BUT HERE I’M getting ahead of myself, or behind myself: I was in bed. My father was absent, as always. Upstairs our mother’s bed creaked; she’d been an invalid since the twins were born, nearly half my life. For a long time Aunt Henrietta had come to help in the late afternoons, after she finished teaching school; that was when she’d first brought us Samuel, or the first Samuel, so deftly swapping the quick for the dead over time that we could believe—Agnes and Alice still believed—he was a single, remarkably long-lived snail. Eventually Marion and I had taken over most of the housework. Now, while I waited for time to pass and the bone fragments to knit themselves to each other, the cooking and cleaning had fallen back on Marion, who was furious with me. Femur, the bone in my thigh. Tibia, the bone in my shin; ulna and radius in my arm. In my bed in the dining room I heard the doors open and close and felt a strip of shadow over my throat: my aunt, who always seemed to smell like a fern, stretching a cool hand down to where the stitches itched and pulled.

She’d brought me not schoolwork, which I could make up later, but Amundsen’s account of his expedition to the South Pole, which she’d extravagantly purchased so she could read to me for a couple of hours every afternoon. The volumes were blue, she said. Gilded edges, lots of maps and photographs; before long I’d see them for myself. Here I am, the first chapter began, sitting in the shade of palms, surrounded by the most wonderful vegetation, enjoying the most magnificent fruits, and writing—the history of the South Pole! Which meant that Amundsen knew, as I now had to learn, the secret of sending his imagination to one place while his body was someplace else. One circumstance has followed on the heels of another, and everything has turned out so entirely different from what I had imagined . . .

On the tenth day after the accident, the doctor came, re-dressed the wound on my head, tended the stitches on my face, and then unwrapped my eyes. First warmth, then light: then—everything. The sky, the clouds, the glinting lake, Samuel tucked beside a fern, my hands and legs—I turned away from the casts—the sky! Almost at once my eyes began to itch, burn, drip tears, but the doctor said this was normal, I’d be sensitive to light for a while.

Marion was out and Aunt Henrietta was still at school, but my mother returned after the doctor left. Her face, which I was so glad to see, was more deeply lined than I remembered, and she reached over and smoothed the bandage on my head when I asked her for a mirror.

“You could wait,” she said. “There’s no hurry.”

“Now,” I said.