“We won’t even have to go near the elevators,” Will said. “We can still investigate from a distance, like we said.”
Jonah sighed and swiped away his bangs. They both sat on the top step. “When I was a kid and we first moved down to Thunder Bay,” Jonah said, “I used to think White people were trying to kill me, not just the social workers who tried to take me away—like all of them. For a while I didn’t leave the house, exactly like your mom. I’d stay in the basement and imagine them coming in the windows like zombies or vampires, trying to suck my blood, eat my brains with teaspoons. I used to concoct ways to defend myself against them. I’d practice judo and draw all these diagrams of explosives and guns and knives. I made traps, snares, and machetes hanging over the windows—that’s how I learned to make those match bombs. It was around that same time I stopped talking because I felt like my words were feeding them, giving them strength.”
“Nobody’s trying to kill you, Jonah,” Will said after some silence.
“You sure?” Jonah said, making to leave.
“You don’t want to help me anymore, that’s fine,” Will said desperately. “But winter’s going to last for three more months. What’re you going to do? Play hockey?”
Jonah shook his head. “I’m going home where it’s safe, and I’m going to stay there—I’d like to see those two try to come get me. Then I’m going to drink some hot chocolate and read two hundred books and have every known human disease memorized before spring comes. Then in a few years I’m going to get a crappy job like my brothers and save some money and go to med school in California and skateboard every single damn day with a big stupid grin on my face and I won’t ever think about Marcus or Thunder Bay or old Titus, not once.”
“Wait,” Will implored as Jonah backed down Will’s steps, “I have an idea …”
But he was out of ideas. Since he’d been Outside, he’d learned that fear was only a default setting, like how the TV always starts at channel 3 when you first turn it on. That everyone is born afraid of everything, but most people build calluses over top of it. His mother didn’t have calluses because she never touched anything, never even tried. Of the things Will was most afraid of—bees, wolves, witches, getting kidnapped, the clunking noise the dryer made when it stopped, calling Angela and telling her he’d liked their kiss, the Butler, the Bald Man, rebar, shovels—he was most afraid that, even after all his bravery and scars and near-death experiences, he still couldn’t survive the Outside without Jonah.
Jonah set the small vinyl case containing their fingerprinting kit on the bottom stair. “See you around, Will,” he said.
22
The following day, Will wrote to his principal as his mother to say there would be no need to send him to Templeton because they were moving back to San Francisco. Then Will spent the morning alternating between practicing fingerprinting, crying into his pillow, doing jumping jacks, and reading the Thrashers Jonah had left behind.
To cheer himself up he practiced pulling prints from difficult places like the toilet bowl and some trim in London. Then he stood on a chair and pulled one from the light fixture in New York: large prints that weren’t his own, yet looked oddly familiar. He compared them with the small library he’d amassed so far in a photo album, prints belonging to the mailman (doorknob), the grocery deliveryman (milk bottle), his mother (glass of water beside her bed), and now Titus (from the prints Jonah had given him), which matched exactly those he’d pulled from the fixture. Will recompared the prints ten times in tingly disbelief, but there was no question they were the same.
Titus had been in his room.
It was concussive, thunderous, his two worlds colliding like brakeless trains—the Inside and the Outside—and in the great crash Will knew that he’d been wrong about everything. Jonah was right, Titus had done something to Marcus in one of his black moods, and concocted that story to cover it up. And Will and his mother were next. Titus had been watching them from the yard for months, maybe longer, peering at them through the windows, writing that note, but now he’d come Inside, and any night he’d creep up on their beds and grip their throats. With horror Will remembered now how Titus always got shifty and red faced whenever the subject of his mother came up. Maybe on some level his mother had sensed his menace all along—maybe Titus always was the real reason for the Black Lagoon, and suddenly an idea parachuted into Will’s head. Though he had settled long ago on not being a genius, he was smart enough to know exactly what measures he had to take to set everything right and keep everyone he held dear safe.
“Can I get you anything, Mom?” His mother was sitting up in her bed in San Francisco, staring into the darkened wall like it was the grille of a speeding truck.
“No, thanks, Will. But it’s good to hear your voice,” she said, her breathing quick and shallow, as if her lungs were tiny as walnuts and located right beneath her neck. Will realized he’d never seen his mother take a deep breath in his life. “I’ve missed you,” she said.
Will sat on her bed. Their bed. He could barely see her in the dimness, except for her eyes, green and crystalline. Most of the bulbs in the house were out now. At night it was like the Middle Ages. He’d thought she would eventually get fed up and change them herself, but she used lamps until they burned out and then ordered flashlights and a headlamp that she wore whenever she forced her way into Venice.
“Want me to change it?” he said, pointing to her light fixture. “I could, but I’m not wearing the wetsuit.”
“Would you?” she said, animating slightly. “I didn’t want to ask. Everything I say makes you so mad lately.”
Will returned with a new bulb, and soon the room jumped into light and she winced and shut her eyes. Sitting on her bed again, turning the dead bulb in his hands, he watched light surf down through her bedraggled hair. She shifted and a smell puffed from her covers like turned milk.
“Was that Jonah I heard at the door yesterday?”
“He and I might not be friends anymore,” Will said.
“That’s a shame,” she said. “I like him.”
Will nodded, and they sat for a while, her hand on his thigh, as Outside trees sifted the wind. It was the first time in months he’d felt any sympathy for her. Will recalled how he used to find her at the window when he was still Inside, sighing, looking not down at her book but out into the streetlights. He wondered if she had any idea what she’d given up, what she’d wasted all these years Inside, what she had yet to waste. If she had any idea how beautiful she still was, how many people there were Outside for her still to meet.
“Have they found that boy yet?” she asked after a while, smoothing his hair. “The one who was missing?”
“Yeah, they did,” Will said, mercifully. “He was camping and didn’t tell anybody.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s a relief.” But if she relaxed further, Will couldn’t tell.
“I remember a time when you were very young, maybe three or four,” she continued, picking at the duvet fabric with her pale fingers. “I pulled you from the bath and stood you on the mat. I stepped out to the linen closet to grab a towel, and I returned to find you looking down at your little wet body, and you were sobbing. You said, ‘My body is crying.’ It nearly broke my heart. I wasn’t sure I could take something that sweet and sad at the same time.”
“But it wasn’t,” Will said. “I was wrong.”
“You’ve always been such a sensitive boy, honey. I never wanted to see you hurt.”
“Mom,” Will said, “you won’t need to worry about me anymore. There’s just one last thing I need to do tomorrow morning. Something I left behind that I need to get. But after that I’m staying Inside again. Like you said, I’m too sensitive. It’s too much for me Outside.” She brushed his ear with her thumb, and suddenly a sadness overtook him. “I hate Thunder Bay,” he said in a sob. He was so tired of being endangered and watched and confused.