If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  “But it still means you’re safer if you go out and do stuff,” he said. “That’s the truth. That’s not just statistics. Everybody Outside knows it.”

  They sat for a while in silence, and she seemed to let it go.

  “Mom, is it because of Dad? Or is it because of Charlie?”

  “What, Will?”

  “The … Black Lagoon?”

  Her eyes were open and searching.

  “The reason you can’t go Outside,” he added.

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “In some way, I guess. I do miss them both. For different reasons. But it also comes from … me.”

  “Then you can stop it. If it’s from Inside you.”

  “It’s not that easy, honey.”

  “Being brave is never easy. That’s why it’s good for you.”

  She cocked her head and sighed but didn’t say anything.

  “What if we built you a shack in the backyard and brought all your stuff out there, like your bed and your books and guitar? Wouldn’t it be basically the same?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “But if we painted it exactly like your room and got—”

  “Look,” she said, her voice cutting, “sometimes I’m scared to breathe, Will. The more I fight it, the worse it gets. But I’ve been doing better lately. This Relaxation business really helps.”

  “Why be scared of breathing, Mom? Breathing never killed anyone. It keeps you alive. You just think about it too much.”

  “I’ve tried to stop thinking about it. Believe me.”

  “You need something to do. Like solve a puzzle or something. Find a mystery. Get a hobby. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Honey, I don’t think crossword puzzles are going to fix this.”

  “But what are you actually afraid of? Dying? Kids at my school have scraps all the time, and they’re fine. It’s actually pretty hard to die, Mom.”

  She snapped her elastic. “Oh, please don’t say that word,” she said. “You’ve come close before, believe me. You just can’t remember.”

  “I got amnesia?” Will said, excited at the potential territory of himself previously unmapped.

  “No, you were young. When we were in Toronto, the sub …”—she seemed to weaken for a moment—“you nearly fell—actually, you did slip … on a pool deck, and cracked your head.” Her elastic thwacked twice. “You bled like a faucet. They had to clear the pool because it went pale-pink.”

  “You took me to a pool?”

  “You were young,” she said in a long quivery breath. “Oh, Will,” she said, shutting her eyes. “What I’m most afraid of is breaking apart and losing everything.”

  “Aren’t you already broken apart?”

  “Not completely.”

  “Well, maybe you just need to get it over with,” he said, “like I do in skateboarding. If I’m scared to try a trick, I need to fall once really bad, and then I’m not scared anymore.”

  “You and Jonah going skateboarding tomorrow?” she said, turning to examine her face in the mirror, except her eyes weren’t looking anywhere.

  “Yeah, probably,” he said, then, just to scare her: “We might go find some hills to bomb downtown.”

  Her breath caught, and she stared at the bubbles for a long while. She pulled back the elastic at her wrist but didn’t let it go.

  “Could you do something for me, Will?” she asked, avoiding his eyes.

  “I’m never quitting skateboarding, so don’t even ask—”

  “No, no, it’s not that. Promise me one thing. Please don’t go downtown to the harbor. Okay? It’s just … very, very dangerous down there. Even more so than the creek.”

  Though he’d never admit it to Jonah, he was still reluctant to leave the neighborhood anyway, because of the Butler’s wolves and the possibility of the Wheezing Man’s bear hug breaking all his ribs like sticks. “Sure, Mom,” Will said, and she put her hand in his wet hair and they sat like that for a while listening to the bubbles fizz.

  Relaxation Time

  It was July, and she’d been daring to open a window in her bedroom, letting the delicious air slide over her skin, amid nothing more than a manageable stitch of anxiety. Perhaps she had absorbed a little of Will’s courage, or perhaps all this talking into her reel-to-reel was helping to loosen panic’s grip on her, finger by finger, word by word, memory by memory.

  Both the radio and TV had gone dead, and there hadn’t been a newspaper delivered in weeks. Even after Diane had berated the profusely apologetic circulation office for an hour, still the paper did not come. At first these had seemed terrible omens, but now she was enjoying the quiet. It cheered her to be free from the Thunder Bay Tribune’s ever-depressing editorials, all those missing children and dour forecasts of a worsening economic future. She was reading Great Expectations and watching old films on her 16mm projector Will and Jonah had set up. Even sketching a little and taking some still photos here and there—mostly when some regular household object caught the sunlight in such a way that the light seemed to originate from within it.

  Will had started sleeping on his own in Charlie’s old room. Sometimes she still woke in the dark and listened hard for his breathing but found no little warm engine of a boy beside her, only the unearthly roar of night. To compensate, she’d ordered an extra quilt to put atop her old one. Tonight she vowed to check on him only twice—a hard-fought number. It was as high as ten previously. Poking her head into his room was like diving into a pool of his sweet breath. She loved to watch his perfect chest rise in the half-light like smoke. But she’d been sleeping better on her own. Now whenever she was troubled by a dream, she could click on her reading light without fear of waking Will.

  Summer meant Will was again a constant presence in the house, and so was Jonah. He was a quiet boy, and at first she’d worried he was somewhat morose, but now that he was opening up she could see something lustrous in him, a vein of brilliance that in some ways reminded her of Arthur. But Will was smitten and rarely ate when Jonah was over, the surest sign of adoration. Initially she was unable to watch their skateboarding—this machine without seat belts or protection of any kind, upon which her sweet, tender son, his legs like finely sanded sticks, hurtled through traffic and over concrete. But on her better days, she liked to watch them out front. Mostly it was to see that old determination on his face, the same zeroed-in look he’d get while painting—something he hadn’t done in months. Though she’d never tell them, she found skateboarding as beautiful as any dance, with its arcing turns and graceful little leaps. (She could only imagine what Arthur would say about how these disenfranchised boys were reclaiming their inhospitable urban environment in creative ways.) It transported her back to the hours she spent in the workhouse at Pool 6, watching in fascination the displays of balance and daring and one-upmanship: men swinging from safety lines, leaping from high perches, dancing through dangerous machinery. As long as Will stuck to their neighborhood as he’d promised, and he and Jonah didn’t start hurling themselves down staircases and sliding across banisters and curbs like the boys in the magazine pages that now wallpapered his room, she’d do her best to contain her fear. Hadn’t Charlie been equally reckless after the deaths of their parents? Fighting, scaling high trees, riding his bike like a demon, working like a man possessed—why must boys terrify the world to know it loves them?

  But most heartening was to see Will and Jonah together. In the Thunder Bay of her youth, Native people still mostly kept to the reserves and to themselves. She suspected that was the real reason the other elevator workers had grumbled about what Charlie and Whalen were up to at night at Pool 6. When a rumor went around that they’d let the Native workers use the common mugs in the workhouse, the men smashed every last one, and the thought of this now left her ill. From the paper she knew more and more Natives were living in the city these days, mostly across the highway in County Park (a
subdivision that hadn’t existed until after she’d left) and down by the harbor—a good thing, she supposed, as long as they weren’t forced from the reserves, as they’d been forced onto them. She recalled the silent scorn and derision heaped upon the Native students at her school, worse than she and Charlie ever got it. How they were never called upon by teachers in class. How at recess they were literally spit upon and ignored. How White children washed their hands if ever they happened to touch a Native student or pass one a handout. It was so easy to misplace details like these because they tasted so foul in the mouth, were so quietly vile. And it would be easier to say that Theodore was kind to Natives they’d pass on the street, which he was, but Diane also remembered her father expounding that old Thunder Bay adage that Natives were averse to work—to him life’s greatest virtue, making idleness life’s gravest crime. Diane could still see him flushing her and Charlie from the house, as though their idle presence on a weekend afternoon was unclean. “I don’t huff grain dust to finance a couple of homebodies,” he’d say. Any man spotted in taverns or sitting on his porch on a weekday was less than an insect to Theodore. But it was worse if they were Native. “I understand these people were given a raw deal,” he said once while driving in his squeaky pickup. “Who hasn’t. Look at us Cardiels. But they need to just forget the past and get to work.” She wondered now what he’d have said about the crew that his son had cheated out of their fair pay? Or of all the hours Will and Jonah spent together painting and skateboarding? And what would her father think of her now? The very definition of a homebody. Living off Arthur’s support checks and her meager royalties. Moping around the house. And what would he make of her films? Had it been work to create those? To Theodore work meant huffing grain dust or loading trains or framing a house. Work was defined by one thing: a punched clock. A payroll. Diane hadn’t worked in decades by his definition. But wasn’t everything that demanded care and effort—painting, growing up, skateboarding, reading, filmmaking, hiding—also equally important work? How much damage had this narrow idea done to people in Thunder Bay? And to Charlie, who would’ve given anything to set foot on a university campus or to make a film, as she had? How much more damage would this idea do?

  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 p
ills that Angela snapped into her throat with unbelievable ease. It still took Will an hour of gagging to swallow a Tylenol.

  “You guys can stay,” Angela said, leaning forward for the nurse. “I do this every day. It loosens the mucus.”

  “Angela, I have something I need to ask,” Will said as the nurse velcroed her into a vest that reminded Will of a flak jacket. Angela coughed a few more hoarse seal barks and spit some blobs into a cup.

  “Sorry,” she said, an embarrassed look directed at Jonah.

  The nurse hooked two tubes from the machine to the jacket, and as Will was about to speak, the machine roared and the jacket inflated like an airplane life vest. Angela began to shake. The nurse checked her watch then left the room.

  “Angela,” Will began nervously, speaking loudly as he did on his first day of school. “You know that drawing of Jonah’s I gave you? Well, he needs it back.”

  She frowned while her bottom lip wobbled with the shaking.

  “He said he’d draw another one for you?” Will added, turning to Jonah, who nodded.

  “But I love that drawing,” she said, her voice warbly like a sheep saying baa. “I see it when I wake up. It keeps me going.”

  “We … need it, Angela. It’s important.”

  “Yeah,” Jonah said. “That one’s not even good. I’ll draw you anything you want.”

  “So …,” Angela said, “you wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t for this thing—”

  “—No, that’s not it!” said Will.

  Suddenly the machine stopped, and it felt like the whole Outside had never been so quiet before. Even the distant beeping and institutional hush of the hospital was lessened.

  Angela thought for a moment before horking brazenly into a cup. “Okay, boys, I have an idea,” she said.

  Will and Jonah spent the next day setting up an ersatz crime lab in Jonah’s basement, opposite to where Enoch kept his weight set. They’d considered setting up in Will’s house (better art supplies and lighting), but Will knew their investigation would unsettle his mother, plus Marcus’s grid was safer here. Despite their fearsome exterior, the Turtle Brothers spoke softly and made a point to eat together every Friday night, the boys all sitting down to either a big stack of ordered-in pizzas or some fried whitefish that Gideon pulled sizzling from a cast-iron pot with a wire scooper. They always waited for Will to take his share first.