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I could feel his surprise even though I couldn't see his face that well.

"Why do you envy the river? Don't you think there's anything good to be said for staying in the same place for long periods of time, if not your whole life?" I asked him.

"A moving target's harder to hit," he replied. "You don't have to always be a target, Duncan."

"In this world?" He laughed. "If it's not one thing, it's another, believe me. Look at you. You moved, didn't you? You didn't want to stay in the same place."

"That's different."

"Why? Why did you want to move? Why is it different?"

"It's complicated," I said.

"People always give you that answer whenever they don't want to answer something. It's an easy way out."

"Is that right, Mr. Know-it-all?"

He was silent.

I lowered myself to the grassy part of the clearing. He looked down at me and then did the same. We were silent again, both of us just staring out at the river.

"Look," I began, "all of us are born with a family history. Mine just happened to make it very hard for me to live in that village much longer."

I waited for him to ask why, but he just reached for a small stone and heaved it into the water. If I continued, I knew I would violate the agreement I had made with my aunt Zipporah. I would be telling the story, bringing it here with me. I'd be the snake smuggling sinful knowledge into paradise. Any place where my past was unknown was paradise to me, and I was about to ruin it.

"It's a very small village, maybe a street or two of this place."

"So everyone knows everyone's business," he concluded.

"That and more."

"So what's so terrible about that? Lots of people know about my family, know my father deserted us. It's not enough to send us packing. There are other things that might do that. Who cares what other people think anyway?"

I hesitated. Why I would even want to share my innermost secrets with him, I did not know. As strange as people like Missy and Cassie might think it was, I would say it was because of his poetry. I felt he had revealed the deepest and most intimate part of himself to me by letting me read the poems. Something permitted him to trust me that much. We had joked about taking risks. It was surely exactly that both for him and for me, for neither of us had much experience with strangers we could somehow believe in and rely upon. It was like that game friends play when someone stands behind you and you permit yourself to fall back in the expectation he will catch you before you hit the ground. We were both in the process of falling back.

I took a deep breath before continuing. In a real sense, I was coming out of the attic.

"More than sixteen years ago, my mother killed her stepfather."

He finally turned to me.

"Killed?"

"She claimed he was abusing her and her mother wasn't paying any attention. After she did it, she fled and hid in my grandparents' attic where she and my father, my aunt Zipporah's brother--"

"Created the wonder of you?"

"Something like that."

"What happened to your mother? Is she in jail?"

"No, she's in a clinic. She doesn't even remember she gave birth to me. At least, that's what I've been told."

"So you've never seen her?"

"Nor heard her voice, never." My voice cracked with emotion, and my chest ached with my effort to keep my tears under lock and key.

He turned away, threw another stone and then lowered his head so that I almost didn't hear what he said. "Thank you."