It is hard work to be destroyed, she heard herself say out loud to the image of Theodore floating in the lights of her goggles as she pulled them from her face and removed her headphones, uncovering the soothing clatter of skateboards out front. No, that first glimmer of Charlie in her son that had so terrified her when Will first stepped outside wouldn’t land him where it had landed his uncle. These two boys tearing around together was proof enough that things didn’t only get worse in Thunder Bay. Maybe recklessness would be the very thing that would save them.
13
While Will was in Paris duct-taping the hole in his shoe that his futile ollie attempts had chewed away, the phone rang. “Angela’s back from Toronto,” Wendy said conspiratorially when he picked up. “She’s at Our Lady of Sorrows. She wanted you to know.”
To reach the hospital, the boys piloted their skateboards through tributaries of street and sidewalk out beyond the preposterously expansive golf course on the outer limits of Grandview Gardens, drawing Will farther from home than he’d ever been. From the peak of Hill Street, he was rewarded with a closer glimpse of the grain elevators, which were even more decrepitly majestic than ever. When they reached the hospital, the sign outside put Will in mind of his mother. “My Lady of Sorrows,” he said to himself.
Inside, the building was a spaceship, all gleaming metal and glass, with a clean smell with an undertow of decay, the way fresh white paint put over rusting iron eventually bubbles and bleeds orange. Will had never been to a hospital. He’d never been sick, either, if you didn’t count choking on the chicken finger and the expired yogurt. Was there a machine here that could fix his heart? Had his uncle Charlie been brought here when he was dying? Had one of these people failed him?
As they were looking around, a stethoscope-wearing man with a crisp collar blooming up through a buttery V-neck sweater bent down to examine Jonah’s swollen elbow. “That’s a nasty one, son,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, it sort of stays like that,” Jonah said, his eyes wide. “It’s just a moderate contusion. But it seems to be resolving fine.”
“You’re quite right,” the doctor said, letting go of his elbow, impressed. Then he leaned in close to Will. “Is your friend safe at home?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s really safe,” said Will. “He’s maybe the safest person I know.”
The doctor directed them to Angela’s floor on the children’s ward. That there could be enough children in medical peril to fill an entire wing nearly sent Will running back Inside. The boys heard a sound from down the hall like a seal’s bark, and they found Angela in her bed, her body braided with coughs, her face a swimmingpool hue. There was a thin white tube snaking into her nose, taped to her cheek. Will had the sudden fluttery urge to sneeze.
“Hold on!” she said when she spotted them, making a bowl with her lower lip, as she kicked off her blankets and rushed to the bathroom, dragging a rolling pole of swinging fluids behind her. They heard guttural sounds of expectoration while Will examined her room: a vase of chrysanthemums, a sparkly purse, a few teen magazines, and some pictures hung in frames on the wall. Will recognized one as the same grid he’d given her from Jonah’s desk.
“Don’t worry about this,” she said, pointing at her nose as she emerged with her hair spray-sculpted and dark eyeliner dragged raccoon-like across the inside of her eyelashes. Though she was right in front of them, her voice seemed underpowered, distant, as if she were speaking through a thin pane of glass. “It’s a feeding tube,” she said. “I don’t need it to breathe or anything. My CF grows fibers in my intestines, so if I don’t get like four thousand calories a day I lose weight. Hey, Jonah,” she said sheepishly.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m happy you’re okay, Angela.”
Angela’s jaw dropped. She looked at Will. “That’s the most he’s ever said to me!”
“I fixed him,” Will said proudly.
Her face lit like an old person’s birthday cake, and words tumbled out of her. “My dad’s convinced all the grain dust hanging in the air made me sick. Actually, my doctor said the childhood asthma rates in this city are through the roof, but CF is totally genetic. You can live to thirty-five, but mine is the worst type—there’s no way I’ll make thirty. So I’m just like whatever. Thirty, eighty, same difference.” She arranged herself again on the bed. “I can’t have babies because I won’t be there for them,” Angela continued, shooting a surreptitious look at Jonah. “And I’d feel bad getting married and then just, like, dying, or whatever.” She sighed like a bored movie star. “I’m what they call doomed. But it’s okay. I can do what I want. Have fun. Plus I’m never going to get wrinkles!”
Will tried to take comfort in his and Angela’s mutually doomed fates, and wondered whether he could even expect eighteen more years from his heart. But such magnitudes of time had a similar underwhelming effect as when his mother first taught him that every single star was actually another sun just like theirs. They created a humph—then nothing. Some information was too enormous to cram into your mind.
“But it’s so good to see my best friend again,” she said to Will, brushing his back in a way that made his penis hook uncomfortably in his underwear. “You look … different.”
Will felt his cheeks flame under her gaze. A summer of daily skateboarding Outside had left his hair sun-streaked, his body dark and slender, tempered by asphalt and concrete. His legs cracked like twin bullwhips when he jumped, and his right calf, the pushing leg, was significantly larger and more rigid than his left. Even his bones felt different: strong and flexible as aircraft aluminum. “Jonah’s been teaching me some things,” Will said as a nurse entered the room with a blocky machine on silent wheels.
“Angela, it’s time for your percussion,” she said, setting out a cup of pills that Angela snapped into her throat with unbelievable ease. It still took Will an hour of gagging to swallow a Tylenol.