My parents had things figured out, and their advice was good. My sisters were off in the yonder somewhere. I couldn't connect to Clover because she wore sunglasses on her feelings. I loved Mel -- she said we were best friends -- but she had no self-control; she had to run, or dance, or play. I preferred to sit and watch. We were a strange pair, because she had all the energy, and I had all the calm. We made forts in the trees, and helped the Larsons with their horses, and hopped on and off the trains that came through, but we always seemed to go out together and come back separately. Either Mel would get bored with me, or I'd lose patience with her. Then we grew up a bit, and stopped spending time together. She had horses, and gymnastics and dancing. I had music and baseball and swimming, and the birds and foxes and plants. And we had different friends, and different kinds of friends.

I wasn't interested in plants and animals the way Mom was, to learn their names, to study and memorize, or to grow them. I liked to wander and see them where they lived. 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 without shoulders, and the hills so abrupt 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 eastern rail line. They hadn't built the office park yet. Riding my bicycle, I couldn't coast, the land was so flat, between the hills I'd come from to the west, and the hills to the east, with the little town of Eudora sitting atop them. There were still wild patches here and there, on the plain, places where redwinged blackbirds nested right on the marshy ground, and little ponds where great blue herons hunted, and a big old barn hidden in the trees on a hill beyond the highway. Behind it stood a maple with a scissortail nest where I watched the parents lead the young from tree to tree, on the day they fledged. I even liked the fields of corn, growing so fast in June that I'd notice the difference in height each day. In the places with corn on both sides it was like riding down a hallway open to the sky -- green and yellow on each side of me, with blue and white above. I liked the smell of the corn, floral and musty.

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 someday. 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.

The woods on 15th street were where I went most often, though, and that's where I found the fox family: a male, a female, and three kits. I didn't notice the difference between the male and the female until I saw them together, and then I read up on them, and I knew they were a family. They are loyal, and mate for life. This pair 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.

The foxes ate the young, and the eggs that fell from the nests. They hunted the birds differently than they did mice: they rushed at birds, but they leaped at 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. I couldn't see how they did it. Their elegance was supernatural.

The foxes were fat, or as fat as foxes get, which isn't very, from the bird young and eggs. Then, when the young birds stopped falling from the nests, the foxes lost weight and began to roam. 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.

I used to sit on a log and watch the vixen and her kits. Late evening was the best time. They were used to me. I usually threw out some dog food and then retreated downwind, well away, and then 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, and come out again. One day was especially good. 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 grass. Her ears rose, she sat up and looked past me, and bolted into the trees. The kits ran after her.

Someone said hello 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 Acker," she said. "What's yours?" Her smile was wider on the top than on the bottom, like a line drawn above a rectangle of even white teeth. She was skinny and pretty, and she wore jeans and a red shirt, and she was very clean. She had a mole at one corner of her mouth. Her glasses were steel-rimmed, a little low on her nose. Her hair was 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 rusty color as the female fox.

"I'm Gabriel Packard," I said.

"Gabriel? No, really."

"Honest. It is. My name's Gabriel."

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

I told her that if she was quiet, the foxes might come back. She made not a sound, and didn't budge, but they were gone for the day. It was weeks before she got a look at them, and when she did, she saw the male hunting, and was as much in thrall as me.

We rode our bikes out to the Kaw that first day, after we gave up on the foxes, 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 squirmed. "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 two months, 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. I threw some of the ashes on the river.

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 rested against my neck. We stood so long my legs got tired and the sun dipped down and the air cooled. 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 couldn't stop. She told her about the Catholic school she attended, and her calligraphy, and her friends, and even recited two poems she'd written, which Mom praised. 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.

She always made me stop a block from her house. She would never explain why, the same way she would never talk about her bruises. To arrange anything I had to leave notes for her 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 evergreen bushes in front of her porch, stuck into the fork of a branch, in where you couldn't find it unless you knew exactly where to reach. It was the thickest of their bushes, and always scraped me. We had to do this because she wouldn't let me call. Mrs. Acker eavesdropped on Julia's phone calls, and Julia was afraid of what her Mom would do if she found out about me. She had frightened off other friends of Julia's, and those weren't even boys.

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, Cindy, was covering for her. Every so often Cindy would call up and say that Julia's Mom had just phoned and what excuse the friend had used ("Julia's in the bathroom", "Julia's outside"). Julia would wait a few minutes and call her Mom back and repeat the excuse Cindy had given.

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 onto me, or me onto her, that's all, like a limb on a tree, and we knew each other. 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 Mrs. Acker let her stay overnight. We were always careful to have Melody ask, not me.

Julia was there, and familiar, in such a way that the future was never a consideration. 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, who I knew was 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, where Maria had lived, and said we would have to talk to her mother in a day or two. Before that Mrs. Acker figured out where her daughter had gone, 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. I think her mother was the reason Julia used to wake up screaming sometimes. I'd hear her, and go upstairs, and hold her, or find Mom already there, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"I'm fine," Julia always said. "It was only a bad dream." She never explained what had actually happened in them, to frighten her awake.

"If you need someone, call me," my Mom would say.

The first few times, Mom waited for me in the second-floor hall. I suppose she could have been checking to make sure I didn't spend the night in Julia's room, but I don't think so. She just wanted to say something like, "Don't hurt that girl. She needs time and patience."

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 stayed put. She kept putting off our move-out month. This was a problem between us. I was always ready for the next step before she was, whether it was sex, or living together, or marriage, or children.

I finally lost patience. We were still virgins and I said I wouldn't wait. She gave in, and we started screwing on the quiet. When we did, I was like a starving man, given food for the first time. I couldn't get enough. For a while Melody was our lookout. If someone showed up, she'd call the teenager's phone (there was an extension in Julia's bedroom) from the main phone. Mostly, we picked our times carefully enough that we didn't have to hurry into our clothes 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 knew what we were doing, and helped us hide it from Mom, but without letting us know that he knew. He was playing the most complicated game of all, I suppose.

I wanted to live in 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 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 tiny 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 than I'd expected.

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. She was too proud, and I was too timid, to apologize first.

Sometimes on the weekend if I had time I'd visit my dad's studio, above the garage. I got distracted because it faced 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 looked for something she didn't find. She closed the cabinet door, turned, and saw me. We watched each other for a few seconds. Then she blew me a kiss and disappeared.

She came out the back door and let the screen door slam, which she almost never did. I remember that she was barefoot. I always noticed when she was, because her feet were the most perfect I'd ever seen. She crossed the lawn to the garage. A moment later I heard her feet on the stairs. I stood and faced the door, and she stopped there and looked at me for a few seconds, about the same amount of time she'd looked at me from the bathroom.

"Julia," I said.

"I can't live this way," she said. "I think about you all the time. Come help me pack. I can't stand being apart any more. It hurts too much." She turned and walked back down the stairs, and I followed.

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

"Moving in with him?" he asked Julia.

"Yes."

"I wondered how long before you came to your senses." He came to her and took the suitcases out of her hands and set them on the floor and wrapped her in his arms. "Come by here and eat dinner like this boyfriend of yours, will you?" he said to her. "If he gets out of line, I want to know. I love you, little girl. I hope you know that."

She nodded her head.

"How are we going to explain this to Mom?" I asked.

"Don't worry. She thinks people who love each other should -- love each other. In a week or two she'll be leaving food on your doorstep." He picked up the two suitcases and headed for the door. "Get the rest of your things," he said to Julia. "I'll drive you over."

When we had Julia's stuff in our apartment, we barely had room to sit at the table, and I was discouraged.

"Time you heard how your mother and I got together," Dad said. "I'll be right back."

He returned with a six-pack, and shared it with us, and stayed until midnight, telling stories about how he met Mom, and how they were with each other at our age, but it was more complete than the story she used to tell us when we were little. He gave us the adult version. When he finished the story he left, because, he said, he didn't want Mom to worry about him, or us, but the real reason was to leave Julia and me together on our first night. The last thing he said was,

"Don't worry. Just lay low for a couple of days, then pretend nothing happened. Let her bring it up."