If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  “Who knows,” she said, sighing, already bored. “Anyway, kids are coming and going from his foster home all the time,” she added. “Maybe he got transferred to another one and they just forgot.” Will would’ve visited this foster home, but the thought of the journey through the culvert to County Park withered him.

  Angela ate her lunch from a long store-bought bread bag—always just four margarined slices, usually including the heel. She didn’t have a mother, a condition Will found unimaginable. Her mother had hopped into an old boyfriend’s semi-truck cab the very day Angela stopped nursing. Now her father, a former railway ticket agent, spent his days on their stoop soaking his insides with a flammable grain alcohol he procured down near the harbor. “Why wouldn’t he just find you another mom?” Will had asked when she told him. “There are women everywhere Outside.” Angela’s face darkened and she said she had to go Inside for her treatments.

  Angela had a disease, something to do with phlegm stuck in her lungs like mortar. Her breath crackled like buckshot on the rare occasions she laughed unmockingly. The school nurse had to go at her chest with a vibrating wand every afternoon during lunch. Whenever Will considered the traffic jam Inside Angela, he had to fight the urge to cough.

  “The treatments are okay,” she said. “I think about Jonah while they do it.”

  “Are your hands free to draw masterpieces?”

  She gave him another scrutinizing grimace. “You’re weird because you talk too much and say weird things. You shouldn’t do that.” Then she asked him if he liked anyone in class, by which she actually meant their vaginas.

  He said he was going to wait until someone liked him.

  “Girls don’t work like that,” she said.

  “How do they work?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said, waving her head like a cobra.

  What he knew about girls was that they closed ranks and whispered malevolently out of earshot. They spritzed their architecturally sculpted bangs with complex bottles. There were rumors they had been making bracelets.

  Angela said the reason that nobody talked to Will was because he was a pussy and a baby who still slept with his mother, which he did, actually, but he’d set up a cot in New York and could tolerate the occasional night there. He wondered how his classmates knew and hoped it was only a good guess.

  While sharpening his pencil, Will often looked out over Thunder Bay, his eyes skiing down the hill and over the steppes of asphalt-shingled roofs, brown, black, and green, each sheltering an entirely different Inside of their own (he still couldn’t believe there could be so many Insides), then down to the monstrous cloud-wrapped lake and the tired, shabby buildings that kneeled beside it. Like the creek, Thunder Bay had proved smaller than he imagined. “It was once a charmed place. Now it’s just an old rusty ruin” was something his mother said so often it sounded like an official slogan. But he liked the ruined parts, best of all the empty grain elevators that the newspaper called a blight, standing like foreclosed castles near the shore now edged with ice. He decided that if he ever somehow became as good an artist as Jonah, they would be the first real masterpiece he’d paint.

  In rare but uncomfortably emotional digressions from his lesson plan, Mr. Miller professed that he’d worked at the elevators to put himself through teachers college and couldn’t bear to see them empty today—but Will only caught half of it because it sounded too much like history, which was actually Mr. Miller opining about how much better things were before he got old and had to give speeches to uninterested children every weekday.

  Then one Friday morning the janitor brought Will a new desk and placed it in the row beside Jonah’s. When Jonah Turtle entered the classroom, Will recognized him instantly as the same boy who’d told him to walk away from Ritchie that day by the creek. Jonah was tall, with thick, swooping eyebrows, and he moved precisely, with a startling elegance, like a gymnast on a beam. He wore a button-up cardigan over old T-shirts and leather old-man shoes, not sneakers. His skin was like gingerbread, darker than Marcus’s, and he had close-cropped black hair except for long bangs that often dangled in his eyes dramatically like a cape, which he then hooked effortlessly behind his ear, as if they had been grown expressly for that purpose.

  Will observed Jonah during art class that day, which was more like cooking than making masterpieces: Mr. Miller drew the recipe on the board with a meter stick and colored chalk, and the class was expected to replicate it. Today’s recipe called for tissue paper to be wrapped over the ends of pencils, then glued in bunches to toilet paper rolls. A Christmas ornament, he said.

  Now glue was mixing with the tissue paper pigment and seeping onto Will’s toilet paper roll, while Jonah’s ornament was perfect, orderly rows of spiraling color. After wringing out their magic in private, Will had finally hung Jonah’s masterpieces in New York, and his mother complimented them as “an interesting new direction in realism.” Will had practiced his own masterpieces of skateboarders and skulls, but they were warped and unconvincing. He could do color fields and free splatters, but never anything real. Lately, Will had begun to question his genius-hood, mostly because there were so many things he clearly sucked at: throwing (anything with his arms), drawing, remembering to bring both his lunch and pencil case to school, math, vaginas, spelling (his mother maintained it was what you mean that mattered), and compared with that of his classmates, his cursive looked like an earthquake readout. But if Will did have a special power, it was his ability to see the Black Lagoon everywhere. He could tell that Mr. Miller was actually afraid of his students, and they didn’t fear him nearly as much as they did failing a grade and falling behind their friends. And that Angela was afraid both of silence and of having nobody to talk to, and that someday her disease would forbid her to breathe. Will had imagined there’d be less fear Outside, but everyone was afraid all the time: of failure, humiliation, harm, though he was still working out in what order. Jonah, however, in his silence that even Mr. Miller respected, didn’t seem to fear anything.

  Later that day at recess, Will and Angela were standing around as usual, drowning the interval with half-meant words. “I think he’d talk to you,” Angela said, gesturing toward Jonah, who was drawing with fingerless gloves on, his skateboard at his side, near the big rock at the fringe of the schoolyard. “You have lots in common,” Angela added.

  “Like what? Being weird?”

  “You’re both artistic.”

  Will scoffed but accepted it greedily as the first compliment he’d garnered in probably his entire life from someone other than his mother or a deliveryman (those were more for his mother). At home his mother produced praise like water from a tap, and it was just as tasteless.

  “Why don’t you talk to him?” said Will.

  “All I’ve ever had him do was hiss at me. It was the sexiest.” Angela then said Jonah lived in County Park, too, though he didn’t take the bus. He skateboarded brazenly through the culvert, which was dangerous because of the hobos and vagrants often lurking there. Jonah didn’t have parents and was the youngest of five brothers, who were thieves, thugs, and bootleggers, either in prison, going to prison, or recently released. Angela said a hockey player from the other side of town once whipped Jonah’s face with a birch switch. The next morning the eldest Turtle Brother showed up at the kid’s house and asked the boy’s father to have his son write a letter of apology. When the man refused, Jonah’s brother broke the man’s cheekbones, as well as those of two neighbors who came to help, then sat on the curb and waited for the police. On the schoolyard Jonah was untouchable, like a hockey referee who never blew his whistle.

  “But why would he talk to me?” said Will.

  “Maybe he’ll recognize a fellow artist,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Will, already walking.

  “Really?” she called after him. “Don’t say anything about me!” she crowed, wringing her hands.

  “Thanks for telling me to walk away that day by the creek,” Will said
when he reached him. “You saved my life.”

  Jonah’s leg stopped bouncing, and his large liquid eyes rose from his sketchbook and fastened calmly on Will’s. He had an angular face, as though his features were constructed entirely of wedges.

  Waiting for some reaction, Will began to feel even more lost and unprepared for conversation than usual. He already preferred kids like Angela, who commandeered airtime like a seasoned radio host. Jonah blinked slowly, then returned to sketching.

  “So why don’t you talk?” Will said.

  Jonah pumped his shoulders once, leaning into his masterpiece.

  “You talk at home?”

  Jonah nodded, pencil wiggling.

  “You just don’t talk at school?”

  He shook his head and brought the pencil parallel to the page and began shading. The Indian kids at Will’s school all rarely spoke, and when they did it was in voices barely audible and with downcast, skeptical eyes, as though the Outside was one big courtroom in which they were on trial. Will stood marveling at the evenness of Jonah’s shadows, their texture, how he knew exactly where light wasn’t.

  “I like your masterpieces,” Will said.

  Jonah looked up again. His face crinkled. He took a breath, then held it and squinted harder. “My what?” he said. His voice was soft and fast, built entirely of smooth tones like the high notes on a bass.

  “Your masterpieces,” said Will. “I saw some when I was sitting in your desk. They’re amazing.”

  “Leave me alone, kid,” Jonah said dispassionately, shaking his head as though they’d been conversing for hours, trying to untangle some tricky problem, and Jonah had finally reached his limit. He retreated again to his sketchbook.

  Will watched him for a defeated moment before making his way back to Angela.

  That night at home, Will let his slow-cooked butternut squash enchiladas cool untouched before him. He saw his mother quake at the sight of his uneaten food, almost savoring this new power of refusal he wielded over her.

  “Why did you tell me that pictures are called ‘masterpieces’?” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, setting her fork down. “That.” She snapped her elastic, and he resisted the urge to ask why the hell was that question scary. “Well, because that’s what they really are.”

  “No, they’re not,” he said sharply. Since he’d been going to school, there arrived inexplicable moments when just the timbre of her voice was enough to irrigate him with rage, moments that passed as quickly as they came.

  “To me they are.”

  “Well, to other people they aren’t, like people who are actually good artists,” he said, throwing his napkin at his plate. “And there’s more of them than us, Mom.”

  8

  Snow fell every day after Halloween, as though the lake had picked itself up and thrown itself inland, snuffing instantly the vivid bonfire of fall. Inside, Will had only felt the cold of the freezer in Toronto, but now immersed in it, he adored the completeness winter brought. Snow made the Outside more like the Inside, a white sheet put over the world, one enormous blanket fort.

  Will whiled away hours in his yard, investigating snowbanks, testing their crusts and consistencies, reconnoitering their cliffs and drifts. He discovered snow wasn’t tasteless—it tasted like club soda, but not as gross. And slush was so named because of the sound it made. And the sand that plows threw on the road yielded a substance that was half earth, half ice and the deceptively inviting consistency of brown sugar.

  His mother had forbidden tunnel forts, so he left his open to the sky. While she peered out from the window in Paris, Will would recline in his burrow, watching frizzy clouds saunter past, wondering if his friend Marcus lay somewhere Outside exactly like this, turning his face to the same endless sky, untroubled that no one was there to protect him. Over the years, Will’s mother had read him a thousand stories about orphans torn from their parents and abandoned to the wilds of the Outside. Will had never had that problem. His had been the opposite: too much protection. But like the twelve and the one on a clock’s face, he and Marcus were closer to each other than you’d think—“Other Will,” he’d called him at first. Will had since heard Angela use Marcus’s word, whatever, to express a complete indifference, but Will could still hear the true tenderness with which Marcus had offered it. Nothing can really hurt you, Will, Marcus had said, and Will knew his friend was alive somewhere, Outside, thriving.

  Weeks passed. Winter strayed into a truer, purer cold. Will’s morning walks were so frigid the ice chirped underfoot like plastic. The air shocked his chest, and a satanic wind bellowed through the elevators up from the lake, now frozen out to the breakwater.

  One day before school, his mother began stuffing some packets into his jacket and snow pants. “What’s this?” he said.

  “I ordered a box. Hand warmers. Neat, huh?” she said, bending one until it snapped before shoving it into his armpit as though he were a shoplifting accomplice.

  His mother knew nothing of winter. To her, the season rendered the world even more predatory. She’d told him about a book she’d read in film school that claimed that because nature was always trying to kill Canadians it made them different from other people. “In Thunder Bay, you doze off in a snowbank”—she’d say before making a sharp teeth-whistle—“that’s it.” But he’d napped in his snow fort several times and woken unscathed, which meant both she and whoever wrote that book didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. His mother had already exaggerated so many dangers that Will was finding it increasingly difficult to heed her warnings.

  On his way to school a hand warmer slipped down into his crotch, yielding the sudden sensation he’d wet himself. Soon he was flushed, dripping with sweat that froze in his bangs like the mousse that had recently materialized in the hair of his classmates. He dumped the warmers along with his gloves, knit cap, and snow pants in the trees before making his way up the path.

  At school there was an unspoken contest among boys to see who could brave the frost with the least protective clothing. Their ears went red as stove elements while their cheeks cramped a bloodless white. Jonah—who wouldn’t even look at Will after the masterpiece incident—wore just a hooded sweatshirt and old-man shoes, maybe because he was stylish or maybe because his winter clothing had burned in the house fire. Either way, in the school-wide tournament to be the least appropriately dressed yet still alive, Jonah won.

  That afternoon, Mr. Miller asked Will to stay after class. He’d seemed a little ragged all day and was sipping from a mug that wasn’t steaming and smelled vaguely of the fluid Will’s mother used to clean her silver jewelry. “Will, I wanted to say you’re settling in just fine here,” he began. “Your work is improving. I can even read your printing now, which is a minor miracle.”

  Will said thanks and turned to go. Time spent in the direct spotlight of any adult always sent him cowering for the anonymity of a herd of children.

  “Another thing, Will. I thought I recognized your last name—who wouldn’t in Thunder Bay. But I wanted to say I’m happy your mother decided to move back home from—where was it? San Francisco? I heard she’d done well for herself. ’Course the only way to accomplish that nowadays is to leave,” Mr. Miller said, letting out the fumes of a great sigh that waggled the pink stalactite between his front teeth as he looked out the window to the lake. “I worked under her father and remember her and her brother from the harbor and, well, it was a shame. What happened. I think all of Thunder Bay … Well, we felt for those two.” Then his voice went gravelly. “Coming back took guts.”

  Will did the chuckling thing he’d picked up from Angela. “Sorry, but you’ve got the wrong Cardiels, sir,” he said. “It’s just me and my mom. Always has been. And she grew up in Toronto.” To this Mr. Miller apologized, and Will made his escape.

  When the biggest snow came, a billion flakes corkscrewed slow to the ground. Cars disappeared. Will watched his neighbors dent their truck with shovels trying to locate it
. Out back, Will found the mud on the creek bank flash-frozen and iron-hard like the gravied entrée of a TV dinner. He watched ice creep out from its banks, first like awnings, then with icy fingers across the narrows.

  It was thanks to these winter investigations that Will discovered the boot tracks in his backyard. They were too big to be Marcus’s, nearly double the length of his own, and fresh. They came up from the creek through a gap in the hedge, then stopped about ten feet from the window beneath San Francisco, right near where he’d found Marcus. The closest footprints were packed tighter than the others, toes aimed houseward. The person had stood in that spot for some time, observing, and at the midpoint of the tread, a distinct hexagonal shape was sculpted deep and clean in the snow.

  Will followed the tracks westward along the creek, down toward the lake, wondering if it could’ve been a yeti—who weren’t real, but still—or a deliveryman, or the ferrety gas meter reader, or perhaps one of the gruff, unemployed men who rang their bell with pitifully affordable offers to plow their driveway, men his mother always hired and tipped extravagantly. But what would any of them be doing approaching their house from the creek?

  Emerging from the woods near the hockey arena, Will lost the trail in the tire print nebulas of its parking lot.

  Relaxation Time

  Today she ended her Session early when an image of her twin brother’s wrecked body lifting from the black lake cut into her thoughts and left her nauseous. While cleaning up at the sink, she recalled her very first glimpse of Will’s blood, in the hospital mere minutes after his birth. A test for blood sugar, the nurse said, roughly squeezing a lustrous ladybug from his pricked heel. Arthur, already depleted by the ordeal and itching to return to his drafting table, went ghostly when he saw it, but Diane’s only thought was: A more precious substance I cannot imagine. The blood was so recently hers—she wondered if she could still rightly call it her own—and had only become more valuable now that it had left her.