Excerpt from Darin Strauss's "More Than It Hurts You"

The question for Josh had always been: how much blindness does a happy life require?  Josh had grown up watching the Mr. Magoo show, in which a wealthy man took on the challenge of failed eyesight by sallying into the world as if everything were fine: he walked off the edge of a girder (the hardhats pointing, yelling, panicking); but just as he stepped off into space, some crane swung an I-beam up under his shoes. Or he would saunter into an animal pen, mistaking it for a doctor's office, and caress a tiger in the belief that he was petting a kitten-and the jungle beast would purr and nuzzle. If Josh could mosey through his days like Magoo through a room, narrowly avoiding the furniture of human faults, wasn't there a chance the world might be flattered, and agree with him, and transform itself into a series of blessings?  But if that worked, it led to another question he hadn't thought about before: what sort of life did that become?

However.

A greater sin than emotional blindness is to play at love without purpose, to be caught just visiting the highpoints of your own existence. Josh loved Dori honestly, faithfully, and blindly. And that was the reason he failed to avoid this strange shipwreck of his family life.

Josh considered May 27th the first truly horrific day he'd known.

Afterward, certain noises would act like fuses, setting off exquisitely painful fireworks of memory. And Josh couldn't stop remembering: the sound of a police cruiser crunching and spitting over driveway gravel; the doorbell-it's three notes, down-up-down, which led him to a sight he couldn't place: police in uniform, wearing somberly rigid expressions; his own stupidly merry: "Who is it?" Car doors now made him anxious, as did his own last name, pronounced by an unfamiliar voice.  And the most evocative, most horrific:  the swishing sound of that squad car pulling away, as it left his driveway and life empty. This police car, these strangers, had taken his son.

Mr. Plates had found, on his third visit, a butterfly needle in Mrs. Goldin's possession.