“I think we’re going to need to take you to the doctor,” my mother said, touching her hand to Kit’s forehead. “You look like a wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s.”

Kitty wiped her hand away. “I’m fine.”

“Wrong,” my mother declared. “You are pale and sweaty.” Then, giving her a look, “I’m pretty sure they have doctors in Belgium.”

“I don’t need a doctor.”

My mom looked at me for help. “Reason with her.”

“You do look”—how to say it nicely?—“not yourself. Why don’t you just—”

But Kitty started talking over me. “I’m fine! I’m fine! I don’t need a doctor—”

As I kept going with “—see somebody? Just in case?”

While my dad added, “It’s going to be such a long flight home, and the last thing you need is—“

As my mom chimed in with “It could be Ebola, it could be a burst appendix, it could be some kind of E. coli situation—”

We all yammered over one another like the most ridiculous bunch of foreigners, right there in our lovely Belgian hotel’s breakfast café, until, maybe just needing to put an end to the madness, Kitty shouted, “I’m not sick! I’m just pregnant!”

We all fell quiet.

“I took a test this morning. Actually, I took three.”

“Whose is it?” I stage-whispered, after a good long pause. “Fat Benjamin? Or the Moustache?”

“I vote for Fat Benjamin,” my mother said, in her normal voice.

“Me, too,” my dad said, raising his hand.

Ian and I raised ours for Fat Benjamin, too. “Unanimous,” I declared.

Kitty gave us a look like we were the worst.

Then she said, “Benjamin, okay? I have to throw up now.”

*

THAT’S OUR STORY. In the decade since the crash, things have moved on for everyone, like they do.

My parents did get back together. My dad just wasn’t a grudge holder, or the kind of guy who could stay mad. As he explained it to me once, when I asked, “Your mother has never been perfect. And I’ve always loved her anyway.” I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d been in his shoes. But I think choosing to go back and work it out suited him. Leaving wasn’t his style. He was a for-better-or-for-worse kind of guy.

My dad retired two years later, and about a month after he did, he got the news that he had lung cancer. Of all things. And he didn’t even smoke.

“Too much sawdust,” he shrugged, when he told us.

He fought it like a champ, and my mom sat right there with him at every appointment and through every treatment. She crocheted fuzzy socks for him and read him articles from Reader’s Digest, and made steak, spaghetti, and meatloaf for him in a rotation. All his favorites, over and over.

To fill the time, in between treatments, when he felt good, he started volunteering reading books-on-tape for the blind. It wasn’t long before he realized he had a knack for reading stories. For a while, he invented a job for himself as the bedtime story guy at camp, reading by the fire every Friday night to rapt groups of kids—doing all the voices and the sound effects. He loved it so much that even after he’d gotten far too sick to read, or even to walk out to the campfire, he still came out to listen to his replacements and offer them pointers. My mom drove him in a golf cart and brought folding chairs.

One night, near the end, when I was visiting him at hospice, he told me that those last years with my mom had been the best of all.

“Why?” I asked.

He smiled, a little sly. “She appreciated me more.”

I flared my nostrils at him.

“I appreciated her more, too,” he added. “And guess what else?”

“What?”

He gave me a half-smile. “I wouldn’t change a thing.” Then he squeezed my hand. “Be sure to tell that to your sister.”

My dad didn’t want to be buried, he wanted to be planted. So we dug a hole for his ashes on the bonfire hill and planted an oak tree there. My mother wants us to plant another tree over her ashes right next to it when it’s her turn—so the two can grow together with their branches interlocked.

She brings it up a lot.

It’s been three years now since he died, and my mom still seems lost. She keeps busy, though. That year without my dad changed her, and humbled her, and freed her in a lot of ways. She’s easier on everyone these days—including, I suspect, herself.

She keeps the books for us at camp now, and helps with the kids, and not long after my dad died, she offered to take his storytelling place at the campfire. She also joined a feminist quilting group called Sew Feisty! that meets every week to sew and talk politics. She still worries too much and starts with death in every situation—but between me, Ian, and Oprah, we’ve got her keeping a gratitude journal.

She’s trying. And trying always counts for a lot.

*

ARE YOU WONDERING if I ever managed to walk again?

I didn’t.

We tried braces and walkers and electrical muscle stimulation, and one more surgery about two years after the crash, and then we called it quits. New technologies pop up all the time, and maybe science will catch up with me, but I’m not holding my breath. I no longer scour the Web for hope on that front. I’ve learned to look for hope in other ways.

I’m happy to report that my donor site scars did heal up, and after ten years of applying vitamin E, you can barely see them. That said, the grafts are a different story. Parts are smooth and parts are ropy and mottled, but no amount of vitamin E could make them anything less than tragic.

Which is why, on the five-year anniversary of the crash, I let Kitty tattoo the whole thing. She’d been begging me for ages, and she had a design all made up: a folk art flower garden “growing” from the back of my shoulder forward over my scar. She did the outline all on the first night, and she’s been slowly adding colors ever since. Look at me from one side now, and I look like my old self. Look at me from the other, and I’m graced with flowers.

My mom said she was going to get a tattoo that night, too—but then she couldn’t decide. She’s still working on it.

I won’t lie. Losing the use of my legs has been the hardest thing in my life. I don’t want to downplay it. I don’t want to pretend it has been easy. It’s been the opposite of easy.

But there have been good things, too.

Ian wasn’t kidding about being in love with me. I never could talk him out of it.

Guess what we did? We got married.

We dated for a while, long-distance at first, and then Ian came back to Texas. Now we run the camp together. Ian runs the PT side—Myles never did go after his license. Turns out, running Ian out of the country was enough revenge to satisfy him, and then Myles himself got a job in Orlando, left town, and—fingers crossed—forgot all about us. I run the business-y stuff and some fun stuff, too: finger-painting, slug knitting, origami, cake decorating, hay rides, Sound of Music sing-alongs.

Everything about Camp Hope turned out better than I imagined. We raised almost twice as much money as I’d been shooting for, due in part to all those followers of Kit’s—but also due to my hard, tireless, obsessive work.

Yep. I give myself credit. I give us all credit.

Once my parents were back together, it took them about two minutes to get out the plans and start discussing the build, and my dad jumped in like a pro. I got to see my parents through new eyes, working as a team. My mother’s relentless perfectionism, when focused on a project instead of on me, was powerful, inspiring stuff, and my dad’s good-natured practicality was a nice counterweight. They collaborated, and even disagreed, in inspiring harmony.

I guess the design apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, because my mom and I turned out to love all the same things: big windows, stone fireplaces, kitschy Western retro lamps, wagon-wheel fences, deep porches, ceiling fans, clean modern lines with classic farmhouse details, and whimsy.

We really got along okay.

The camp’s been up and running for seven years now. It’s a real, bustling, thriving place. It’s sunny and warm, and the buildings are stone and stucco with tin Texas roofs, and big porches, and shady trees. We’ve got fields of wildflowers and nature trails. Everything is entirely ramp accessible—even the treehouse. We found all kinds of craftspeople to create magic with murals and sculptures and fountains. We made mosaics on the camp gates using all my broken dishes, and now we have a mosaic class where folks get to smash their own.

We run camps all summer for kids, and classes all winter for grown-ups. We have movie nights and cookie contests and charity projects for the sick. We have resource networks and referral systems. We offer classes for the newly injured as well as projects and support for their loved ones. We help people cope with where they are—but we also show them where they can go.