Duckling Ugly

Aaron threw up his hands. 'Why can't you be happy with what you have here? It's more than you ever had in Flock's Rest, more than you ever could have there!'

'I don't want to leave,' I told him. 'I just want to visit. I want to go back and say good-bye. I owe my parents that much!'

'No one leaves!' he insisted. 'And if Abuelo found out you were talking about doing it, he'd be furious!'

Aaron stormed away, then stormed right back. Frustration bordering on anger flared in his eyes. 'I never should have told Abuelo to send you that note! I should have just forgotten about you, just like I forgot about everyone else!'

It stung to hear him say something like that, and I thought maybe there was still some ugliness in De Leon after all.

'I'm sorry,' he said, after a moment. 'I didn't mean it.' But the damage had already been done.

Then I turned to see Harmony standing in the doorway. I was so used to leaving my door open, I hadn't thought to close it.

'May I come in?' she asked.

I nodded. I thought to pretend like nothing was happening here, but I realized that would be pointless. 'So I guess you heard everything. . .'

She sat down in one of the chairs Willem and Claude had made for me and gestured to two of the others. 'Come sit down. Both of you.'

I pulled up a chair, and Aaron reluctantly did, too.

'Please talk some sense into her,' Aaron said.

'It's not sense she needs,' Harmony said. 'It's perspective.'

I didn't like being talked about in third person. 'So are both of you going to run to Abuelo and tell him I was talking treason? Does he have a torture chamber beneath that mansion of his? Maybe something from the Spanish Inquisition?'

'Of course not,' Harmony said with a calm to her voice that just made me feel even more tense.

'Hasn't anyone ever left this place?'

'No!' said Aaron. 'Never!'

But Harmony put up her hand to silence him. She took a long moment to think before giving me her answer, and then she be­gan a tale she probably hadn't told for hundreds of years, if she'd ever told it at all. Her answer to my question was a thread as finely woven as her gossamer garments.

'I was one of the first settlers with Abuelo,' she told us. 'I've followed him from San Juan, to Tibet, to Lourdes, to this val­ley?and when the waters shift and the fountain moves else­where, I will follow Abuelo to that new place, too.

'The first time, when the fountain started to fail and we pre­pared to journey from San Juan, I feared that Abuelo was wrong. The fountain had grown shallow, our little hidden rain forest was dying?and I was convinced that the fountain was drying up for­ever. Abuelo said he could feel the pull?he knew where the fountain would next appear, but I didn't believe him . . . so I ran away. I went back to my family in the American colonies. And do you know what I found?'

'What?' I asked.

'My sister had died of old age. My nephews and nieces were all older than me. The world had moved on, and there was no place for me. I raced back to San Juan, as quickly as travel in those days allowed, certain that Abuelo and the others would be gone . . . and as I traveled, an illness overtook me. A fever that I was sure would kill me.'

'A fever?' Aaron said. 'That can't be. Once you've been touched by the fountain, you can't get sick?Abuelo told us so!'

'There is one sickness we can get.'

'What is it?' I asked.

Harmony thought carefully about her answer. 'Consumption,' she said?but by the look on her face, I had a feeling it wasn't the same kind of consumption you read about in medical books. 'Luck was with me,' Harmony said. 'When I arrived at our little settlement, they hadn't yet left. My illness passed, Abuelo forgave me, and we sailed across the sea. I made the harsh journey with them across the Himalayas, and I was the first one to see the new valley. Once I saw the valley, I knew that I would never doubt Abuelo again.'

'I've only been here a few months,' I reminded her. 'The world may have moved on for you, but not for me. My family is still there.'

'That is true,' Harmony said. 'But it still doesn't mean there's a place for you in that world.'

'I don't want a place,' I told her. 'I only want to say good-bye.'

'Even so, it won't bring you any happiness.'

Then Aaron spoke up again, more gently this time. 'I don't want you to go. It's a hard journey, and a hundred things can go wrong.' He took both my hands. 'In a while you won't care any­way,' he said. 'That place, and those people, will feel like part of someone else's life.'

I knew he was right about that. 'Maybe that's why I want to do it now.'

Harmony considered it, and Aaron didn't seem so much an­gry now as scared?scared for me, or maybe just scared of losing me. 'If I'm ever going to be happy here,' I told him, 'I have to see my family one last time.' But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was more to it. It wasn't just that I wanted to see them. I wanted them to see me.

Finally Harmony sighed. 'If you insist on going, we can't stop you. All we can do is warn you. Going back will not be what you expect. Things won't go any better for you than they did for me.'

I thought about her story. She had traveled a much greater distance, and at a time when travel was much more difficult. She had left with no plan to return, but I would have a plan.

'Two days to get there, one day to say my good-byes, and two days to get back,' I told them. 'I'll be gone for five days, that's all.'

'A lot can happen in five days,' said Aaron, but there was a sad resignation in his voice, because he knew I had made up my mind.

I planned to go on foot, but Aaron, as opposed as he was to it, had a better idea.

'If you go on foot, you could freeze to death. We don't have any clothes here warm enough to see you over the mountains. It's best if the monks take you.'

'But don't they serve Abuelo? They'll never do it!'

He gave me a halfhearted grin. 'The monks won't ever know they're taking you.'

He explained how, once a week, a group of monks arrived on a hillside to the east to deliver supplies and take away the garbage that could not be composted.

On this particular week, I would be part of the garbage.

Harmony went to visit Abuelo that morning, to make sure he was distracted and his eyes weren't on the hillside as Aaron and I climbed out of the southern tip of the valley. I took off my gossamer gown and dressed in something more 'earthly' for my journey, and Aaron brought along a burlap sack. Anyone who saw us making our way up the hillside would think we were just taking out the garbage.

This spot to the east and high up the hillside was the only place where mountains didn't rise too high to climb. Grass still grew there, but it wasn't as lush and green as it was lower in the valley. This grass had turned yellow, and spots were turning brown. As I looked back into the valley, I could see a thin rim of yellow grass that circled the entire valley of De Leon. I had never noticed it before. Aaron knelt down and rubbed his hands across the yellow grass, a look of worry on his face.

'This is a bad idea,' he told me, in a last-ditch effort to change my mind. 'No one in Flock's Rest deserves your good-byes.'

'Wouldn't you have wanted to say good-bye to your parents?' I asked him.

'No,' he said?but I could tell he wasn't sure if he meant it.

At the crest of the hill were a dozen sacks, like the one Aaron carried, all filled with the trash of De Leon.

'Five days,' Aaron reminded me. 'That's all you get.' He opened his sack to show me that sewn to the inside were furry animal skins that, unfortunately, still had some of the animal at­tached. 'I know it's not pretty,' he