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pair of braces,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “They had to be forged at a blacksmith’s and the straps had to be ordered from a saddlemaker. You couldn’t even buy braces in the town where I grew up. People with polio were supposed to be shut away where nobody had to see them. Thank God my parents had different ideas.”
    By the time they returned to her room, Clare was glad to be lifted into the newly made bed.
    “Somebody left you the Reader’s Digest ,” observed Mrs. Thatcher.
    Clare picked it up and found she was too tired to read it. She might have fallen asleep with the Reader’s Digest clasped to her chest if a young man in a white coat and white trousers had not walked into the room.
    “I’m Doctor Henderson,” he said, extending his hand. Clare took it, and he pressed her fingers between his. “Did Mrs. Thatcher have you walking this morning?”
    It annoyed Clare that he should ask her a question to which he almost certainly knew the answer. He glanced down at the papers on the clipboard he carried and hurried over the possibility of a reply.
    “Your right leg is stronger than your left, but your left leg has more feeling in it. There’s no nerve damage, no muscle damage, no fever, and no infection. Something in here”—he tapped his head—“is telling your legs they can’t walk, and that’s what we’ve got to overcome.”
    He gave her a broad smile.
    “You won’t be going back to school. But there’s no need for you to shut yourself away from your friends. I had a patient who lost both arms and legs in an accident. Nicest guy in the world. Everybody loved him. He married the head nurse. Can you swim?”
    “What?”
    “Can you swim?”
    Clare nodded her head, puzzled.
    “Good. Swimming helps. There’s a good pool at the YMCA.”
    Anger boiled up in her. She was a good swimmer, but how could she go to a public pool with her body like this?
    In Paradise, the Lord of the Universe tosses a green ball which breaks into a red ball, which breaks into a gold ball, and Wanda Harkissian finds, in the lining of her winter coat, a silver coin with a skull on one side and a winged man on the other, strung on a thread of elastic.
    “Ben,” she says at breakfast, “isn’t this the coin you lost years ago at the Y?”
    She drops it into his open palm, and Ben sees himself on a hot day in July, eight years old, running along the edge of the pool. He always told people a bigger kid pushed him in at the deep end, because the truth sounded so goofy: he jumped in because he thought the water would hold him up. Water had always been friendly to him. Why should it do otherwise?
    He sank swiftly into aquamarine, saw the ladder stretching still and blue, down, down under the water—how tall it stood! how far it reached!—resting its feet on the bottom like a great tree. Above him the white legs of swimmers churned the shining lid of the water into silver globes. He sank. He touched the floor of this vast, still room, felt the water push him almost to the surface; but he had fallen too far, and the shining lid was both near and far off, like land seen from the prow of a ship.
    Then everything around him shattered, as the man who dived in to save Ben collided with him.
    For weeks Ben would not go near the water at all. When he and Willie passed the Y, they crossed to the opposite side of the street.
    Everybody should learn to swim, his father told him, and he gave Ben the coin to wear on an elastic thread around his neck while he made his peace with the water. For a month Ben paddled at the shallow end while the young man who taught swimming led the other children out into deep water. One day Ben allowed himself to be led beyond his depth. He clung to the edge of the pool and kicked and he let go and swam across the pool, steadily and with great purpose, as if he were answering a summons from the other side.
    Two days later Ben could neither find nor remember having lost the talisman he was sure had helped him.
    Now,