The hundred iron fighter-kings of Baltim had armies that rode on iron elephants; but one of those kings had a princess daughter with six fingers on her hand, and a white cat with six toes; she had a garden, and in the garden a lake without a bottom. They would begin to travel from the plains of Annu to the mountains of Zygo and because there was an infinity in between, never arrive. But they would cry out, topping each other; but the trees can sing, and they warn you about the tigers; but the water is warm and the ice ship melts. He thought of dangers, and planned for them; she invented escapes, at the last moment.

Her parents seemed hardly to notice this game, or so she then thought. She was surprised years later to find that her mother had kept a lot of the writings they had done, the drawings and the models, the chronologies and the maps. Most of the work was Ben’s, which was maybe why she had kept it. When Kit took it all from the cardboard box, she felt a strange vertigo: she recognized and remembered these things and at the same time saw them shrivel and shrink; what had once been big and vivid to her became small, and not only in size. He had done it all on little pieces of shoddy paper and card, in colored pencils; he had been just a child. It was like picking up the body of a bird, and being surprised to find it nearly weightless.

Between themselves she and Ben called their parents George and Marion, not Mom and Dad: they found it irresistible that their parents had the same names as the two ghosts who bedeviled Cosmo Topper on television. George! Marion! the dapper little Englishman would cry in exasperation or befuddlement at his mischievous, unflappable dead friends, up to their tricks again; and the Malones would laugh and look at one another. Their George and Marion were so much like those ghosts: untouchable, it seemed, so blithe and insubstantial.

In the summer before Kit went into high school, they moved into a new development strung along the banks of the Wabash River. Behind their split-level house were young woods, and a steep gully going down to the riverbank and the little brown river. The trees hung over it and lifted their slimy knuckled toes out of it and the undergrowth was dense.

“Bugs,” Ben said as they climbed down. “Bugs and more bugs.”

“You don’t say bugs,” Kit said, coming down after him with the collecting stuff, the jars and the cotton soaked in carbon tet, notebook under her arm. “That’s the first thing they said. Bugs doesn’t mean anything.”

He smiled that serene smile of his, the one that meant he felt no need to respond and yet remained in the right. He had the net, and with it he brushed bugs—deerflies, mosquitoes—from his head.

Kit had been enrolled in a Catholic school for the coming year, St. Hedwige’s, and at registration was told that over the summer it would be her job to make an insect collection, fifty species at least, to be mounted, labeled, and brought to Biology class on the first day of school, which now was only a couple of weeks away.

She didn’t hate bugs, especially. She withdrew from them: ducked beneath the flight paths of hunting wasps, stayed far from June bugs and darning needles. Going down to the river just because that’s where they were, parting the layered leaves and upturning stones out of their sockets in the mud to find them, messing with them—she felt a deep reluctance that Ben made fun of. A girl’s reluctance, he implied, and it seemed to be so, for it was like the feeling that her own girl being was just then causing in her, unable to be ducked, her own swelling slug’s alien aliveness.

So she had let the days slide away, and read her small books, which were full of earth’s music and the river too, of course, and the murmurous haunts of flies on summer eves, but that was different, until it was August and her few specimens (a couple of June bugs she had found already dead and a great moonstone-colored luna moth she wrote a poem about) had already decayed, improperly mounted; and Ben started taking her down to the river in the mornings and the evenings.

“Listen,” he said, standing still in the green.

The noise really was ear-filling, an orchestra endlessly tuning, strings here, woodwinds there.

“Good hunting,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. At first she only followed; he was fearless and soon fascinated by the job, finding amazing beings in the city of leaves that he might have seen at any time but never had, a robber fly, a cicada killer (huge slow wasp like an attack helicopter), or a camel cricket with glossy russet hump. He learned to step up to a hornet or a wasp as though he meant to tame it, and slip the net smoothly over it like an executioner’s hood; he made Kit try it.

“He’s gonna get me, I know it.”

“He’s not. He doesn’t even know you exist.”

“I got him I got him.”

“Easy. Don’t catch his wing, don’t hurt him.”

“Hurt him! We’re trying to kill him.”

“Give him a little shake. There, now he’s dropped in. Now the cap.”

In the jar she had caught, yes, quite a specimen, a beetle painted in clown colors and in fact named (they looked it up as they sat to drink the Cokes he had brought too) a harlequin. So there.

And this was how she learned to be unafraid of the world, at least unafraid of this modality of it: how she became a hunter and an explorer and a namer, a taxonomist. By summer’s end she was crashing through the shallows and the reeds in pursuit of some glamorous something whose wing-hum she had heard, digging into a black crevice where a centipede, not actually an insect, was escaping, one of a kind she hadn’t seen before and wanted. The more she learned the more she wanted to know, and wanting to know displaced fear. Her poem “The Split Level” would be about that: about a woman learning the names of flowers, and thus (she believes) coming closer to nature, and really coming closer too, even though by means of the one thing nature doesn’t possess of itself, its names.

The day before school started she came to her mother (who was washing dishes) and told her this weird thing had happened and she was scared: her stomach hurt and there was blood on her underpants.

Well that’s not something to be scared of, her mother said (Kit remembers how she went on washing her flowered plates and standing them upright in the rack like soldiers or tombstones, not alarmed or apparently unsettled at all). She began an explanation, saying Now you know you have this hole there, not the peepee one but the other one. Kit nodded and listened to the rest of what her mother said, and accepted the hug and pat her mother offered (Big girl now, my baby’s a big girl) and then went back to her room; and as though she were catching a bright centipede in its damp crevice she discovered what she had in fact not known before, that she had a hole there: not how far it went, though, or where it led.

How can you know anything true about someone when your memories stop just as you are becoming a person yourself? She thought Ben had been beautiful and strong, that his strength and his beauty were like a horse he rode: once a pretty pony, it grew into a tall stallion, then gone, bearing him away. That’s what she remembered, not knowing if it was true or false or neither.

Home from high school on a day in spring, taking off his watch at the kitchen sink to wash his hands; his thick dark hair just cut, what they called then a “Princeton cut” for some reason, just long enough to part and brush to one side. Pink button-down shirt, a Gant, only one of the brand names he was loyal to; an inch of white undershirt showing in its cleft, its sleeves turned back one graceful turn. People say I can remember as though it were yesterday, but you can never remember yesterdays as clearly as these moments that are not yesterday or any day, but always now. His pleated gray slacks, pegged at the ankle, revealing now and then like a mockingbird’s flicked tail another inch of white: his socks between the black loafers and the breaking flannel cuff. She remembered his clothes better than she remembered her own. A slim gold belt, buckled (it was the style that season) at the side.