At Mass General, a doctor used tweezers to pull whiskers of metal from Danny’s neck. The metal had come from the piece of bed frame that hit Danny on its way to imbedding itself in a wall. The doctor told Danny the chunk of metal had come so close to his carotid artery that it should have sheared it in half. He studied the trail of it for another minute or so and told Danny that it had, in fact, missed the artery by roughly one—one thousandth of a millimeter. He informed Danny that this was a statistical aberration on a par with getting hit in the head by a flying cow. He then cautioned him against spending any future time in the kinds of buildings that anarchists were fond of bombing.

A few months after he left the hospital, Danny began his dire love affair with Nora O’Shea. On one of the days of their secret courtship, she kissed the scar on his neck and told him he was blessed.

“If I’m blessed,” he said to her, “what was the thief?”

“Not you.”

This was in a room at the Tidewater Hotel that overlooked the boardwalk of Nantasket Beach in Hull. They’d taken the steamboat from downtown and spent the day at Paragon Park, riding the carousel and the teacups. They ate saltwater taffy and fried clams so hot they had to be waved through the sea breeze before they could be swallowed.

Nora bested him in the shooting gallery. One lucky shot, true, but a bull’s-eye and so it was Danny who was handed the stuffed bear by the smirking park vendor. It was a raggedy thing, its split seams already disgorging pale brown stuffing and sawdust. Later, in their room, she used it to defend herself during a pillow fight, and that was the end of the bear. They swept up the sawdust and the stuffing with their hands. Danny, on his knees, found one of the late bear’s button eyes under the brass bed and placed it in his pocket. He hadn’t intended to keep it beyond that day, but now, over a year later, he rarely left his rooming house without it.

Danny and Nora’s affair had begun in April of 1917, the month the United States entered the war against Germany. It was an unseasonably warm month. Flowers bloomed earlier than predicted; near the end of the month their perfume reached windows high above the streets. Lying together in the smell of flowers and the constant threat of a rain that never fell, as the ships left for Europe, as the patriots rallied in the streets, as a new world seemed to sprout beneath them even quicker than the blooming flowers, Danny knew the relationship was doomed. This was even before he’d learned her bleaker secrets, back when the relationship was in the first pink blush of itself. He felt a helplessness that had refused to leave him since he’d woken on the basement floor of Salutation Street. It wasn’t just Salutation (though that would play a large role in his thoughts for the rest of his life), it was the world. The way it gathered speed with every passing day. The way the faster it went, the less it seemed to be steered by any rudder or guided by any constellation. The way it just continued to sail on, regardless of him.