Page 23 of Hold on Tight

“Not really. I just learned how to walk.”

“If you practiced, could you run?”

He knew guys who were doing it. Training to run, even prepping for the Paralympics.

“How ’bout you answer my question, then I’ll answer your question?”

Sam considered that carefully. “Okay. What was your question?”

“Why didn’t you tell your mom you didn’t have any friends?”

“Because stuff like that makes her sad, and she worries too much already.”

That was what he’d suspected, that Sam protected Mira. Damn it, a seven-year-old boy shouldn’t have to do that. He shouldn’t have to think about anything other than Halloween and baseball practice and feeding the dog.

“Now me. If you practiced, could you run?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. In fact, he knew from hearing it talked about at Walter Reed that there were runners—Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, was an infamous example—who ran faster on prostheses than they could on their own legs.

Sam was sitting up now, his face lit. “I’m a good runner. My mom doesn’t like it when I run fast, but I’m good at it.”

Why the hell did Mira make him hold back like that?

“Do you want to see me run?” Sam asked.

“Your mom said you hurt your shoulder and arm and knee.”

“I did. But they’re better now.”

“So let’s see it.”

“I won’t run super hard.”

A spark of rebelliousness made Jake say, “You can run as hard as you want. That’s why you have an inhaler.”

“Oh.” Sam frowned.

She’s going to kill me, Jake thought, and then,Really? I must have left my balls in Afghanistan.

They went out front. There were cars parked here and there on the street, but otherwise it was empty. “I’m going to run from that red mailbox to that fire hydrant.”

“Okay,” Jake said. Today the Seattle summer weather was perfect, a slight fog lifting away as the morning wore on, the sky vivid blue behind the scrim of gray. “Do you want me to time you?” He got his phone out and selected the stopwatch app.

“Yeah.” Sam got into a runner’s starting stance and almost made Jake laugh, he was so earnest andcoiled.

“Twenty-five seconds,” Jake reported, after Sam had collapsed, panting, on the mostly dead grass.

“Is that good?”

“I think so.”

“Will you race with me?”

Jake hesitated. He wasn’t sure what would happen. In PT, he’d done some of the early jumping, hopping, and skipping exercises that would eventually translate into jogging, but he’d only run once. The street was reasonably flat and even, but even small irregularities could trip him up.

The time he’d run had been on a track, under the watchful eye of his physical therapist. There had been no joy in it, only frustration. He’d heard that walking—forget running—generated eight times the amputee’s body weight in force at the point where prosthesis met body.Eight times his body weight. Slamming his prosthesis into his residual leg. Jarring dead meat and bone, jamming his aching hip, stunning his miserable brain. He’d only wanted it to stop—the impact, the pain, his PT’s eyes boring into him.

And then he’d taken a spill, skidded across the red rubbery composite surface. Sprained his wrist. Set himself back another week and a half.

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