“Sorry.” “Hey…fuck! That hurts!” “Try to stop moving around.” “Ow!” Me, embarrassingly enough. Shock endorphins had worn off long before, and all I had now was pain and self-recrimination. “I don’t see anything except this bruise.” Clara gently probed my ribs. “It’s a big bruise.” “If anything was broken, you’d be hurting worse.” Not much of a bedside manner, though I had to agree with the diagnosis. “It must have been fifty feet to the water,” I said. “You were lucky.” And that was the understatement of the year. I’d landed only about twenty yards from the shoreline, slamming into the water like a rock. But I didn’t lose consciousness, so I struggled to shore and dragged myself up onto the boulders that formed the base of the river wall. Then I just collapsed, utterly spent, for about five minutes, until I realized nobody knew I was there. The parking garage that had almost been my doom was three stories tall, sitting in between the greenway and the Hudson’s edge.
