“No. I did crawl when I was very small, but my legs were so weak there was no serious effort to make me stand, thank God. But I did my time in PT. It’s unavoidable. My PT couldn’t do anything for me, really, so she got obsessed with the fact that my knee tendons were drawing up and my legs wouldn’t straighten. She was a German woman. ‘Schtraighten your lecks,’ she’d say, ‘or ze kontraackchure vill get vorse.’ I complained about her so much that my ma started referring to her as the Bitch of Buchenwald. ‘How’d you get along with the Bitch of Buchenwald today?’ she’d ask. One day I asked her, ‘What’s Buchenwald?’ She told me all about Hitler, the Jews, the camps, the ovens, and the medical experiments. It blew me away. I was only about eight years old, and I had no idea. Then I asked, ‘Mama, what’s a bitch?’”

I snort; it’s a funny story, whether true or not. But Sara isn’t laughing. She leans forward and shifts her weight from one elbow to the other.

“You know, my mother made light of it, but all that yanking and pulling really hurt. And what’s really weird is that I went through it for about two years of my life and no one asked why. The Bitch never explained why I needed to have straight legs. When they started talking about surgery to cut my tendons, the light finally dawned on my parents and I got out of PT for good. Ze kontraackchure got vorse, as predicted, but it didn’t matter at all. So I sleep with pillows under my knees!”

Sara’s cot creaks as I pull my feet up on the mattress. I wrap my arms around my suntanned knees, not quite concealing the thin, pale lines where my legs were cut to release drawn-up tendons.

Sara is waiting for me to say something, but I don’t know what to say. My parents saved that article about me walking to celebrate a brief triumph; all these years it has remained in my scrapbook as a permanent reminder of my only real failure, a disappointment none of us wanted to talk about.

Can a wheelchair be a choice, and not a failure? I’m not sure. Maybe Sara was abused by her physical therapist; surely for most people it makes sense to try to become as normal as possible. But what if normal isn’t the only way to be? It’s an oddly thrilling idea, but I’m not ready to put it into words.

So I ask, “Do you have any pic-tures?”

“Just one.” She opens her book and takes out a photograph she’s using for a bookmark. “Here we are. Grandmother’s porch on Thanksgiving.”

The big house with white columns looks like something from Gone With the Wind. Margie gasps.

“We have the trappings of privilege because my mother is from the landed class. But not lots of cash.”