If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Initially at least, she was happy having a boy. Boys seemed more durable, less finicky. Will’s birth somehow eclipsed the tragedies of her past—her chief responsibility now being to ensure he didn’t taste abandonment as she had. He fascinated her like no book or film or idea had before. She spent hours watching him in his crib, parsing his overwhelming actuality. Each night she read to him, his eyes waltzing in wonder, until her throat was hoarse, until his book’s covers detached, until she’d memorized every word, then until he’d memorized them himself. “That?” was his first word, said pointing at a page. They spent hours speculating what would happen after the story ended. She ceased reading adult books entirely, her most private thoughts taking the shape of children’s stories. Gone were ideas for films, the cinematic visions once gifted to her upon waking or during long walks in the city, but she offered her mind gladly to the chaos a child brought, to the endless tidying and banter, to the horrors these perform on creative inspiration.

  Then came learning to walk, all that totter and tumble. Will’s first unmoored voyage from coffee table to couch—relentless was a word whose true meaning he’d taught her. The cracked heads, bashed elbows, and rug burns; the way Will rose, bloody dirt in his teeth, that little lung-sucking storm before the big show. Motherhood acutely sensitized her to the menaces of the world: the murderous table corners, the seduction of electrical outlets, the friendly dogs that snap gladly at tiny fingers.

  How precariously blood moves through us, she thought now soaping her shaking hands in the bathroom. We spring a small leak and lose ourselves to the ground. And how dearly we depend on the lone muscle convulsing in our chests. On the two flimsy balloons that so narrowly rescue us from suffocation. On the wobbly pâté in our heads that preserves our very selves. All of it so ad hoc, so absurd, so temporary.

  In the hallway she heard a curious scratching emanating from Will’s studio—New York, he called it. A welcome sound. With Will away at school during the day now, like a planet unhitched from orbit, the house had fallen into gloom and silence, even though she’d begun leaving the kitchen radio on and often consulted Will aloud while vacuuming or staking her window-box tomatoes as though he’d never left. Still, the days felt doubly long. She missed his industry and his mind-bending questions (“Is it murder if your friend agrees to let you cut off his hand and then you strangle someone with it?”) and had to settle for burying her face in the plush, boyish scent of his bedding several times per day.

  She opened the door to New York and found him rubbing 40-grit sandpaper over the grips of the new snow boots she’d ordered, a prisoner’s file beside him, blue rubber bits splayed on his easel and already ground into the carpet at his feet.

  “What’s going on, Will?”

  “Oh, hey,” he said, startled for a second. Then it passed. “Grips are actually really hard to get off,” he continued, returning to the task.

  “But Will,” she said, pulling a troubled breath, “you’re destroying your boots. We just had those delivered, and now you’re—”

  “—Making them better,” he interjected.

  “Grips are supposed to … what? Any idea?” she said with an ineffectual elastic snap. And in an instant she saw Charlie hurtling down a still-icy Machar Avenue in early spring, pedaling for broke on a bicycle he’d only just learned how to ride, his coarse hair a wildfire in the wind, with Theodore jogging behind bellowing complex instructions and warnings, mere seconds before Charlie would crash into a yellow hydrant, folding his nose flat to his cheek and forcing their family’s painful return to the hospital, where their mother had taken her last breath not three weeks previous.

  “I’m making them more exciting,” Will said.

  “Grip, Will. That’s what they do,” she said.

  “Not always,” he said.

  “And why may I ask are you ruining your boots?” she said, putting her hands to her hips more to steady them than to appear commanding.

  “For nothing.”

  “So why, then?”

  His eyes fastened on hers. “Because they’re mine to ruin.”

  “You remember who buys those boots,” she said, guiltily reminding herself of Theodore.

  “So send them back,” Will retorted. He held the boots up, one on each hand. “I’ll go barefoot, then.”

  “You are going to snap your neck is what’s going to happen. You’re going to slide your way all the way down to the harbor and”—she felt her voice go shrill and her blood surge as she watched Charlie descending into a grain bin with only his grin and his daring to save him, then stepping out the door the night that he—

  “Stop yelling, Mom,” Will said.

  Had she been yelling? She apologized, drawing her hands to her face, fighting anew to keep the images from overthrowing her mind.

  “Mom,” he said in a voice so wounded and adult that it shocked her, “it’s like you’re not actually worried about me. It’s more like you’re scared of me.”

  With that all her panic and anger dissolved. She closed her eyes, preparing a rational, level-headed exhibit of the ways in which her son was sorely mistaken, a response that would assure her dear boy of this notion’s utter preposterousness—afraid of her son? She was afraid of about everything else!—until a vapor of images swooped again in her, stories from another life, grain pouring from a hopper, a train, a cable, a subway platform, a staccato dream she’d had so many times it had become her: a son torn wordlessly from her breast, dragged back from their house into the woods by phantom figures to be devoured while no one made so much as a sound—neither she from the window, nor he from the dark. “I’m not afraid of you, honey,” she managed to get out, black spots speckling her vision as she backpedaled from the room.

  How could she tell him that to have lost a twin was to be half-erased? To be dead by proxy. That when another version of your very self had failed, had been evicted from the world and pushed back into the dark, what less bitter end could be hoped for, for those you love? How could you ever expect a child to comprehend how easily, how unnecessarily, a loved one can be torn from your arms and how it can leave you ruined forever.

  So whether she was scared for him, or of him, it mattered little. Her job was still the same: To build them a world that death could never touch.

  9

  It didn’t matter that Will had yet to secure a single Outside friend other than Angela and that he was no closer to finding Marcus or catching whoever was sneaking around his yard, because he had become the most electrifying practitioner in the short but storied schoolyard pantheon of ice sliding.

  After the big snow came an oddly brief warming, followed by a temperature plummet of migraine cold that left the hill that butted their school enameled with ice. Originally, he’d sanded his boots smooth to render his tracks untraceable during his investigations, but he soon found alternate uses. When he took a big run and set his feet, not even the best hockey players could match his daring or his distance—the whole hill, nearly to the footpath. Helmetless and unafraid, Will could dance, spin, slide backwards, and do 360s on one foot. For weeks he’d executed the miracles of his slides at recess, the envious gazes of the entire school upon him. Little did they know that to his mother’s horror he trudged back up the hill on weekends to practice until dusk, hands frozen talon-like inside his sheepskin mitts.

  The only classmate who came close to matching Will’s prowess was Jonah. Though he lacked special boots, his old-man shoes served him well, and Will attributed his uncanny balance to that skateboard he kept with him. Though they never spoke, their daring was a bond, a pact. Will now saw something saintly in Jonah’s silence. He hid his voice the way Will’s mother hid her body, except Jonah had made himself the place he never left, which Will envied but couldn’t emulate, because having spent his whole life Inside, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  The day before Christmas break, Will was working on sliding in a squat, one leg extended before him—“the Cossack,” he called it—as a crowd of s
tudents looked on. Jonah watched sagely from the hill’s margin, where he stashed his skateboard and backpack, brushing a fuzz of ice from his jeans. As Will climbed again to the summit, a dog meandered onto the schoolyard. It pranced down in the middle section where the hill leveled, the spot where Will liked to unleash his jumps.

  Will paced back from the hill, turned, bolted forward, and braced his feet into a slide. As he descended the slope, lowering into a crouch, the dog barked, ear splitting and sharp, then veered over toward where Jonah was. Will heard the supervising teacher call out, backhanding the air in a shooing motion.

  The dog paused, then bounded over and snatched Jonah’s backpack in its mouth, recoiling exactly into Will’s path, a path that, even with his skill and superior balance, was now impossible to alter. As Will thundered closer, the dog grew and resolved, its coat winterized and bristly. Jonah had his hand out and was approaching the dog cautiously. Taking no notice of Will, the dog lowered itself and dropped the backpack to bare its wicked teeth.

  Will decided to go down, his first time off his feet in weeks, the ice hot and abrasive through his pants. He dug in his boot heels, traumatizing his eyes with sparks of frost. At the mercy of the ice now, claimed by it, and mere feet from the beast, Will realized that the creature was not necessarily a dog. Trying to draw realistically like Jonah, he’d studied intently the physiology of wolves, their thick, curved backs and rod-straight tails, their teeth visibly protruding from closed mouths, and this creature bore a worrisome resemblance.

  Just before they collided, Will clutched a blurry hope that he might befriend this wolf, take it for his own, harness it to a sled or teach it tricks, until he struck its bony legs like a quartet of bowling pins, and in the impact felt skin and fur slide over hard ribs, and the thing yipped, sounding less like a dog, more like an electrocuted man. They slid together, the beast writhing upon him, Will’s body a toboggan to it.

  Before the next downslope they drew to a halt. Still inverted, the wolf thrashed as though trying to snap its own spine. Then over him, ears flattened, an avenging growl chugging inside it like a lawnmower, its narrowed golden eyes dead as marbles, it lashed and tore at Will’s chest, recoiling with a mouthful of white polyfill, his jacket’s guts. It jawed the material, puzzled by the taste. Then as Will attempted to roll away came a dull clamp on his thigh. He’d never played with a dog before, had never felt measured play-bites on his arms and hands, so it would’ve been easy to think that the wolf was playing, except for the sudden dagger of pain that delivered him to the truth. The wolf commenced a series of neck jerks, as if there was something stuck in Will’s leg that it rightly owned and was trying to reclaim. The cadence quickened and Will could feel himself coming loose. Searching, he spotted a figure in the fringe of trees, a stout, bald man, and Will tried to call out to him but could not find his voice. It occurred to Will that Marcus could’ve already died like this, devoured, with no adult to save him, dragged between the frozen trees by a hundred sets of teeth. Just as the pain paralyzed him, the beast relinquished his leg, and Will clutched his neck with interlocked hands, as though performing sit-ups on his side. It sniffed at his neck, breath passing hot over his ear with the sound of blowing over a microphone. Maybe, Will mused in the crude blur, though his Outside courage was growing daily, the scent of Black Lagoon still lingered upon him, the strongest perfume the wolf ever imagined, drawing it to him like a magnet. His mother had read him stories of wolf packs raising lost boys in the Arctic, but they were always orphans like Marcus, boys already wounded, abandoned. Never happy boys. Will wondered for an instant what sort he was. And then a voice, too indistinct to parse, and Will’s head knocked terrifically hard, while the wolf yelped and flew upwards in a poof of snow. It walloped to its side a few feet from Will, stopped from rolling by stiffened legs. Over Will was Jonah, posed in the balletic follow-through of a great arcing kick, his old-man shoe nearly shoulder height, hands open and loose beside him like a dancer’s. As the wolf struggled, Jonah recaptured his balance, then unleashed a two-footed leap that landed him square on the wolf’s rib cage with the sound of dry kindling.

  A teacher was over Will saying my goodness in repetition, forklifting him from the ground in her arms. A void now in his thigh, more troubling than the pain it replaced, and beyond that, wetness. He watched his blood bounce like beads of mercury on the ice.

  A policeman was already waiting in the principal’s office. Soon paramedics were treating Will’s thigh with an enormous dressing that crinkled like a diaper. Will overheard the teacher and the principal discuss how to manage what Jonah had done, whether discipline was required.

  “That Turtle boy left that wolf a sorry sight, but we’d have put it down regardless,” said Constable MacVicar, the one who’d never returned Will’s call about Marcus.

  “We don’t have a phone number on file for you, Will,” said the principal, receiver in hand, “What is it?”

  “No idea,” Will said through his teeth as the stoic paramedic eased him upright.

  The principal glanced to the secretary.

  “Here, son,” Constable MacVicar said, “I’ll get you home.”

  Will passed out for a spell in the police car, the squawking radio recalling the taxi cabs he now dimly recalled taking with his mother long ago, and awoke levitating in MacVicar’s arms as they approached his front steps. “I remember when your mother and your uncle bought this place,” MacVicar said, examining the golden-lit window in San Francisco. “Nobody could believe they did it themselves. That was one determined fella.” Then Will’s mother appeared, framed by a rectangle of doorway, green bathrobe over what looked like nakedness. As Will rose dreamily up the front stairs she was yelling and also crying, the sight of his mauled leg striking her as though with invisible blows. Soon she was saying the word lawsuits while also referring to Marcus, or “that poor boy who disappeared.” She calmed for a moment and asked why MacVicar couldn’t protect her son. “That’s your job, isn’t it?” she screeched when the constable left the question unanswered, repeating “Isn’t it?” as he retreated to his cruiser like a man in a downpour.

  “We can’t save them from themselves, Ms. Cardiel,” he said at last, popping his door.

  Safely Inside, his mother set the deadbolt and embraced Will hungrily, then pushed him back, locking her elbows, almost to ensure he was her son, and not some counterfeit boy, before yanking him close again.

  She helped him hop to Venice, where she snipped away the dressing and Will glimpsed two ivory-edged canyons in his thigh before she covered them like an obscenity. After wrapping his wound in a mile of gauze, she dragged the couch from Cairo into San Francisco and positioned it beside their bed. She set up the 16mm projector and brought him snacks and made double-cheese slow-cooker lasagna for dinner.

  Later, while they watched a film, she sat close, compulsively testing his bones and kneading his muscles, inventory-taking, pushing the hair from his brow, as though its roughness could harm his skin.

  Over the following days, he watched films and swallowed the pain pills she rattled out, drifting into murky reveries of wolves ripping soundless through his school, fast as lava, lifting the weakest of his classmates from their desks, and he saw again the Bald Man he’d spied in the woods while he was attacked. He’d wake in San Francisco to find her tidying, moving things from one side of the room to the other. When she left, he’d call for her, and she’d return within ten seconds; he timed her. She drank tea from her masterpiece mug, and he sipped her special limeade that she hand-squeezed for him, in which he could taste the faint hint of her hand lotion. He requested meat for dinner every night in the belief it would mend his leg.

  When he finally massed the strength to hobble to Venice, Will found his mother crying in the empty tub, tears jeweling her eyelashes.

  “I cut myself chopping onions,” she said, wrapping her finger with the tissue she’d been blowing her nose with.

  “Is it bleeding?” Will asked. “You need stitches?�
�

  She shook her head.

  “Can I see it?”

  Again she shook her head shamefully, like Angela the time Mr. Miller asked her for homework she hadn’t completed because her father kept her awake all night yelling.

  Will hobbled to the fireplace in Cairo and returned with the poker that of course they’d never used. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said, poker raised, conjuring an image of the boot prints in the yard and the wolf and the Bald Man, “I’ll kill anyone who comes in here, if that’s what you’re afraid of. A wolf or a person or anyone.”

  “Please put that down, Will,” she said wearily. “Nobody is coming in here.”

  Will complied and climbed over the tub’s edge and nestled into the crook of her arm, her smell the same as always: yellowy paperbacks and cinnamon and fresh laundry. She leaned in and kissed his hair, the old comfort swirling in him, her clean breath and her pale hands cool on his belly.

  “Are you crying about me?” he said, not yet entirely thinking, the warmth of her body and the pain pills loosening the tethers of his tongue, “or your brother?”

  He felt her stiffen.

  “What was his name, Mom?” Will said, sleepily.

  She let out a long, weary breath. “His name was Charlie,” she said. “My twin.”

  “Like in my dictionary?”

  “It was his,” she said. “He liked words. Especially odd ones.”

  “MacVicar said you bought this house together?”

  “We did,” she said. “Though it was mostly his money.”

  “So you lived here as a girl? In this house? Not in Toronto?”

  “No, we grew up near the harbor, in another house, until we moved here together. But you were born in Toronto, Will, where I met your dad. When you were very little, you and I came back to sell this place, and well … we stayed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about him, Mom? Did something happen?”

  “Some things aren’t easy to talk about, Will. And I didn’t … I didn’t want to worry you,” she said, squeezing him.