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    set in, but it was as if the ride itself wouldn’t set me free. We reached the top of the climb, and I felt it—the panic that comes right before a dead drop, the kind that I imagine pilots sense when a plane has gone into a nosedive.
    “Please,” I shouted to the clowns below. “Please, pull the lever and make it stop!” But all I heard was merry-go-round music, oompa-loompaing in the background, my voice bouncing off it and echoing back. And besides, it was already too late. We’d crossed the hump of the hill, and gravity was already pulling us down. I tried to grab hold of the clown pressed up to my right, but my grip went right through him, like he was an apparition and bore no weight. The car was flying, and I was going with it. We went fast, faster, faster still until we tore off the track, skidding against the paved grounds and leaving smoke in our wake. We landed on a mound of sand, a flattened beach in the middle of the park, and though I should have felt relief, what I felt was only increasing panic. Because all at once, like a tentacle around my calves, a sucking force pulled me down, deeper, deeper until I was in the sand up to my thighs. I frantically flailed over crimson clown wigs, oversized buttons, and suffocating cotton candy, but no matter how much I willed it to be so, I couldn’t gain solid footing. And I couldn’t make it stop. Just as I was about to give up, just as I was about to surrender to my fate, a hand reached out and pulled me up. I tried to see who it was, see who saved me, but all I saw was a faceless shadow, and then, even that was gone.
    i w o k e u p on my couch with the ladies from The View yammer-ing in the background, and moved my hand up to feel my pulse nearly beating through my neck. Gingerly, I swung my legs to the The Department of Lost & Found
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    floor, wiped the film of sweat off my forehead, and reached for my Nikes. The waves of nausea had mostly passed, at least for this week and this round, so I propelled myself out the door. Dr. Chin had urged me to be kind to my body, not to push it, but also to keep it vibrant, let it know that it was still living. My four-mile-run mornings were out, but walking, breathing in the throbbing vitality of the city all around me, I could do.
    October had set in, and it had always been my favorite month: the one where the air still captured the warmth of the previous season but also hung with the promise of the fall chill. When the light on Seventy-third Street turned red, I stopped and nuzzled the wet nose of a black lab standing beside me with his owner, and in exchange, he lapped my face in a warm bath. I wiped down my cheeks and smiled. As I cut over to Central Park, the sun bounced off the crimson and golden leaves, and other than the passing dog-walker, it was just me, the nutmeg-scented air, and the autumn hues.
    When Jake first moved in with me, we took lingering walks each weekend. It was our thing. Some couples play poker, some love to bowl; we loved to explore the park like we might have when we were nine: It was our private playground. We’d stumble over the roots in the Rambles, roam up to the ball fields and watch Little League, or sit on the swings at dusk and split a bottle of merlot.
    Eventually, our buzz for each other faded, as one’s buzz inevitably does, and I spent more weekends holed up on the thirty-first floor, and he spent more weekends racking up frequent flier miles, in hopes of becoming the next Mellencamp or Petty or Clapton or whomever he’d deem cool enough to emulate that month.
    Today, because I was on the slow upswing of my chemo cycle, I felt well enough to follow the looping path down past the ice rink and around the carousel. I stopped and watched the little kids, 44
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    mostly with their nannies, grab the fiberglass horses as tightly as their tiny fists could hold, and squeal with delight as they went up, then down, then back up again.
    That summer, the one