"I'm not afraid of heights," the response was quick and unthinking, "and I was taught to walk - on a tightrope. It was--"

And then the easy, cheerful, eager voice that comes with remembering some things just clamped up, Dick freezing in the passenger seat, the flash of flight on the trapeze, the sure touch and hold of his mother's hands around his arms, the whistle of air against his ears as he rolls through it, one, two, three, four times... that memory flashed into watching them fall, kneeling before their still bodies, sprawled on the ground. There was a thin trickle of blood from the corner of his mom's mouth.

After maybe a full minute, he finally managed, "I'm not afraid of heights, even if some could say that the heights took my parents from me."