I didn't understand my sisters -- they didn't like our parents. I did. I knew people who were older than mom and dad, and I liked them, too. Old people had things figured out, and they usually had good advice.

I couldn't connect to Clover. I loved Mel -- she said I was her best friend -- but every ten minutes she had to get up and run, or dance, or play, and I liked to sit and watch when I saw something interesting. We had adventures making forts in the trees, helping the Larsons with their horses, catching the trains that came through, but we always seemed to leave home together and come back separately. Either she'd get bored with me, or I'd lose patience with her. Then we grew up a bit, and stopped spending time together. I had music, and buddies, and baseball and swimming, and the birds and foxes and plants.

I wasn't interested in these things the way my mom was, to learn their names, to study and memorize, or to grow them. I liked to poke around and study them in place. I started in the forest between the railroad tracks and Haskell street, but then I wanted to see more. So I'd ride my bike out to the floodplain. 15th street was dangerous -- narrow and no shoulders, with hills so sharp that cars couldn't see you until too late. I ended up in the ditch a few times. But any other route would have been roundabout.

The floodplain was farmland, except for the old fertilizer plant and the tracks of the other rail line. They hadn't built the office park yet. There were still wild patches here and there, places where redwinged blackbirds nested right on the marshy ground, and little ponds where great blue herons hunted. A big old barn hidden in the trees on a hill beyond the highway. A maple with a scissortail nest where I watched the parents lead the young from tree to tree, the day they fledged.

At night, except for the cars on the highway and the lights of the few farms, I could be alone, especially by the rivers. The Wakarusa was small and stagnant and usually green with algae. The Kaw was bigger and faster. I'd watch it, and listen to it, and dream about the Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Ganges, and wild, fast rivers in the mountains, and great waterfalls. I was obsessed with rivers and water, and planning to sail around the world some indefinite day. I read everything I could find on solo voyages. I would build a boat, and put in on the Missouri, and sail down to the Gulf, then through the Canal, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, transit the Suez, and circle the Mediterranean. I'd cross the Atlantic and take the Intracoastal Waterway, then the Mississippi and Missouri home again. I had a lot of dreams then, dreams I won't have time for now.

The floodplain is mostly unchanged, except that they moved the highway and built the office park. The woods on 15th street are still there, too, where the foxes lived. They were a family: male, female, and a pair of kits. The foxes made their living from the rookery, where all the herons and egrets and ibises for miles around nested. The dam on an old fishing pond had broken, and never been repaired, and the silt that had been the pond bottom had sprouted trees. These trees were crowded and tall, with a lot of perching and nest space and cover. Every spring the ornithology professor from the campus brought his class down to census the birds.

The foxes ate the young, and the eggs that fell from the nests. They hunted the birds differently than they did the mice: they rushed the birds, but they leaped at the mice. They went up at an angle, made a bend in the top of their curve, and came down. I liked this about them more than anything else. I liked their color, and their ears, and their bushy tails, and their astonishing alertness, but I liked that pounce better than all the rest together. No living thing could move like that.

The foxes were fat, or as fat as a fox gets, from the bird young and eggs. Then, when the eggs had hatched and the young stopped falling from the nests, the foxes were thin. They roamed then. I saw one a few miles east, out by the farms; it looked like the male. He was sitting at the end of a row of corn, watching the traffic. A fox knows how to watch; he misses nothing. They're beautiful animals, as springy and lively as an animal can be. I like them because they're vivid, they're truly alive. And they're smart. They can take care of themselves. You'll never tame a fox. A fox belongs to himself.

Julia liked the foxes, too, when I showed them to her. I was sitting on a log, watching the vixen watch her kits. They were used to me. I always left lots of space between us, and didn't move. When I'd been there long enough, everything, not just the foxes but the birds too, would get used to me, or forget I was there. They'd come out again. I'd been sitting for half an hour, and the foxes had been out most of that time. The vixen had nursed the kits in a patch of sunlight, in the grass. Her ears rose, she sat up and looked past me, and then bolted into the trees. The kits ran after her.

Someone said hello. She was behind me. When I didn't answer she walked around in front of me and said hello again.

"What do you want?" I asked. I was annoyed that she'd scared off my foxes.

"My name's Julia," she said. "What's yours?"

"None of your business."

She laughed. Her teeth were white and even. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. None of Your Business."

She was skinny and pretty, and she wore jeans and a red shirt, and she was very clean. Her glasses were steel-rimmed, a little low on her nose. Her hair was brown and wiry as a metal brush, and didn't -- wouldn't, I found out later -- lie flat. It was cut just below the bottom of her ears, and stuck out at all angles, the same brown as the foxes.

"What's your name?"

"Gabriel."

"No, really."

"Honest. It is. That's my name."

"That's so cool. That's the greatest name I ever heard."

I told her that if she was was quiet, the foxes might come back. She made not a sound, and didn't budge, and they did return, but only for a moment, dashing across the clearing, barely glimpsed. I told her about the way they hunted, and she wanted to see that, too, but they didn't. The pounce was rare to see, and it was weeks before she did, and after that she was as much in thrall to them as I was.

We rode our bikes out to the Kaw, after we gave up on the foxes for the day, and I showed her the canoe I was making from a log. I wanted to float all the way down to where it joined the Missouri, as practice for later, bigger adventures.

She was so excited she bounced on her toes. "I go canoeing with my dad," she said. "I'm the bow paddle. Can I come?"

"This isn't big enough. We'll have to make another one."

We worked on our canoes for weeks, carrying the axe in the basket of my bike. The wood was oak, and the chopping was slow work. Then we rode out one Sunday, not to work but just to sit by the river, and found our logs had been burned. The ashes were still warm. Some partiers, probably college students, had drunk a case of beer and left their cans scattered around. They'd made a fire and cut up all the deadwood with a chain saw, and burned our logs. Our canoes were gone.

Julia cried, so I hugged her and tried to comfort her, but I didn't know how. She stopped crying and we stood there, with my arms around her and her fists against my chest. She was as tall as me, but she bowed her head so it was resting against my neck. We stood so long the sun dipped down and the air cooled and we broke apart. I didn't know what to say. I looked at her, and she picked up my bike and started walking it, looking at me from the corner of her eye. I walked her bike without saying anything. When we got to the road and she tried to get on, she noticed her mistake and we traded. We pedaled home without saying anything.

I leaned my bike against the porch and she stood looking at me, waiting. I raised a hand toward the house, in a half-invitation to come in, but only half, so I could pretend I hadn't meant it if she chose not to. She propped her bicycle against mine and I opened the kitchen door.

Mom was at the table grading papers. I introduced them.

"Julia?" she asked. "Would you like some lemonade?"

She moved all her papers to the corner of the table and poured three glasses and asked Julia what we'd been doing, as if they'd known each other forever, and Julia told her about the burned logs, and the foxes, and talked as if she'd never stop. When I rode home with her later, Julia said, "I wish I could be in your family, instead of mine."

I already had two sisters, but I didn't say so.

The rest of the ride was silent, and she made me stop a block from her house. She wouldn't explain why, the same way she wouldn't talk about her bruises. I had to write notes and put them in Ziploc bags. I would ride my bike over at night, and watch the house, until I was sure no one was moving around, and then I'd leave the letter in the bushes in front of her porch, stuck into the fork of a branch, in where you couldn't see it unless you knew exactly where to look. It was the thickest one of their evergreen bushes, and always scraped me. We had to do this because she didn't want me to call. Her mom always listened on the phone, and Julia was afraid of her.

Julia had been too shy to come to my house until the day we found the logs burned. She thought my mother would be like hers. Now she started coming by in the morning and we'd do something until the day got hot. She'd go home for lunch, and claim she'd been visiting a classmate who lived near me. The friend was covering for her. Every so often she'd would call up and say Julia's mom had just phoned and what excuse she'd used ("Julia's in the bathroom", "Julia's outside"). Julia would wait a few minutes and call her mom back and repeat the excuse.

So she came by in the morning, went home for the hot part of the day, and came back later. Evening was the best time. We'd lie in the hammock with our feet in each other's laps and talk and daydream and be silent.

I don't know that we fell in love. She grew into my life, that's all, like a limb on a tree, and I became familiar with her. We never talked about ourselves, or thought of ourselves, as a unit, but other people did. Mel called us the twins, and my parents started saying "Gabriel and Julia" a lot, and whenever we had family plans, like Fourth of July fireworks, my parents invited her. She never could come, but they made it clear she was welcome. Then my mom got to know Julia's mom somehow, and after that Julia was freer to stay at our house, and even spend the entire day. She got close to Melody -- Mel loved her -- and sometimes Julia's mom would let her stay overnight. We were always careful to have Melody ask, not me.

Julia grew to be part of my life in such a way that the future was never a consideration. We didn't think about it. We were like the fox kits, finding things out, so wrapped up in whatever we did that nothing else existed for us, certainly not the future.

We started at Lawrence High, and shared a locker, and walked home after school, and studied together. We never dated anyone, really not even each other. It was as if we were already joined, but observing the formality of separate residences.

We had nowhere to have sex in privacy and comfort, and Julia didn't want to sneak around, so we waited. We went through high school, and both applied to K.U., and when we had our acceptances she went to her parents and announced that she was going to move into an apartment with me in September.

Her mother, whom I had long ago figured out as the source of Julia's bruises, handed her a suitcase and told her to pack and get out. Julia's dad tried to intervene, but through the years he had yielded too many times, and he couldn't stop what was happening. Julia lugged the suitcase the mile to our house.

My parents gave her the rooms on the third floor, and said we would have to talk to her mother in a day or two. Mrs. Acker found out what had happened, realized that her threat had backfired, and showed up in person, demanding that Julia return home. Julia refused. She was eighteen, and there was nothing her mom could do. Mrs. Acker gave up and didn't come back. She didn't like her children, anyway; when I figured this out, I became more patient with Julia's hesitations.

We'd been planning to start our life at the beginning of our first semester, but Julia loved my family, especially my mother, so much that she wasn't willing to move. She kept putting off the time. This was to be a theme in our relationship. I was always ready for the next step before she was, whether it was sex, or living together, or marriage.

I finally lost patience. We'd been putting sex off for several years and I said I wouldn't wait. She gave in, and we started having sex on the sly. For a while Melody was our lookout. If someone showed up, she'd call us on the teenager's phone (there was an extension in Julia's bedroom). Mostly, we picked our times carefully enough that we didn't have to hurry into our clothese before we'd finished, and we usually had some time to talk in bed. But I wanted to spend hours naked with her, and we rarely had the chance.

We lost our lookout -- Melody ran away within a year -- and then we had to be more careful. We had a few close calls. I think my dad was aware of what we were doing, and helped us hide it from my mom, but without letting on to us that he did know.

I wanted to move into the attic with Julia and let my parents deal with it. Dad wouldn't have cared, and what was mom going to do? She wouldn't kick us out, the way Mrs. Acker had done to Julia. Mom wasn't that mean. But Julia didn't want to hurt her, and I didn't want to fight Julia to get my way.

For two years we lived like that, screwing in stolen moments, until I was fed up again. I told her I was moving out. I was twenty. She could come, or she could stay with my parents. She looked like I'd hit her. She launched into a rage. I hadn't seen one in a long time, but I couldn't forget what they were like. Still, I didn't back down.

I found a couple of cheap crummy little rooms on the second floor of a house on Connecticut, between 10th and 11th, and moved there just before the fall semester of my junior year. Even with the monthly check from dad I could barely afford them; I only had a part-time job, and had to pay my tuition and fees from that and the check. My funds were much tighter.

I missed her. She was five minutes' walk from my place, and I ate dinner at home every other night, and she was usually there, but with my folks sitting right at the same table all the conversation was impersonal. We were both too proud, or too timid, to apologize first.

Sometimes on the weekend if I had an hour to spare I'd my dad's studio, above the garage. I got distracted because it faced the house, and the windows on one side of Julia's floor. Mostly the view was of her ceiling, but if I arrived at the right time of morning I'd see her brushing her teeth.

I was sitting at one of the keyboards and staring at her bathroom window when she walked up to the medicine cabinet, opened it, and took out a razor. She looked down, and saw me, and we watched each other for a few seconds. She blew me a kiss and turned away.

A minute later I saw her come out the back door and cross the lawn. I heard her feet on the stairs.

"Come help me pack," she said. "You win. I can't stand it any more."

When we came back down from her room with as many of her things as we could carry, my dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading his beloved Los Angeles Times. He looked up from the paper.

"Are you moving in with him?" he asked Julia.

"Yes."

"I was wondering how long it would take for you to come to your senses."

"How are we going to tell mom?" I asked.

"Leave that to me." He stood. "She'll get used to it. She thinks that people who love each other should -- love each other. Give her a week or two and she'll be leaving food on your doorstep." He picked up two suitcases and headed for the door. "Go get the rest of your things. I'll drive you over."

When we had Julia's stuff in my apartment, the rooms looked dingy and crowded, and I was depressed. Dad was looking at me.

"It's time you heard how your mother and I got together," he said. "Just give me a few minutes to leave her a note, so she doesn't worry."

He came back with a six-pack, and shared it with us, and stayed until midnight, talking. He only left then because, he said, he didn't want mom to worry about him. We all knew that he wanted to leave us together on our first night.