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“Oww,” I said, but I didn’t move until she ran away.

I was running up the path from the Nearings’ after the bus dropped me off, always running to the beat of some increased urgency in my heart, when my toe snagged a root and I fell forward onto the damp earth and pine needles, arm crunching beneath my chest. A tiny protest shot through the bones near my wrist. Broken, I was sure. I ran again toward the brightness at the end of the path where it opened out into the back field, trunks of trees flashing past, dark-light, in the fading light. “Mama,” I called, though I knew she couldn’t hear me yet. “I broke my arm.”

A boy in my class broke his leg, and I’d watched with interest to see that everyone gave him a lot of attention. One or the other of his parents drove him to school, the teachers helped him to the bathroom, and all of us kids wrote on the white plaster of his cast, drawing bright pictures with markers. I imagined Mama would hold me sobbing in her arms. Drive me to school and pick me up. Forgo work to tend to my needs. But the protest in my arm was already fading, blood pumping to soothe the ache, so I held my arm out to smack it against a tree. The pain sprang back into my wrist from the impact. Broken, I was sure.

Across the field of stiff shorn cornhusks that poked through my sneakers, past the woodshed, the ash tree with its dangling swing, up the stones of the patio, the granite slab of doorstep. The wooden latch fell away, and the house opened its emptiness to me.

“Mama?” Back out the door. Scanning with ears and eyes across the clearing. Mama? I slipped off my shoes and ran through the autumn remains of the garden, dampening sawdust clinging to my feet, its coolness creeping up my legs. The tears began to come, not from any pain in my wrist, the impact already forgotten by the resilience of my young muscles, but from the hollow pain in my throat, the egg rising up.

“Mama,” I called. “I broke my arm.”

Dew washed the sawdust from my feet as I ran by the farm stand full of storage, up the grassy lane, past the orchard of shriveling apples, and out to the parking lot. Mama’s VW Bug was gone. The Silver Bullet gone, too. Only the sunken shape of Good Ole Jeepie remained, rusted and beaten down from years of work. The campground spread out on the other side of the parking lot, cook shack and tent platforms empty, rope swing hanging still and straight. I already knew the log cabin would be empty, but I went anyway, up the driftwood steps of the porch, repeating the words to the empty room. “Papa, I broke my arm.”

Then I did something that seemed strange even as I watched myself doing it. I ran up and down the packed stones of the back driveway, running to keep myself running so when someone returned it would seem like I had just come up from the bus, just broken my arm. I ran until the lump in my throat blocked the air from my lungs. My legs weakened, muscles slackening as dusk closed around me, but I kept walking up and down the drive, willing the tears to roll down my face for effect, but they were gone, dried up, and by the time Mama returned from her errands the welcome pain in my arm was gone, too.

I see now that beneath it all was a feeling I didn’t want to admit to myself. It felt like relief. Relief because for so long I was working to prevent just this from happening, the falling and falling apart, but when it actually happens, you realize that once spilled, your life never goes back in the same way. It isn’t supposed to. It’s only then that you know you are alive, and that despite the uncertainties, you will survive.

Books are what save us. The best place for reading was the space where the feet were supposed to go under Papa’s built-in desk in the log cabin. I read in the story of The Snow Queen about a goblin who made a mirror that had the power to shrink everything beautiful and magnify everything evil. The goblin carried the mirror up to heaven to turn it on the angels, but it slipped from his hands and fell to earth, where it shattered into a million pieces. A little