In the Gardens:<br/><br/>Arik was silent for a moment as he thought about the answer to her question.  It was something he preferred not to think about at all and had never really talked about with anyone.  Looking out over the small pond but not really seeing he began his hands moving fluidly with the motions of his only means of communicating.  "I was 12 when my father and I went on a camping trip.  It was always just the two of us because mother detested the outdoors and refused to come along.  We found a small lake to camp by where we could fish and swim to our hearts content.  On one end of the lake we found a place where there was some small cliffs.  We climbed the rocks and found a good place to dive out into the lake from.  My father... My father decided he wanted to try from a higher place from where we had been jumping.  He told me to wait on the ledge where I was and watch.  I watched him as he climbed further up the cliff.  I was so proud of my dad... I loved him and looking back maybe even worshiped him.  My dad took a stance on a ledge about 20 feet above and several feet to the right of me.  I watched as he stretched his arms up into the sky  then leapt in the most perfect dive I had ever seen my father do.  He had flipped two times before coming back out into a dive entering the water with very hardly any splash at all...  I clapped and clapped it had been perfect... (Arik's hands stopped moving and tears began to stream down out of the corners of his eyes unnoticed then slower than before his hands begin to move again) But he did not come back up for air as soon as he should have.  I got scared and dove in after him... he had gone in to deep and fast with his dive and hit his head on a large boulder at the bottom of the lake.  I managed to get him to the shore but it was to late... he was already dead."  Arik's hands dropped into his lap as he continued to just stare out in front of him.  His mother had blamed him for his fathers death... 'If it was not for you he never would have gone jumping off cliffs in the first place... and quit waving your damn hands at me!!!  Why couldn't you have been normal like other kids!!!  Why did I have to have a freak for a child!!!'  Three days later Arik had been dropped off at the door step of a local church.  The priest had fought with his mother trying to get her to change her mind but in the end she had left him there... she didn't want him maybe someone else would.  Arik lived in an orphanage until the age of eighteen when he was told it was time for him to go.