This was during the grape harvest of 1913, when everyone in the village was busy and accidents at the wineries—a hand caught in a crusher, a full crate dropped onto a foot—were so common that the doctor was already working night and day. My right thigh and left shin were broken; I’d fallen twelve feet when the aeroplane scraped me from the canvas hangar. Where the wing hit—I’d raised my right arm—both bones broke between wrist and elbow, and also some ribs, but because my arm had partly shielded my head, the propeller slashed my face at an angle instead of hitting straight on. I couldn’t see because of the bandage over my nicked eyelids, but the doctor said my eyes weren’t damaged and I wasn’t blind. Bluntly, and too soon, he also said that Link had crashed his machine after hitting us, but he was alive and not badly hurt. Raney’s friends, the two Navy lieutenants who’d pulled us up onto the ridgepole, had walked away with cuts and bruises. Raney was dead.

I slept, woke, slept and woke again: and still, Raney was dead. I dreamed about the red silk wings of the first flying machine I ever saw, rising briefly above the frozen lake. I dreamed I was flying a glider, and then that Constantine Boyd, a little boy I knew, had built me my own aeroplane. I dreamed that my father brought me black kid boots, as elegant as Raney’s, magically fitting my swollen feet—and I dreamed about Raney, a large fair girl with straight hair hardly darker than champagne. The first time I’d seen her, she was sitting on the dock of her family’s summer place, talking with her friends as I watched my sisters at the town beach. I’d pretended not to notice her.

Soon the door would open, bang shut, open and open again—Elaine, who was supposed to wait for the twins but seldom did, followed by Agnes and Alice. After crashing around, dropping their books, rushing into the kitchen for something to eat, my younger sisters would tiptoe into what had been the dining room but was now given over to me and the borrowed bed. My feet toward the kitchen, my head against the wall. My broken legs lined up with the windows that opened to the porch, and beside me, on the floor, the heavy glass jar that had once held specimens for my aunt’s biology class. Caroline, Elaine would whisper, are you awake? I’m giving Samuel a leaf. Her job, now, to take care of him. Then Alice would sit on the piano bench and tell me what she’d done at school, and our older sister, Marion, would crash pots in the sink as she waited for our aunt’s arrival to release her. She had work at one of the vineyards and couldn’t stand tending me.