Son of … Jesus, this was the man who’d saved my life. When I burst out of the garage, everybody else was running away, but he came running to help. He either pushed his cart into me or maybe abandoned it, but Chair had hit it. It had gotten caught up in the wheel enough to turn Chair a few inches and slow it down. Then somebody had grabbed hold to bring it to a stop. Maybe this guy. It didn’t matter.

I looked up at him, shook some confusion out of my head, took a deep and delicious breath, and said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

And then the tears came.

10

I was running. I was maintaining a steady pace. I was in the desert; there was nothing around me but sand. The ground was hard, though, and I had no difficulty running. I could feel each breath as it was pushed out of my lungs, then traveled down my body, splitting into two at my waist then coursing through both legs until it escaped from the bottom of my feet. Then I took another breath and the process started again. I had found my rhythm and knew that I would run forever.

It was the old dream.

I knew it was a dream, even when I was in the middle of it. I didn’t care. I considered it a gift from my subconscious. For those seconds or minutes, I had no idea how long it actually lasted, it was real and that was all that mattered. I was running. I could feel my legs working hard. I could feel the cooling breeze against my skin and I ran until sweat dappled my body.

When I woke up, I was sweating.

I spent five days in the hospital. Incredibly, I’d suffered no serious injuries. I was battered and bruised and scraped, but other than ten stitches, some serious painkillers, and substantial loving care from Miss Jennifer Miller, I required only basic medical care. The hardest part were the memories it dredged up. I thought I had buried them. It was a different hospital, in a different place, with different doctors and nurses, but the sounds and the smells were the same. Emotions that I had once fought hard to contain, that I had finally managed to put away a long time ago suddenly reappeared in my mind, bringing with them the familiar fears, the night sweats, the reality of what I had lost.

Mighty Chair had been banged up too, but Y went to work repairing and replacing parts. Originally Chair had been designed to enable me to overcome my new limitations; I called it Viagra for my legs. Most of the work had been done by my nephew, Noah Glenn, a former mechanical engineering student who’d dropped out of Cooper Union to invent in my sister’s garage. I dubbed him Y in deference to James Bond’s Q, as in, “Why aren’t you in school?” But with parts readily available off the shelf, he’d transformered an upscale wheelchair into a mobile environment. He was constantly experimenting and adding features, until only the two of us knew all Mighty Chair’s capabilities. Given this opportunity, he upgraded its technology, adding among other enhancements a rearview camera. Chair was ready to roll when I was ready to leave the hospital. Y did wrap an elastic bandage around one arm, though, just as a reminder.