So what about rule four? Who tells you when it's okay to jump?

"Can you keep a secret? Like your aunt?" I used English. I didn't trust my French and it had to be crystal clear.

Alejandra tilted her head to one side. "Will it hurt me? Will it hurt my family?"

I swallowed. "Not keeping it could hurt your family." She frowned and I said, "I would never hurt them, but those who are after me might hurt them, getting to me."

"Okay. I can keep a secret." She leaned slightly closer to me than her aunt and whispered, "And who tells their parents everything?"

Ouch.

"All right. Let's start with this box."

I jumped to Sam's living room. He wasn't in there but I heard movement in the kitchen. I called out, "Sam, it's Griffin."

"Jesus!" I heard a dish clatter across the bottom of the sink. He appeared in the door, wiping his hands with a dish towel. "Everything okay?"

"It's fine. These are Consuelo's," I said, raising the box slightly. I put it on the table. "She changed her mind about the traveling thing."

"Oh? You guys someplace private?"

"You ever been there?"

"For the funeral."

I stared at him. "I didn't know you knew her then."

He shrugged. "Just. I found them. Their bodies."

Oh. "Well, we're in the jungle, up the hillside from the house."

He nodded.

"Okay, then. I'll be back."

Alejandra was sitting on Consuelo's suitcase, her head between her knees. Consuelo was fanning her with a hat.

I knelt beside her. "You okay?"

"Jesus Cristo!" She sat up. "Mi tia dicemy aunt says you just traveled to California."

"Verdad." In the week I'd known her, I'd never seen her lose track of which language she was speaking.

"And back again?"

"Yeah."

"How?"

"Beats me. Can I have the suitcase?" I pointed. She stood up abruptly and Consuelo steadied her. I took the case and jumped.

Sam was sitting in the corner, arms crossed. I put the suitcase down against the wall. "What took so long?" "Alejandra."

He frowned, then said, "Consuelo's niece? Is she there?" "Yeah. Only her, but we didn't tell her first. Only asked for secrecy. She's a little freaked."

His eyebrows went up. "Well, it do take some getting used to."

I jumped back. Alejandra flinched but it didn't seem to be fear. Just the sudden appearance of something unexpected, caught from the corner of your eye.

"So, you're going to take my aunt now?"

"That's the plan."

"Have you ever done this before, with a person?"

I shook my head. "When we were discussing it, back at Sam's place, I tried it with a kitten. Worked fine."

"My aunt is larger than a kitten. How do I know you won't leave part of her behind?"

"That's just gross," I said. But it worried me a bit. The heaviest thing I'd carried was the carts we'd used. They only weighed about thirtyfive pounds, though, big as they were.

Alejandra said, "Try it with me first."

"What?"

Consuelo, watching us both carefully, said, "iQue dijiste?"

Alejandra pursed her lips and I realized she didn't want to tell her aunt, that Consuelo would protest.

I stepped up to Alejandra from behind and put my arms around her. I only came up to her shoulder blades; my cheek pressed against her spine through the thin cotton of her sundress. She smelled wonderful.

Consuelo said something sharply and took a step toward us. I jumped.

I staggered a bit, but we were both in Sam's living room.

Alejandra gasped and staggered, too, and I steadied her kept her from falling over. After a moment she said, "Uh, Guillermo, you can let go."

"Ah." I stepped slightly away from her, then caught her again as her knees buckled.

Sam and I helped her sit on the couch.

"Where's Consuelo?" said Sam. "Is everything all right?"

"You explain," I said to Alejandra, and jumped.

Consuelo was talking fast and furious with lots of gestures and I couldn't get one word in ten, much less meaning. Well, I didn't understand the sentences but I sure understood the sentiment.

I kept trying to calm her down but finally I just jumped behind her, like playing tag with Dad in our exercises, put my arms around her, and jumped.

We both staggered forward in Sam's living room, but Sam steadied Consuelo and Alejandra grabbed my arm.

Everyone was a little wideeyed, even me.

Deep breaths.

"You know," I said, "I'm hungry!"

Consuelo couldn't stand for anyone to "have hunger." She didn't even need it translated.

We ate out by the spring and Alejandra marveled at the dryness of the air and the trees and the rocky brown hills.

"iDonde estd lo verde?" she asked her aunt. Where is the green?

Consuelo got a stony look on her face. 'Wo tenemos agua, ni hay verde."

I realized what she was thinking about: her husband and son. No water, no green.

Alejandra realized it, too. "/Oh, perdoneme! No pense." I didn't think.

Consuelo waved her hand. 'Wo es importante." She said something else that I couldn't understand.

Alejandra translated. "She's glad she doesn't have to spend all that time on the buses. Even if it was terrifying."

"Travel Air Griffin. When you absolutely have to be there today."

"Greefin? Why Greefin?"

"Uh, that's my name. My real name. Consuelo and I chose Guillermo because they know my real name, the people who killed my parents. And Griffin is unusual. So, it's Guillermo, okay? I mean, you can call me Griffin in private, I guess."

"No," said Sam. "Go on as you mean to go on. She calls you two different things, it's easy to get mixed up. She calls you one thing, then she's not likely to make a mistake in front of someone else."

Alejandra nodded. "True. But going on? Are we meaning to go on?"

Sam switched to Spanish, asking Consuelo something, and the conversation broadened to include all three of them, but I didn't follow it. I was watching Alejandra. Waiting. Hoping.

Finally, she turned to me and said, "Well, GrifGuillermo. Do you want to live with me in La Crucesita? I have a small house behind the Hotel Villa Blanca, just across from ChaueBeach. There is a small room above the carport with spiderwebs." She shuddered. "But it could be cleaned out."

I nodded solemnly.

"You'd have to study hard and learn espanol because I'd be telling everyone you are a distant cousin on my mother's side, the Losadas. She's from Mexico City, not de el lado de mi familia de La Crucecita. And you would have to go to the beach often, to tan, so people would not call you el gringito."

I nodded more vigorously. "All right. I'll work hard and I'll keep up my home schooling. And I'll learn Spanespanol. And I can shop for you, in the United States if you want, or Thailand, or Lechlade, uh, our village back in Oxfordshire in England."

"Whoa, boy," said Sam. "You are going down to Oaxaca to disappear, not draw more attention to yourself."

My ears got hot and I stared at the table for a moment. "Uh, right."

Alejandra reached out and touched my arm. "I'm sure you will be a big help to me. You already speak French and English. Learn Spanish and I can put you to work in my agency. Or I'll find you work as a guide. Not to worry. But school will be your main job, comprendel Guillermo Losada?"

"Claro que si!"

"Excelente!" She smiled again. "I have an appointment this afternoon. We should return."

And so it went.

Alejandra, who was afraid of spiders (las aranas), had me do the initial clearing of my new room. Once all the webbing was down and the screens were covering all the windows, she pitched in with hot water and lemonscented cleanser. By the end of the week I had a cot, a dresser, and a small table (with bookshelves above) for a desk. A metal folding chair completed the suite. It wasn't air conditioned but the sea breezes made it quite comfortable.

I had very little to put in the dresser but that changed over time and, really, in the warm climate of Las Bahias de Huatulco, I didn't need much.

Alejandra not only began as she meant to go on, calling me Guillermo and never referring to me by my real name, but she also stopped talking to me in anything but Spanish, miming verbs, pointing to objects and naming them. Very rarely she would ill.u.s.trate a complicated verb conjugation by comparing it with French usage. She towed me along for the immersion cla.s.ses she ran at the resorts, too.

It took me three months to learn enough espanol that she began talking to me in French and English again. Three months later, she considered me fluent and it was another three months before I stopped sounding like a foreigner. By the end of my second year, most locals thought I'd been born in Oaxaca. I still looked European but so do many Mexicans without indio ancestors.

I worked for her agency half days, for which she paid me off the books. Three hours a day I worked on schoolwork, in English and French and Spanish. Spanish word problems for math. European history in French. Sciences in all of them. And I sketched, everywhere.

I was "that boy who draws" to everyonein5 the park before the church, at the marinas, on the beach. Most of it stayed in my sketchbooks but the wall of my room slowly acc.u.mulated the drawings that worked.

The nightmares were bad at first, but they slowly lessened in frequency. Twice, in that first month, I woke up, my heart pounding, staring around in the sandy wash of the Empty Quarter, that spot in the SonoranDesert where Sam had found me, b.l.o.o.d.y and unconscious.

The Spanish study helped. At least there was something to do when I woke up. I'd finished Don Quixote and was working my way through Arturo PerezReverte's books about Capitan Diego Alatriste. Or, I'd do a unit of math. Math was always good.

But it was probably a year before I slept all the way through the night.

In my second year there, I bought a boat, a little fibergla.s.s dinghy with oars, a daggerboard well, and a small, removable mast with a lateen sail. When I got it, there was a hole in the bow as big as my head and the sail was in tatters and there were no oars, no rudder, no daggerboard, and no life jackets. I spent a week running errands at the Santa Cruz Marina, translating, running to the store, and acting as a local guide. At the end of that I had the oars, two life jackets, a stained but intact Sunfish sail, and enough fibergla.s.s and resin to fix the stovein bow. I made a daggerboard and rudder out of cheap lumber, scavenged from construction sites, and fibergla.s.sed it.

Alejandra had doubts. "You could drown!"

I raised my eyebrows. "I suppose, if I were knocked completely unconscious, I could. But not from a cramp or being tired, no matter how far out from sh.o.r.e I was. Think about it." After a bit I added, "My dad and I used to sail, in the Bay of Siam. It was a bigger boat."

She registered it in her name but it was really mine.

There are nine bays and thirtysix beaches in the Bahias de Huatulco, many of them unreachable by road. I explored all of themswimming, fishing, snorkelingas well as the edges of the jungle.

More than once I got caught in the surf, which can be very rough, and I was rolled, though luckily, I'd unstepped the mast and lashed it, and I was able to recover the oars and the life jackets and the daggerboard. Later, I learned how to time things, to ride the breakers in and to row out without taking on too much water.

Rodrigo, one of Alejandra's many cousins, teased me about the sail and oars. He wanted me to buy an outboard, but I hated the stink and the noise. Every time he brought it up, I rubbed my fingers against my thumb. "iTu tienes dinero para la gasolina ? "

He was always broke so he had no answer. He'd reached the magic age of fourteen and what little money he had went to las ninas, the girls. While I took him out fishing and lobstering, sometimes Alejandra forbade me to lend the boat to him, to impress the girls.

"You might not drown, mon cher, and I know Rodrigo can swim like a fish, but his girlfriends? Let him get his own boat. I don't want him sailing off to remote beaches. He'll get them drowned, or worse!"

I didn't quite see what was worse than being drowned, but I figured out what she meant, eventually. It seemed odd, since she had boyfriends and there'd been times when they'd spent the night.

She blushed when I pointed this out, but she said, "I am not fourteen or thirteen. That is the difference."

Rodrigo's answer to this prohibition was to try to get me to take him and his filles du jour out, but the dingy was too small. I offered to take these girls for rides sin elwithout himbut this didn't go over so well.

Every three months I climbed the hill into the jungle behind the Monjarraz compound and jumped to Sam's place in California. Usually I would just transport Consuelo and some gifts back, but once Sam came, too, and I took him fishing.