Finn

FINN HAD A HARD GO of it from the very beginning. He slipped through the hands of a midwife who had delivered hundreds of babies and gave his birthday cry when he hit the floor. When he was five, there was a house party next door. He was allowed out to listen to the music (Shane MacGowan blasting from pole-mounted portable speakers) on his side of the street. It was summer, he was barefoot, and a cherry bomb thrown by an exuberant partygoer flew up, arced down with the stub of its fuse fizzing, and blew off the baby toe on his left foot.

Wouldn’t have happened again in a thousand years, his grandma said. Also: God must have wanted that toe for an angel.

When he was seven, he and his sisters were playing in Pettingill Park while Grandma sat on a nearby bench, alternately knitting and doing one of her word search puzzles. Finn didn’t care for the swings, had no use for the seesaws, could not have cared less about the roundy-round. What he liked was the Twisty, an entrancing curlicue of blue plastic twenty feet high. There were steps, but Finn preferred to climb the slide itself on his hands and knees, up and around, up and around. At the top he would sit and glide to the packed dirt at the bottom. He never had an accident on the Twisty.

Stop that awhile, why don’t ya, Grandma said one day. You’re always on that old Twisty. Try something new. Try the monkey bars. Show me a trick.

His sisters, Colleen and Marie, were on them, climbing and swinging like … well, like monkeys. So, to please Grandma, he went on the monkey bars and slipped while hanging upside down and fell and broke his arm.

His teacher that year, pretty Miss Monoghan, liked to end each day by saying, What have we learned today, kiddos? At the urgent care, while having his arm set (the lollipop he was given afterwards hardly seemed adequate compensation for the pain), Finn thought what he’d learned that day was Stick to the Twisty.

At fourteen, running home from his friend Patrick’s house in a driving thunderstorm, a stroke of lightning hit the street directly behind him, close enough to char a line down the back of his jacket. Finn fell forward, hit his head on the curb, suffered a concussion, and lay unconscious in his bed for two days before