Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“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.

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 students 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.