A May day in March, the temperature in the 70s, and the world still dormant. Ada named the plants and trees as they walked, dozens of bushes and flowers, and even weeds: henbit, chickweed, duckweed. Wyatt didn't see how she recognized them in their winter sleep. Only the crocus had thrust its way up.

They picked their way down the hill, over the cracked and broken, tilted slabs of the sidewalk. From the upstairs window of a Queen Anne with an uneven porch and peeling paint came the sound of flamenco guitar, and they stopped to listen -- a dozen bars, a pause, the same bars repeated with confidence, then played a third time without hesitation, straight to the end of the song, and a flourish. A pause, the rustling of paper, and another piece, begun as haltingly as the first one. Ada stood on her toes and kissed Wyatt.

He said, "That's the first time you've kissed me outdoors."

"There's usually someone around. I don't like people watching. Besides, kissing when we're vertical isn't nearly as much fun."

"I agree."

"Nasty man. I only meant that you're too tall for me."

"Can this relationship be saved?"

"I don't know," she said. "I'll have to think about it." Then, "Yes."

They turned left and walked the half mile to the deli. The dwarf was working the counter. Wyatt couldn't understand the man when he spoke; all the sounds seemed to run together without syllables. A scar ran from nose to upper lip, and his fingers were strangely shortened and misshapen, the nails almost nonexistent. Wyatt didn't comprehend how Ada could love the crippled and freakish, or how they responded to her treating them as not-different, or why she thought they were no further outside the norm than herself. She was chattering with the little man. She was outside the "cave", so she was cheerful; the cave was the feeling of being alone, of not being understood. With Wyatt she was never there, she was always in the sunlight. Wyatt had never felt or imagined this -- what to call it? Isolation? Was there a word for it? No one was warmer and more open, so why did she feel such alienation?

They took their eclairs to the park and ate them in silence, sitting on the bench. The sun was lowering onto the hill, and cool air flowed for a moment. Wyatt crumpled the pieces of flimsy wax paper that had wrapped the food and put them in the paper bag and crumpled it in turn.

"This is my favorite time of day," she said.

"You said dawn was."

"It varies."

"Depending on what?"

"What time of day it is."

"That's what makes you special," he said. "Your gratitude. You don't take anything for granted."

"Do you know why I couldn't resist you? I tried, you know. I couldn't. Do you want to know why?"

"Sure."

"Because when I came here, you were the only person who believed in me. It's because you say things like that. What you just said."

"Anyone would, if they got to know you."

"I love you," she said, "but you've confused me with someone else."

He carried the wadded paper bag to the trash receptacle and discarded it, then stood and listened to the buzzing of a fly. She liked him to tell her these things about herself, because they confirmed how he felt about her, but she never believed what he said. He didn't care. If she had believed him, then she wouldn't have been Ada. He turned and looked at her. She was daydreaming.

He sat next to her on the bench. "What are you thinking about?"

"My brother. I was walking to your place this evening and someone called out 'Henry!', and I've been thinking about him ever since. I miss wandering around the forest with him. He loved the forest."

He took her hand in his.

"He likes to poke around and look at things," she said. "He's incredibly observant. Even at night, he'll know exactly where a bug hole is in an embankment and he'll shine his flashlight on it, and half the time, there's the bug, sitting in its doorway... He used to go to a cabin in the forest. It was old and falling down, but he loved that place. It was far off and hard to get to. He'd go there by himself, and sit for hours and listen, and cook meals, and draw pictures of everything, all the plants and insects and the mountains and clouds... I miss him. He made toys for me, and taught me things, and helped me with my chores."

"My brother and I were always fighting. One time he heated up a nickel in the oven until it was red hot and then slipped a chisel under it and flung it at me. That's how I got that scar on my forearm."

"I wondered where that came from. How strange. We didn't argue much. Rarely. Sometimes I would ignore him, or refuse to talk to him, or even go to school separately, until I got over whatever made me angry. Sometimes he'd sabotage my chores when he was angry at me. But we didn't do it that much. There wasn't much -- room -- for it; things had to be done, and you did them, you know? It was a difficult place to live. And there wasn't much to argue about in such a simple place, anyway, I suppose, but, well, we usually talked, or else we avoided talking about whatever it was. It was a habit. In my entire life I don't think I've ever heard mother or father raise their voices."

"Is that why you always walk out when I get angry?"

"Yes. I never know what to do. I never learned to fight like that."

"You do fight with me," he said. "Sometimes you hammer away. The difference is, you get quieter, instead of louder. You're polite, and you don't sound like you're arguing. Insistent, maybe that's the word. You won't quit."

She laughed. "I'll have to watch myself. I'll try to do better."

"It's fine. I don't mind."

She said nothing.

"Tell me about Henry," he said.

"He's more outgoing than father or me. Father never says more than two sentences together, unless it's a story. He's a wonderful storyteller. When he tells a story, his tongue loosens and he loses his shyness, and the words flow. How he fell in love with mother. Their wedding. His trip to Europe after the war, to help rebuild the bombed-out places. The flood in Mexico. That sort of thing. Stories about his parents and grandparents, but never about prison."

"When he was a conscientious objector?"

"Yes. I think he emigrated to get Henry away from the draft. It didn't get him out, but at least they took him as a C.O. I'm glad I'm not a man. Those choices must be hard."

"Being a man is easy," he said. "Men don't have to give birth. What. What does that look mean?"

"Don't make fun. I love children."

"Think what you have to do to get them. Like pushing a basketball through your nostril."

She leaned against him, her forehead against one of his cheeks, a hand against the other. "You were such good fortune. I travelled so far, and I found you. I'll miss you. Will you write? Every day?"

"Yes."

"I decided to stop arguing, but I have to tell you this once what an empty place there will be when you go. You're as close to me as my breath. Now I'm not one person, but only half of two, and when you go, you'll be taking half of me away. Now I promise not to talk about it any more."

"Ada -- "

"No. I won't make you justify yourself any more. I won't. Don't say anything. Let's talk about -- oh, ask me something I never told you. Go ahead," she said. "Anything."

"The journals. I always wonder what you wrote."

"You would ask that... No, it's all right. They were mostly about what I was doing, or my family, my chores, the books I was reading, but I used to write stories. I had an imaginary friend, a hero who would rescue me when I got in trouble. He was a Spanish grandee. He had a white horse and a sword of Toledo steel. His name was Zodon De Castellon." She waited, but he didn't follow up. "I wrote other stories, too. I wrote one about a bee who fell in love with a boy."

"A bee?"

"A honeybee. She used to land on his sleeve, and he would ignore her, or brush her off, but she loved him, so she taught herself to talk, and then they would have long conversations, and he fell in love with her, too. She brought him honey from the hive, and he trusted her enough to let her fly into his mouth and put it on his tongue. She used to sleep in his hair, and he always had to wake her up in the morning before he took his bath, so she wouldn't drown."

"What was her name?"

"Bettina. Bettina the bee. One day at school a girl flirted with the boy, and Bettina was jealous, and the next time she brought him honey, she stung him on the tongue. He told her to go away. He never wanted to see her again. She tried to apologize, but he got a flyswatter and chased her away. Later he was sorry, and he looked for her everywhere, but none of the other bees had learned human language, so they didn't know what he was asking. She died of a broken heart, but he never found out. He thought she'd flown away and left him. It was very sad."

When he'd finished laughing, he said, "I'm not making fun of your story. It's touching, but it's funny." He wiped the tears away.

"Yes. It's a little-girl story. I wrote it when I was small."

They talked about her father and brother and mother, her tree house back home, her favorite horse there, the strange American couple who had pitched a teepee near her house in Monteverde just before she left, Wyatt's brother's letters from school in New Orleans, the way Wyatt had come to take up piano. They had talked about these many times, and handled them like well-used worry beads, followed by less familiar things: Charlie Parker, the Motown sound, the arias of the Queen of the Night (he was still trying to educate her about music); dorm food and its shortcomings; East Lawrence and why it should be so much poorer than West Lawrence; The Red Badge of Courage; her mother's way of baking bread; Saint Theresa of Avila, spy planes, and the eccentricities of Ada's French professor; the temporary job Wyatt had found, taking care of lab rats under the football stadium; the car he was buying for the move to L.A., and how he worried that it might break on the way; the names of birds (she reeled off "resplendent quetzal, immaculate antbird, shining honeycreeper, snowy cotinga, anhinga, tinamou, merlin, potoo, bobolink, dickcissel, volcano junco"); why the haloes on Buddhas and Bodhisattvas should be shown as vertical while the haloes on Christian saints were horizontal or angled; the differences between two-stroke and four-stroke engines; the changes in his dreams on reaching puberty; which things he should take to L.A., which he should give to her, and which he should throw away. He asked for a good English translation of Don Quixote but she couldn't recommend one; she'd only read it in Spanish.

They roused from their trance when neither of them could think of anything to say. Traffic was nonexistent. A nighthawk flew back and forth above them, veering from side to side and croaking. Midnight. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

"We'd better go," he said.

They were halfway up the hill, crossing a driveway, when a car hurtled toward them, backing out. Wyatt pulled Ada out of its path and yelled, but the car kept coming, at such speed that even after the driver slammed on the brakes, its back bumper dented a car parked on the other side of the street. The driver, a black man with a large Afro, shifted out of reverse and floored it and almost overran the curb before he regained control.

"I wonder why he's in such a hurry." He watched the car run a stop sign at the bottom of the block. "Stay here," he said, and walked up the driveway.

He was back a moment later. "Listen." He stared to make sure she was paying attention. "Knock on doors until someone answers. Tell them to call an ambulance. And call the police. Someone's hurt." He ran back up the driveway.

There were two of them, a black woman and a white man, both naked, lying between some bushes and a small house. The front door was open, the interior dark. Wyatt watched for a moment, looking for movement. Either no one was home, or if they were, they were unlikely to bother him, so he returned his attention to the couple. The woman's legs were across the man's. She was face down, he was face up. There was no chance of finding any i.d. so he could speak to them by name. He looked for spurting blood and saw none. Both were breathing, but the man's was uneven. He was the more badly hurt. The woman had no obvious injuries. She was beginning to stir.

He went to work on the man, feeling his stomach and chest with the tips of his fingers, opening the eyelids and looking at the pupils. Definitely broken ribs and a broken nose and maybe a broken jaw. At least the pupils of the eyes were the same size. Wyatt felt the sides and back of the head gently but found no obvious damage. His hands and the cuffs of his shirt were stained with the man's blood.

The woman was stirring, and he pushed her shoulders and said, "Don't move, I'm here to help," but she wouldn't stay down. He helped her up and wrapped his shirt around her and settled her against the wall.

"What's your name?" he asked, but she only moaned. "What happened?"

She didn't answer. She looked at him blankly and began to get up. He pushed her down.

"Don't move. You're hurt. What happened?"

She stared.

"What's your name? Do you know what day it is?"

"Cheryl."

"Can you sit still?" he asked.

She nodded.

He went back to the man, whose breathing had steadied. The blood bubbled in his nostrils as he exhaled. Wyatt felt for a pulse; it was stronger and steadier than he'd expected.

Ada was asking him a question and stopping in the middle. Wyatt looked up and saw her shocked, pale face and moved between her and the man, partly concealing him.

"Go back to the sidewalk," he said. "Wait for the ambulance and show them where to come. Do it now." She turned, head hanging, and walked away.

Wyatt looked at the man again and decided it would be best to do nothing, sat back on his heels and watched the man breathe while he planned what to tell the paramedics.

When he heard the siren and the ambulance pulled into the driveway he was waiting. "Bring blankets," he said. "A white male and a black female. Both nude. They were unconscious when we found them. Probably fifteen minutes ago. They couldn't have been here much longer, someone was leaving. I think they've been beaten. The male is in worse shape, still unconscious. Broken nose, fractured ribs, a lot of bruises. The woman may be able to answer questions by now."

One paramedic examined the man. The other took the shirt from the woman and handed it to Wyatt, who put it back on. It was sticky with blood. The paramedic wrapped a blanket around the woman. "What's your name?"

"Cheryl." She reached in her mouth and pulled out a tooth.

"What's his name?"

"Owen."

"What happened?"

"My boyfriend." She gestured vaguely. "Not him." She nodded at the unconscious man. "Owen's not my boyfriend caught me in bed with Owen. Baseball bat. I can't talk. My head hurts." She dropped the tooth on the ground.

"Where are you hurt?"

"Everywhere."

"Can you walk?" She nodded. "Bring her along," he said to Wyatt.

The paramedics lifted the man onto a gurney and rolled him down the driveway. Cheryl leaned on Wyatt and limped to the ambulance and took a seat on the bench inside. She closed her eyes without looking at the man, an oxygen mask now strapped to his face.

Wyatt turned. Ada was standing behind him, rigid, staring into the ambulance. He touched her on the shoulder. "Go over there," he said, pointing to a spot where she wouldn't be able to see the hurt man. "They'll need to back out."

The police arrived, blocking the street. The ambulance driver gestured the cars out of the way, closed the doors, then backed out and turned on the siren.

Wyatt hated police stations, but he had to spend two hours in one, waiting, and then answering questions. Watching Ada was the worst. After she had given her name and residence, she spent the time sitting on a chair staring at the floor, her hands holding her knees.

A cop gave them a ride home. Wyatt seated Ada on the sofa.

"Ada. I know how much that, how much... Ada, you have to talk to me... Come on. Say something." He waited a minute. It seemed longer. "You have to let me help. Talk to me... Ada. You're worrying me. Say something."

"I never knew what it was like. The photographs, the stories, it's not the same. Oh, that poor man." She hid her face in her hands and rocked. "That poor man. Why would anyone do that to him?"

"I don't know."

"I don't understand," she wailed. "I don't understand."

"Ada. Maybe you should go to bed now. Sleep."

"How can I sleep? That poor man. That poor woman. Oh, Wyatt, what is wrong with us? How can people do these things?"

He made tea, though coffee was her usual drink; he wanted her to sleep. They sat without speaking on the sofa. He drew her against him, her head on his shoulder, and waited a very long time, until she stopped moving and her breathing slowed. He picked her up, surprised again at how little she weighed, and carried her to his room and undressed her, lifting her to get her jeans off. She smiled as if drugged, rolled over and sighed, and fell back to sleep.

He went in the bathroom and opened the window and turned on the shower.

He was eleven that year. His neighbor Buddy was a brute, and all but the older children avoided him. Buddy spent his time dreaming up cruelty. Wyatt was a favorite target, for no reason except that their houses were on the same block, and Buddy had a father who beat him. Wyatt had heard one of the beatings, and heard Buddy sobbing and pleading for his old man to stop, and Wyatt had made the mistake of mentioning it, of trying to be sympathetic. Buddy hadn't taken it that way.

Wyatt was playing in the garage. He was facing the back, and heard something and turned around. Buddy was there, holding a rope.

"You see this?"

Wyatt nodded.

"You know what I'm going to do?"

Wyatt nodded.

Buddy looked surprised. "What?"

"Nothing. You're not going to do anything."

"Wrong. I'm going to hang you." He threw the rope over a rafter and started tieing a knot in one end. He was trying to make a hangman's noose, but he didn't know how.

Wyatt looked around. His father had some two-by-fours he'd salvaged, leaning against the wall. Wyatt edged closer to them.

"Fuck it," the boy said, and turned.

Wyatt stepped in with the shortest piece of lumber, and swung the way he did when he played baseball. The end of the board caught the boy next to the eye. He screamed, and the echoes rang from the walls. Wyatt saw that the eye was bleeding. There was a nail in the end of the lumber, and something white clinging to it. Wyatt dropped the board and stared at the boy writhing on the ground.

The surgeons had to remove what remained of the eye, and the next time he showed up at school, Buddy was wearing a patch. The incident was handled among the parents of the two boys and the police. It was clear what had happened. No charges were pressed, no referrals made for counselling, and nothing was printed in the newspaper. Buddy began to show up at school with more bruises. Some days he didn't show up at all. A few months later his family moved away.

Buddy stayed away from Wyatt, but he had two friends, and they followed Wyatt after school, and caught him in a vacant lot. One accosted him while the other moved behind him. The one in front of him talked, the one behind him got down on his hands and knees, and then the one in front pushed him so that he fell backwards. They sat on him and pounded him until he managed to bite one on the hand, and kick the other in the crotch. They ran off.

He had two black eyes. The next day at school they taunted him for fighting like a sissy, and warned him to expect the same thing again, when he wasn't looking. He said nothing and waited. He studied them. He couldn't beat them when they were together. He had to make an example of one. That was what he needed, an example, so both would stay away.

He stole the hammer from his father's tool box and hid it in a storm drain one morning. That afternoon he hurried ahead of one of the boys and retrieved the hammer and stuck it inside his belt, at his back, and waited. The fight was strange because they didn't work themselves up to it. It was the only fight Wyatt ever had that didn't begin with insults. He walked toward his enemy, his hands at his sides, leaving himself wide open. The boy grabbed Wyatt's shirt and cocked his fist. That was the moment Wyatt had planned for, when his enemy was focused on him, and as he let himself be hit he reached for the hammer. He struck as hard as he could, trying to break in half the hand that was holding his shirt. The boy backed away, howling and cradling his forearm with the other hand. A detached part of Wyatt noted that the hurt hand was already swollen.

"I'll kill you," Wyatt said, trying to sound calm. "Leave me alone, or I'll kill you." The boy cringed. It didn't give Wyatt any satisfaction; he had no feeling one way or the other. This was something to be carried out. He hit the hand again.

The police showed up at his house an hour later, and the nightmare began. It didn't make any difference that he'd been beaten up once, and that they'd promised to beat him up a second time, that they'd taunted him, or that the other boy had landed the first punch. Wyatt had planned it too carefully. Someone used the word "premeditated". The possibility of a group home was mentioned, and counseling was ordered.

The counselling was a way the adults had of ganging up on him, the way Buddy's friends had, but more subtly. Wyatt wouldn't believe that he hadn't been justified in counterattacking. But the adults were too much. He learned to shut up and sit tight. His parents transferred him to another school, but the students there knew about the eye and the hand, and they avoided him, except the bad ones, and Wyatt avoided them. He had few friends for the next several years. By high school his reputation had faded, though not completely. The nice girls turned down his requests for dates, always politely, always saying that they were busy, or getting involved with someone, or that they could only date a Christian. He could almost predict the excuse any given good girl would use.

The girls who were drawn to him usually smoked and drank, but he wasn't interested in them. The summer after his freshman year there was an exception, a college girl, Emily, who smoke and drank and doped and fucked. She worked behind the counter at the drugstore where he bought comic books. One day she said, "You're dense. I've been trying to get your attention for two weeks."

She spent the evenings for the rest of the summer "teaching him to sin," as she put it. When she went back to school in the fall, he started taking out the bad girls who showed any interest. After Emily, they were boring. They didn't have personalities yet. They all talked about Elvis, and gossiped about each other, and complained about their parents. He didn't want these bimbos, he wanted the good girls, the smart ones, the ones who would say something interesting, the virgins. He wanted to court them; he wanted them to fall in love with him. But they wouldn't have him, and he had to settle for the sluts. Their conversation before and after sex was always an excruciating waste of time. His senior year he applied to colleges no one else planned to attend.

He scrubbed until he felt clean again. His clothes he left on the bathroom floor. In fresh jeans and shirt and a jacket he sat barefoot on the balcony in the cold dawn air, thinking of nothing, everything in his head muddled and colliding. Ada had taught him a lesson, without intending to, or even knowing that she was, but he didn't know yet what the lesson might be. What was he to do? She had cancelled mores he'd learned, and which he had believed to be true. Why should we forever be passing on the hatred and violence we've received, to the next in line? There had to be other methods, and she could teach him them. But now he was moving a thousand miles away.

Hours later she found him there. She spoke, startling him, startling him out of his immobility. "Have you been awake all this time?"

"I wish you hadn't seen that."

She knelt next to him. "I know, and I love you for it. But you can't protect me. You know, until I came to this place, I had never heard a voice raised in anger. These things are hard for me, but you can't protect me. I'll learn somehow."

It was her turn. She took him by the hand and led him to bed and covered him. He closed his eyes and slept.