Through here, she said. Inside the chapel were narrow concrete stairs, which we climbed to the first landing. She had presented this as a secret, which I promised to keep. Stop, she said. Sing, she said. I can’t, I said. Anything, she said, so I started in on “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” The sound wasn’t an echo but a softening and a carrying as if my voice were wind and the walls had held it for a hundred years at last releasing it slowly, like blood into water. I imagined I did not exist, that the sound was always loose, it was my imagination that I had made it myself. Climb higher, she said, so we did. I found her abrupt childlike attentions intriguing. We made a flute of the stairwell or some instrument not yet invented that opens the pores and makes singers of us. I was a child who could sing anything, the voice something like a headstone, substance standing for lack of it. One step followed another, summer came, the coats pushed back in the closet, flowers bloomed, first the buttercups, then hyacinths, tulips, and finally the fierce daylilies one after the other as if we were moving from a very low place to a higher which could easily be explained by the transit of the sun, or rather, the earth’s relation to it. It was impossible to form any judgment, which I recognized as love, that I loved her better than most in some secret way. My voice came out in those colors and we sang “Tell Me Why,” “Ol’ Man River,” the few whole songs I could remember, but she knew them all, being a singer. Still, I was not embarrassed, being a child with few moral judgments sitting on the spillway at church camp with maybe 80 percent of my life still strung out somewhere glittering, encased in some twilit dawn. Nothing else, except we agreed to bring music next time, to have more words, the way things go, toward professionalism, the way water is sent down a spillway stone by stone so as not to overwhelm the landscape.