Of the Silence, we had heard even less—a whisper among the adults, a sense that we should not ask about it. Even in Stockton, so far from what had happened—separated by both time and geography—there seemed to be a fear that, somehow, the event might be resurrected by the most casual of comments. No, I discovered the Silence much later—only learned during my brief attendance at the Hoegbotton School for Advanced Studies, for example, that the annotations in Ambergrisian history books (A.S. and B.S.) stood for After Silence and Before Silence. Of Samuel Tonsure’s journal, so inextricably linked to the Silence, I heard not even a whisper until Duncan educated me. (I may have given you the most personalized and eccentric education on the Silence in the history of Ambergris!)

We did not learn much about any of this from Mom. For a good portion of our youth in Ambergris, rare was the day that she rose before noon. Sometimes we barely saw her. She had so many rooms to hide in in that house. Her internal clock, her rhythms, became nocturnal and erratic. She continued to paint, but sometimes we would return home to find that instead of a canvas she had painted the wall of an unused room in a welter of dissonant colors. Until the basement began to flood with river water every time it rained, she loved to sit down there in the damp and read by an old oil lamp we’d brought with us from Stockton, an heirloom dating back to the time of the pirate whalers. (When she was there, Janice and I would sometimes join her. We’d pull up chairs and listen to the whispering gasp of the river water as it tried to get in through the floorboards, and we’d read our books or do our homework. Mom rarely said anything, but there was something about being together in the same room that felt comfortable. I think she enjoyed it, too, but I don’t know for sure.)

I do remember that in our mother’s absence one of my aunts tried to help orient us to the city, telling us, “There’s a Religious Quarter, a Merchant Quarter, and an old Bureaucratic Quarter, and then there are places you don’t go no matter what. Stay out of them.” Faced with such vague warnings, we had to discover Ambergris in those early days by exploring for ourselves or asking our classmates.