That was me, during those early months after leaving the hospital. I was all three of those kids at the same time. A miracle of survival—but drowning anyway, all the same.

My old friends wanted to see me, for example, but I didn’t want to see them. They wanted to “get together” and “grab a bite” or “have coffee.”

Why would I want to do that? I dreaded the pity on their faces and the assumptions they’d make. I dreaded how sorry they’d feel for me. I dreaded every single reaction of every single girlfriend when she heard how Chip had ruined my life and disappeared. I wasn’t going to feed their schadenfreude.

My mother read an article saying it was important for “people like me” to stay connected. She even tried to convince me to let her organize a girls’ day at a spa. “It’ll be fun,” she tried to declare. “We’ll get our hair done. Mani-pedis. You can roll home feeling great.”

“I never feel great, Mom,” I said. “That’s not a feeling in my collection.”

“I just read an article that said human connections help prevent Alzheimer’s.”

“Alzheimer’s,” I said, “is the least of my worries right now.”

I tried not to feel bleak, but I felt bleak anyway. I tried to leave the house, but I always stopped at the door. I tried to count my blessings, but even just trying made me mad. Things went on like this for months—and months. No change in sight. I don’t mean to gloss over it, but there just isn’t much to report. Wake up. Feel angry. Avoid human contact. Smash dishes. Repeat.

And then, in late summer, Kit came home for a weekend.

Twenty-five

YES, KIT’S BOYFRIEND, the Moustache, had let the Beauty Parlor fall apart. Yes, things were far worse than she’d expected when she got back. Turns out, he had no interest in the boring, day-to-day activities of running a shop, like sweeping or taking out the trash or writing down appointments. Kit returned to angry customers, disgruntled employees, and a cockroach infestation.

We hadn’t talked on the phone every day, as she’d promised—though she had found time to talk every day with my mom.

It was fine. My mom needed her more.

“If you’d just follow me on Instagram,” Kit said, “we wouldn’t have to talk on the phone.”

“It’s really not the same thing.”

Kitty had the most contact with our dad of anyone, so she and my mom suddenly had a lot to talk about. They also had years of resentments, misunderstandings, disappointments, and blame to work through. But I had to hand it to them. They didn’t just smile big and make nice. They went for it. They argued, they disagreed, they compared notes—on their lives and everybody else’s.

When we did talk, though, Kit was very interested in my health, my progress, my daily routine. She asked tons of questions—sometimes so many we never talked about her at all. Specific questions, too, about how I felt and how I was taking care of myself. She started emailing me articles on spinal health, recovery, home rehab, functional electrical stimulation, and neurogenesis. Specific, highly technical articles, too—far different from the pop psychology we’d started with.

“Where are you finding these?” I asked her. “I thought you were repainting the shop.”

“I broke up with the Moustache,” she confessed.

“Because he drove your business into the ground?”

“Because I think I’m in love with Fat Benjamin.”

“We’re all in love with Fat Benjamin. He’s adorable.”

“Anyway, I have insomnia.”

“Do not worry about me in the middle of the night!” I said. “Go back to sleep!”

“Nobody chooses who they worry about in the night,” she said. “Just read the articles and shut up.”

So I did. Or tried to. Actually, I just printed out most of them and put them in a stack. They were very dry. My guess was Kit herself only read the titles.

All to say, she’d hoped to visit in early summer, but she didn’t make it until August. Which was fine. I wouldn’t have been much fun before that anyway.

I wasn’t much fun in August, either.

But being with Kit seemed to help.

She made me get dressed and put on lipstick and go out to hip new restaurants with her. She made me listen to disco and sing with her—and she filmed everything. One afternoon, she drove me to the ocean.

“I’m worried about you,” she said, snapping my photo as we watched the waves. “You’re living like an old person.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

She leaned over and sniffed me. “You’re a little mothballish, even.”

I swatted at her. “I am not.”

“You do remember you’re twenty-eight—not seventy-eight?”

“I think I’m doing okay,” I said. I was alive, wasn’t I? Maybe I wasn’t doing yoga at sunrise, but I did get out of bed every morning. Usually.

“Why haven’t you learned how to drive?”

“Where would I drive to?”

“Why haven’t you investigated braces for your legs?”

“I’m fine with the chair. It’s fine.”

“I think you need to try harder.”

She probably meant well, but I was tired of people meaning well. “I think you need to mind your own business.”

But Kit didn’t care. “You are my business,” she said with a shrug. “You always have been.”

She took a million pictures of me for her followers: me eating spaghetti, me getting my toenails painted rainbow colors, me sunbathing in heart-shaped sunglasses. She gave my pixie cut a freshen-up and Instagrammed that. She made me put on her retro 1950s lipstick and Instagrammed that. She even took a picture of the scars on my shoulder and Instagrammed that.

“Kit! Nobody wants to see my gross shoulder!”

“Everybody wants to see it. You’re an Instagram star, lady. Just accept it.”

But Kit just had to push me. On her last night, at dinner, in front of my mom, of all people, Kit said, “How’s your summer camp coming along?”

It felt like an awfully private question to bring up in a place as public as the dinner table. I glanced at my mother.

“Summer camp!” my mom said. “You want to go to summer camp?”

Kit said, “She wants to build a summer camp.”

My mom sat straight up. Build something? Yes, please!

She lobbed fifty questions at me at once, but I shut them all down.

“I haven’t even thought about it in months,” I said. Which was true.

But that night, as I was falling asleep, I found myself thinking about it again. Under the onslaught of real life in the real world, I’d almost forgotten the idea entirely. It was so like Kit to remind me.

Overnight, my head flooded with ideas, and the next morning, before I’d even had coffee, I wheeled into the kitchen in my pajamas to find some paper, and I made a list off the top of my head: chair bowling

bonfires

gardening

singing

hand cycling

wheelchair kung fu

bungee jumping

pinball

Pop-A-Shot

racing

canoeing

zip-lining

ping pong

wheelchair obstacle course

horseback

“What is all that?” my mom asked when she came in, peering over my shoulder.

“Ideas for the summer camp,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it, too.”

“You have?”

“If we built it,” she said, “maybe the camp sign could be a mosaic. That would give us something to do with all your broken dishes.”

That’s how Kit got me to try harder. The same way she got me to sing. By tricking me. By playing a tune I couldn’t resist. But I do have to give her credit—or maybe I have to give it to Ian’s mom. Because the next thing I doodled on that paper was her famous quote: When you don’t know what to do for yourself, do something for somebody else.

*

KIT LEFT THAT morning, but it was okay. I didn’t have that same sense of panic I’d felt when she left the hospital.

Now I had a project.

Or maybe the project had me.

In the following weeks, I got consumed. I took over the dining table. I drew plans for buildings and consulted an architect. I made lists of ideas, resources, people to work with. I did real estate searches online—looking for land that was far enough out to be cheap but close enough to be accessible. I looked at other, nonprofit camps online to see how they did things and what they offered. I brainstormed names and investigated graphics. I made plans for a nature trail, a library, a ceramics studio, a yarn café, a bake shop, a butterfly garden. Everything would be wheelchair accessible—and everything would be architecturally beautiful. I had rolled my eyes so much at my mother decorating my hospital room—but after we’d taken it all down, I’d seen her point. The feeling of the room changed. Without her quilts and curtains and table lamps and splashes of color, it felt like the saddest place in the world.

I wanted this place to feel like sunshine. I wanted it to feel like hope. Warm, but cool. Bright, but shady. Alert, but calm. I wanted it to feel like magic.

“You could call it Hell on Wheels,” my mom suggested one night at dinner.

“‘Hell’ might give the wrong vibe.”

“What about Camp Magic?”

I gave a shrug. “Might sound like an academy for young magicians.”

“Not a bad idea,” she pointed out.