MY BEEPER GOES OFF just as Kate starts another course of dialysis. An MVA, two cars, with PI—a motorvehicle accident with injuries. “They need me,” I tell Sara. “You’ll be okay?”

The ambulance is headed to the corner of Eddy and Fountain, a bad intersection to begin with, renderedworse by this weather. By the time I arrive, the cops have blocked off the area. It’s a T-bone: the two vehiclesrammed together by sheer force into a conglomerate of twisted steel. The truck made out better; the smallerBMW is literally bent like a smile around its front end. I get out of the car and into the pouring rain, find thefirst policeman I can. “Three injured,” he says. “One’s already en route.”

I find Red working the Jaws of Life, trying to cut through the driver’s side of the second car to get to thevictims. “What have you got?” I shout over the sirens.

“First driver went through the windshield,” he yells back. “Caesar took her in the ambulance. The secondambulance is on its way. There are two people in here, from what I can see, but both doors are accordions.”

“Let me see if I can crawl over the top of the truck.” I start to work my way up the slick metal and shatteredglass. My foot goes through a hole I couldn’t see in the flatbed, and I curse and try to get myself untangled.

With careful movements I pull myself into the pleated cab of the truck, maneuver myself forward. The drivermust have flown out the windshield over the height of the little BMW; the entire front end of the Ford-150has plowed through the sports car’s passenger side, as if it were made of paper.

I have to crawl out what was the window of the truck, because the engine is between me and whoever’sinside the BMW. But if I twist myself a certain way, there is a tiny space where I can nearly fit myself, onethat puts me up against the tempered glass, spiderweb-shattered, stained red with blood. And just as Redforces the driver’s side door free with the Jaws and a dog comes whimpering out, I realize that the facepressed up against the other side of the broken window is Anna’s.

“Get them out,” I yell, “get them out now!” I do not know how I force myself back out of this snarledskeleton to knock Red out of the way; how I unhook Campbell Alexander from his seat belt and drag him tolay in the street with the rain pelting around him; how I reach inside to where my daughter is still and wide-eyed, strapped into her belt the way she is supposed to be and Jesus God no.

Paulie comes out of nowhere and lays his hands on her and before I know what I’m doing I deck him,sending him sprawling. “Fuck, Brian,” he says, holding his jaw.

“It’s Anna. Paulie, it’s Anna.”

When they understand, they try to hold me back and do this work for me, but it is my baby, my baby, and Iam having none of it. I get her onto a backboard and strap her down, let them load her onto the ambulance. Itip back the bottom of her chin, ready to intubate, but see the little scar she got from falling on Jesse’s iceskate, and fall apart. Red moves me aside and does it instead, then takes her pulse. “It’s weak, Cap,” he says,“but it’s there.”

He puts in an IV line while I pick up the radio and call in our ETA. “Thirteen-year-old female, MVA, severeclosed head injury…” When the cardiac monitor blanks o............