later, and I came back from even these short outings with my bad hip crying for mercy (and more than once with tears standing in my eyes), but they were steps in the right direction. I was returning from one of these walks when Mrs. Fevereau hit Monica’s dog.
    I was three-quarters of the way home when the Fevereau woman went past me in her ridiculous mustard-colored Hummer. As always, she had her cell phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other; as always she was going too fast. I barely noticed, and I certainly didn’t see Gandalf dash into the street up ahead, concentrating only on Monica, coming down the other side of the street in Full Girl Scout. I was concentrating on my reconstructed hip. As always near the end of my short strolls, this so-called medical marvel felt packed with roughly ten thousand tiny points of broken glass.
    Then tires yowled, and a little girl’s scream joined them: “GANDALF, NO!”
    For a moment I had a clear and unearthly vision of the crane that had almost killed me, the world I’d always lived in suddenly eaten up by a yellow much brighter than Mrs. Fevereau’s Hummer, and black letters floating in it, swelling, getting larger: LINK-BELT .
    Then Gandalf began to scream, too, and the flashback—what Dr. Kamen would have called a recovered memory, I suppose—was gone. Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn’t known dogs could scream.
    I broke into a lurching, crabwise run, pounding the sidewalk with my red crutch. I’m sure it would have appeared ludicrous to an onlooker, but no one was paying any attention to me. Monica Goldstein was kneeling in the middle of the street beside her dog, which lay in front of the Hummer’s high, boxy grille. Her face was white above her forest-green uniform, from which a sash of badges and medals hung. The end of this sash was soaking in a spreading pool of Gandalf’s blood.
    Mrs. Fevereau half-jumped and half-fell from the Hummer’s ridiculously high driver’s seat. Ava Goldstein came running from the front door of the Goldstein house, crying her daughter’s name. Mrs. Goldstein’s blouse was half-buttoned. Her feet were bare.
    â€œDon’t touch him, honey, don’t touch him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She was still holding her cigarette and she puffed nervously at it.
    Monica paid no attention. She stroked Gandalf’s side. The dog screamed again when she did—it was a scream—and Monica covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. She began to shake her head. I didn’t blame her.
    Mrs. Fevereau reached out for the girl, but changed her mind. She took two steps back, leaned against the high side of her Hummer, and looked up at the sky.
    Mrs. Goldstein knelt beside her daughter. “Honey, oh honey please don’t.”
    Gandalf lay in the street, in a pool of his spreading blood, howling. And now I could also remember thesound the crane had made. Not the meep-meep-meep it was supposed to make (its backup warning had been broken), but the juddering stutter of its diesel engine and the sound of its treads eating up the earth.
    â€œGet her inside, Ava,” I said. “Get her in the house.”
    Mrs. Goldstein got an arm around her daughter’s shoulders and urged her up. “Come on, honey. Come inside.”
    â€œNot without Gandalf !” Monica was eleven, and mature for her age, but in those moments she had regressed to three. “Not without my doggy !” Her sash, the last three inches now sodden with blood, thwapped against the side of her skirt and a long line of blood spattered down her calf.
    â€œMonica, go in and call the vet,” I told her. “Say Gandalf’s been hit by a car. Say he has to come right away. I’ll stay with