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Macs. My final sketches—the whole procedure minus the gore—were what a medical illustrator does. They would make plain and to scale, in the paper Dr. Joshi would present, what photographs could not show. I did drawings and even animations in the same way for professors to use in teaching. For lawyers, my drawings made injuries specific in court without causing jurors to throw up. As I sketched, though I was being careful, I also was thinking that when I got home I’d find a message blinking on my office phone, telling me that “Doctor” had decided to proceed another way. When I stood up to leave, however, to my shock and his credit, Dr. Joshi extended his hand. He said, “I’m sorry I offended you.”
    I answered, God help me, “Dasvidaniya.”
    Standing at the window before I climbed into bed, I studied the traffic out on Lake Shore Drive, the taillights and headlights strung in a curve like a necklace of bright amber beads. Next year , I thought, I won’t have to put myself through this . My life was going to change. Next year on this date, I would be a different person, putting someone else’s needs before my own. I would be truly grown up.

    My phone brrrr ed and spun again. By the time I got to it, it had stopped.
    The missed call was from Joey, my fiancé.
    Yep, my fiancé.
    I’d become engaged the previous fall to Joey LaVoy, the first kid I saw that day when I struggled to my knees in the snow still clutching my melted vinyl purse to my face. Joey and I would be married in August. Most people with a congenital deformity or a disability who thrive at all do end up with someone, but the someone is usually either another “special” person they met in rehab or is the kind of person who gets off a little on it. It was down to the way Marie had raised me that I was engaged to a bona fide hunk, who also was a firefighter like my dad, and in Chicago too, where only the best of the best worked.
    My aunt was no psychologist. But she knew human types. She was a TV news chick. She could suss out the core of people like a hunting dog. A sassy, hyperactive flyweight, she reminded everyone of Audrey Hepburn, with her Peter Pan haircut and her short black dresses with tights and ballet flats. Marie’s appearance was as deceiving as mine.
    Even now, well into her fifties (how well, she never revealed), my aunt was the kind of woman people thought of as “kittenish,” long after the age when a cat was a cat. In fact, not only was she no kitten, if she’d been a feline, she’d have been the kind with half of one ear torn, the kind that could bristle to twice its size in battle. You could ask anyone who’d been in Marie’s sights, ever so trustingly unaware before she pulled the trigger in an interview. Or you could ask me. I think no one knows Marie better than I do, not even her sisters or her parents or her (kind of many) lovers. When my aunt Marie said that she would never leave me, that night at the hospital, she meant it. And in return she demanded absolutely just about fifty percent more in everything. Giving me a pass would have been the worst thing she could have done, but there’s no instruction manual to tell you that. My aunt flew on instruments: You can’t be as good as; you have to be better than , Marie said. Over and over. Day and night. It was her litany.

    The first thing she did was get me to survivor-type groups—not to learn coping techniques but to see what I could become if I didn’t choose to live life like it was a giant slalom. She was right. What I saw shocked me into fight mode. Mine might well have been that pitiable—but so much simpler—life, the twilight existence some girls endured, living on disability, sewing veils to wear to the mall, never driving, dancing, dating, or drinking. In burn groups and loss groups and body-image groups (I was good for any group), most people ran a continuum from depressed to suicidal. True, many of them adjusted, with time. Those who adjusted