Now that he remembers, it hurts to look at her directly, and sometimes he even feels a jolt of anger when he sees her. He doesn’t know what it is about this city, the way it swallows up anything kind and good. He still remembers the dust that coated the bakery windows after the accident, thick enough to choke on.

HE THINKS of ways he might tell her, might show her without making her afraid. He tried to come up with the combinations of words, but none of them could ever be enough to match what he feels. Every day he went to school and got hurt, teased. Boys stuffed him into the lockers, and once they locked him in the custodian’s closet and no one found him for hours. When he was ten, his grandmother saw the bruises when he took a bath, and he never went back again. He waited for someone to come look for him, his teacher or someone from the offices, to come to their door, insist that he had to go back. He doesn’t know if his grandmother spoke to the school, or if no one bothered to find out where he had gone. But no one ever came.

That was the year his grandparents needed his help more than ever. His grandfather’s limp had gotten worse; his foot started dragging along the floor. His grandmother rubbed cream that made his nose tingle into his grandfather’s knees. His grandfather kept a bullet in a tin box in his nightstand drawer, would hold it up to Luis, point to his knee. Luis would hold the bullet as his grandfather unfurled the map. Europe, with its small pastel shapes, most of them not even as long as his little finger. Then, they would go through the photographs. His grandfather in a green uniform, his helmet tucked under his arm. His grandfather, face smooth and the hair on his head full and dark, doing exercises on the deck of one of the old hotels, a row of men missing limbs, the ocean in the background, large boats hulking darkly near the horizon. Luis was never sure if the boats were bad or good. If they meant protection and safety or if they were something else to fear.