He is ten years old. He is asleep.
The sound is wrong. That is the first thing. Not a loud sound — not the kind that snaps you upright with your heart slamming. Just a sound that is wrong. A door, maybe. A weight on a floorboard.
He lies there for a moment in the dark.
Then the other sounds come.
His father's voice, in the hallway, saying something Gideon cannot make out. Then not his father's voice — different voices, more than one, lower and harder and carrying a quality that even at ten he recognizes as intent. Then his mother, and her voice is not a question.
He gets out of bed. He does not know why. He just does.
Maya's room is across the hall. Her door is open two inches, the way she likes it — she is seven and she does not like full dark. The strip of light from the hallway falls across her bed. She is sitting up, awake, looking at the strip of light with the absolute stillness of a child who has understood that something is happening and is waiting to be told it is all right.
She sees him in her doorway. "Gideon," she whispers.
He puts his finger to his lips.
He crosses to her. He gets her out of bed, and she is small and warm and she holds his hand with both of hers. He takes her to the closet. He puts her in the back corner behind the hanging clothes. He tells her, very quietly: "Don't come out. Don't make noise. Whatever you hear, you stay here."
She looks at him with her dark eyes. "Are you coming back?"
"Yes."
He closes the closet door.
He does not go back.
This is the part that visits him — not in dreams, because he does not dream about it, but in the flat geography of a Tuesday afternoon when his hands are idle, when the operating room is quiet, when there is nothing demanding his attention and the sealed compartments become less sealed.
He is ten years old. He closes his sister's closet door. He goes into the hallway.
He does not know what he was going to do. He has never known. He was ten. There was nothing he could have done.
He just could not stay in the room.
This is where the memory always ends. Not because he has suppressed what came after, but because some part of his mind has decided, with the particular mercy of self-preservation, that the beginning is enough. The beginning contains everything.
Everything after it is simply the world as it became