Diane took a nectarine from the fruit bowl and began paring it with a knife, lifting the wedges of fruit from its edge with her lips. Then she realized the dangerousness of what she was doing and locked the knife in the drawer. She pulled back her elastic and snapped it soundly, the pain only further agitating her.
Who was she kidding? She’d never make it to that retrospective. She couldn’t even sit in the dark alone for a while without terrifying herself. They’d have to find another caged curiosity to trot out. She walked to the kitchen counter and crumpled the NFB director’s letter and dropped it in the trash. She would’ve burned it had the thought of fire not caught her breath and set her hands tingling.
She returned to her bedroom with a new table lamp but couldn’t yet dare to plug it in, even with her dish gloves on. She couldn’t risk another panic. She got under the covers and read by flashlight—as she had all those nights as a girl—and silently decreed her five pageturner limit hereby null and void. If the Relaxation Sessions had stopped working, these silly books were the only barricade left between her and ruin.
But after she’d read her eyes dry and sore, and her mind dipped toward sleep, a memory knifed up from the past: the bang that had lifted her from this same bed long ago. An apocalyptic sound she later learned was heard as far as fifty miles outside Thunder Bay. Diane took her father’s old truck, her bare feet on the rough pedals, over the tracks and down to the harbor. Men arrived in coats over their nightclothes, leading her to the loading bay, where an overturned railcar had dropped to its side, a thick support cable lying sheared and slack near a good quantity of spilled oil—she hadn’t known it was blood until she saw the way the others avoided it. A search of the area was conducted, men with naphtha lanterns slicing the dark, projecting the shadows of giants onto the towering concrete of Pool 6. After a few hours, in the very same water from which they’d pulled Theodore years previous, one of the men spotted something that belonged more to the lake than to the land. The men had no idea how it got there, with wounds too mortal to carry itself. She helped them drag twine nets through the harbor throughout the night, but her brother was never recovered in his entirety. Though Charlie and Whalen were the same size, had the same haircuts, and had worn the same canvas coveralls, and though the body was shredded by the frayed cable’s whip, the face a ruin, it was the terrible confirmation of Charlie’s fate—the expectedness of it—that convinced her that night of exactly who she’d lost. She knew her brother never would abandon her to the world if he could help it—a loyalty she never would’ve expected from Whalen.
Yet what drove her panic today wasn’t that her brother had died at the elevators, just as her father did, or that her mother died a young woman. It was that anyone did. Anywhere. That tragedy made no distinction. That it claimed equally those who invited it and those who didn’t. Those treasured, and those ignored. That there was no protection, no spell. It knew every face. Every address. That doom, as Emily Dickinson wrote, was a house without a door.
She knew she was supposed to be optimistic, was expected to hope, that hope was a mother’s great gift, and that she was betraying Will’s bright future if she could not accomplish this most basic self-deception. But what she felt was the opposite of hope. It was only a matter of time before he would break his little bones. Before he would become drunk, diseased, delirious, deranged, and one day—whether she was around to see it or not—he would become like Charlie: only parts of himself, undone.
If only there were some way to teach him that everything is lethal. That injury, sickness, calamity, death—these things follow us like a white moon whipping in the trees beside the highway. And that it is more insane to forget this, even for a second, than it is to remember.
17
That night in New York, Will shot up in his cot, his heart kicking like a bronco.
Grain dust.
It had been a week since he’d confronted his mother with the dusty boots and she’d said his grandfather and uncle were always covered with it from working at the elevator. It must’ve been what the Wheezing Man had left on Will’s coat after he grabbed him.
“I can’t believe we were so stupid,” Will said to a drowsy Jonah after he’d phoned and had Enoch rouse him from bed. “Everything points to the elevators. The boots. The dust. Plus the creek runs from where Marcus went missing right down the hill and empties into the lake exactly where the elevators are. The Butler must be using the creek to get around the city undetected.”
“The harborfront is the only place we didn’t search,” said Jonah.
“Maybe Marcus is hiding in one of those abandoned buildings down there. Or the Wheezing Man.”
“Or maybe the Butler is,” Jonah said sleepily. “But fine, we’ll take a look. We might find a dry place we can skate when winter comes.”
The next morning Will filled a pop bottle with tap water and dropped it into a backpack. Next, he went to Paris and retrieved the secret key from the top of the doorframe that he didn’t know about and unlocked the knife drawer. The selection was limited, but he took the wickedest-looking blade, a long serrated thing with a blunt tip that his mother used to slice her fresh loaves, and stuffed it into his hoodie.
“Is everything still okay, Will?” asked his mother as he was pulling on his skateboard shoes. She was in her bathrobe, her toenails long as teaspoons. Like half-buried jewels, her eyes had fallen deeper in their sockets during the past few days that they hadn’t been talking. “I’m worried about you,” she said.
“Imagine that,” he said, hitching his laces tight.
“You’re always in such a hurry these days. And that note, I just hope you and Jonah aren’t in danger—”
“Everyone’s always in danger,” he interrupted while fixing his pants cuffs. The way they met his shoes had recently assumed great significance to him.
“Sure,” she said, retying the sash of her robe as though trying to cinch herself calm, “but are you in more danger than normal?”
“Are you in danger, Mom?” he said, standing. “Right now?”
She frowned. “That’s not fair,” she said. Her face melted, and she began to drip tears, again.
“Sure it is,” he said, willing himself to stone.
“I don’t know how worried I should be. Can you at least tell me that?” she said.
“I’ve got it under control,” Will said, flinging open the door.
“Being anonymously threatened is under control?”
“Better than you’re doing,” he said. “You don’t know who’s threatening you either.”
She went to say something angry but turned her head slightly to the side and shut her eyes. “You’re just … never home anymore, honey. I miss you. I miss watching you paint. I miss your voice in the house.”
Looking into her eyes that were green and bright as alarm clock digits, her yellow hair over the neat cockles of her ears, he felt the old Inside parts of him soften for a moment and ached suddenly for her to enfold him. “I miss you too,” he conceded.
“You’re growing up so fast,” she said, putting her cool hand on his cheek. “It’s like you don’t need me anymore. We used to take such good care of each other.”
Will felt these words bulldoze his heart, and he shut the door and fell into her arms with a great heaviness, a feeling not unlike when he used to stay in the tub in Venice until all the water had drained out, leaving him heavy, sedated, and blissful, as if he’d narrowly survived a drowning. They lowered themselves to the floor, coming to rest side by side against the wall. He tried to breathe again in the old way, in exact synchronization with her, but because his lungs had grown Outside, matching her breaths didn’t spin his head like it used to. How could he explain now that even though boys could trip and punch you, and wolves could feast upon your flesh, and blood could gush from your body and bounce on the ice, and some kids didn’t even have parents to worry about them, and a boy could disappear from the world and nobody would care, Marcus had been right—the Outside wasn’t all that dangerous. It was worth leaving for, if only to see it up close and to make a friend for a short while.