“When the first highway patrol troopers got there, they could see him in their headlights,” Sherry said. “His torso was still straight up, not slumped over the hood or anything. They said his head was back and his mouth wide open, like he was yelling to the sky. But he wasn’t making a sound.”

“Jesus,” I said again, putting the image in my head, and then having a hard time shaking it out. Maybe Sherry could sense my discomfort, or maybe she just went back to concentrating on the macadam roadway, because she went silent for a while. She hadn’t even gotten to the point of why she was telling me the tale.

All that came out of her now was that rhythmic breathing and the almost imperceptible grunt of effort each time she pushed the wheels of her wheelchair, spinning them forward, her wrists feathering up like a rower does when he’s finishing a stroke in a skull. Her chair would glide for a second while she exhaled, re-cocking her arms and preparing to spin again.

I was riding next to her, peddling in a middle gear on a ten-speed touring bike. When we’d first started coming out here to Shark Valley in the southern Everglades, I actually jogged next to her while she rode the chair. She wouldn’t let me push her-never had. Even the day she left the hospital, only a week after having her leg amputated, she refused to let anyone push her wheelchair.

Then after two days at home, she decided to take herself down the ramp I’d built off her back porch. She figured out a way to open the wooden gate herself, and was rolling down the street “to breathe some fresh air, for God’s sake, Max,” she’d snapped when I’d asked what the hell she thought she was doing. “That room, the house, the walls. It’s like being in a freaking cell up at Raiford.”

I’d started to say something about her not knowing what being in a Florida State Prison cell was truly like, even though she’d sent more than a few convicts up the line as a detective with the Broward Sheriff’s Office. But I’d learned to keep my mouth shut at such times. Sherry had lost her leg during a camping trip I’d taken her on in the Glades. I’d been ignorant of a churning hurricane in the lower gulf. Then I’d soaked our only cell phone in a stupid move to dunk her playfully.