A sample of the craft

The cold arrived early that year, the way bad news does - quietly, and then all at once. I was nine years old, and the river behind our house, which had run brown and patient through every summer of my childhood, stopped moving altogether. My father stood at the kitchen window with his coffee and said, to no one in particular, that he had never seen it freeze solid before Christmas.

What I remember best is not the cold but the sound of it - the groan the ice made under our boots, like an old door opening in a house where you are not supposed to be. My brother Tomás went first, because he always went first, and I followed him, because that was my job. Halfway across, he turned around with that grin he kept for the rest of his life, even in the hospital years later, and shouted: see? The world holds you, if you keep moving.

Our mother never found out. Or so we believed for forty years, until the afternoon of her ninetieth birthday, when she set down her cup and asked, quite casually, whether we still thought the river was a secret. Mothers, I have learned, keep an archive of everything. This book is mine.