Stronger by Jeff Bauman

American flags. He was there to support the “Tough Ruck” team, twenty National Guardsmen who had started marching the marathon route with rucksacks at 5:30 a.m. They were raising money for the families of soldiers killed in action, or those who had committed suicide or died in PTSD-related accidents. One of the guardsmen was marching in honor of Alex.
    The soldiers had just crossed the finish line, after nine hours of marching, when the first bomb went off. Carlos saw the ball of fire. He saw a man fall over the barricade into the marathon course. And then everything disappeared into smoke. He jumped the barricade on his side and was halfway across the road when the second bomb exploded.
    He crossed himself, God protect me , and kept running. He was lifting the barricade off Michele when he saw me, without my legs, lying in a pool of blood. He knew I didn’t have much time. He lifted me into the wheelchair. He ran beside me, unwilling to leave my side. He stayed with me as long as he could, staring after the ambulance as it pulled away and headed down the street. I was the one person he focused on that day.
    By then, we were both crying. I hugged him again, and he hugged me back. There was a long silence, the only time I’ve been around Carlos when he wasn’t talking.
    “Don’t cry,” he said, wiping away his tears. “Something good happened.”
    English is Carlos’s second language, so it’s sometimes hard for him to express the nuances. What he said probably sounds strange to you. But in context, I knew exactly what he meant. He meant that something good had happened because he was alive . I suspect it had been hard for him since Alex’s death. He believed he was doing the right thing, but it was probably hard to know if it was making a difference. The war never ended. He lost his other son.
    But he saved my life. I mean that: I would be dead today without Carlos Arredondo. And now he can say to himself, if he ever struggled with it before: Something good happened because of me. It’s a good thing I survived.

14.
    I transferred from Boston Medical to the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center the day after I met Carlos. Erin had pulled strings to get me transferred quickly, because she thought it would lift my spirits. And she was right. It felt like a big deal to leave the hospital, even if I was still, technically, in a hospital. It was a vote of confidence from my doctors. My treatment wouldn’t be about my immediate health anymore; it would be about learning how to live without legs.
    I was all in on that, because I was already sick of the wheelchair. I wanted to walk.
    At first, they transferred me to the old Spaulding Rehab Center, a plain redbrick building squeezed between the TD North office tower and the Zakim Bridge on the northwest edge of downtown. It was cramped and worn down and felt like an old mental hospital, complete with metal gates that could be pulled down at the ends of the hall. I felt like I’d been rolled into The Shining .
    Even the television sucked. It was an old tube TV, not a flat-screen, and the picture was so bad the Red Sox looked green.
    Three days later, they strapped me and a few other patients into a special van and drove us a mile or two north, through an old neighborhood, then through an industrial area, then finally onto a long block of new buildings. The new Spaulding Rehabilitation Center was on the site of the old navy yard, on the point of land where the Mystic River met the bay. It was a world-class facility, in planning and construction for ten years, and it happened to open twelve days after the bombing.
    They took us through the front door, where backhoes were leveling the land for a park next door. The floors gleamed, and the hallways were extrawide, so two wheelchairs could pass with ease. My room on the fifth floor had a view across the river to the old docks and warehouses on the north side, and the windows were low enough that I could look out of them from my