I still remember how Bonmot’s generous drum of a laugh, deep and clear, often drew disapproving looks from the students studying nearby. And yet even then, during what I considered retreats from the exhausting carnality of my “normal” life, Mary Sabon was with us, folded into the pages of the grade book Duncan kept with him. There never really is a finite beginning, is there? No real starting point to anything. Beginnings are continually beginning. Time is just a joke played by watchmakers to turn a profit. Through memory, Time becomes conjoined so that I see Mary as a physical presence at those lunches, leaning against Duncan, trying to get his attention.

She is everywhere now. I am, almost literally, nowhere.

5

Can a childhood memory be misconstrued as starting over? I don’t think so. Not if I tell it this way:

The forests outside Stockton remain as real to me as the humid, fungi-laden streets of Ambergris, maybe more so. The dark leaves, the mottled trunks, the deep green shadows reflected on the windows of our house, as of some preternatural presence. All sorts of trees grew in Stockton, but the difference between the staid oaks that lined our street and the misshapen, twisted, coiled welter of tree limbs in the forest seemed profound. It both reassured us and menaced us in our youth: limitless adventure, fear of the unknown.

Our house lay on the forest’s edge. The trees stretched on for hundreds of miles, over hills and curving down through valleys. Various were the forest’s names, from the Western Forest to the Forest of Owls to Farely’s Forest, after the man who had first explored the area. Stockton had been nestled comfortably on its eastern flank for centuries, feeding off the timber, the sap, the animals that took shelter there.

By the time I had turned thirteen and Duncan was nine, we had made the forest our own. We had colonized our tiny corner of it—cleared paths through it, made shelters from fallen branches, even started a tree house. Dad never enjoyed the outdoors, but sometimes we could persuade him to enter the forest to see our latest building project. Mom had a real fear of the forest—of any dark place, which may have come from growing up in Ambergris. (I never had the sense that growing up in Ambergris had been a trauma for her—she lived there during very calm times—but it is true she never talked about it.)

One day, Duncan decided we should be more ambitious. We had made a crude map of what we knew of the forest, and the great expanse labeled “Unknown” irked him. The forest was one thing that could genuinely be thought of as his, the one area where he did not mimic me, where I followed his lead.