Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

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.

“I’m not worried,” he said in his most reassuring voice, smoothing the nest of her hair, struck by the strange sensation that he was at this moment not her son, but her father. “I’m going to be okay. I may not be a genius, but I’m getting stronger Outside. Nothing can really hurt me,” he said, quoting Marcus. “Not even that wolf.”

She pulled away, wiped her eyes, snapped her elastic, and shuddered. “Will,” she said, “come with me.”

He followed her to San Francisco, where she sat him on the bed. She reached to a high shelf in her closet, producing a yellow envelope, from which she extracted a few papers. Letters from a doctor, she said. “You were tested when you were a baby, honey, and there is something not quite right about your heart. The valves. Like a murmur, but worse. I didn’t want to scare you. That’s why I kept it from you all this time. I know I haven’t told you much about our family … but we aren’t the luckiest people.”

Will drew his hand between the lapels of his pajamas and palmed his sternum. “Is that how Charlie …”

She shut her eyes and nodded.

“Could I … die of it?”

Her eyes got pained, and she lifted her chin up slow, then let it down even slower with her lips pursed.

“How easy?”

She dropped her head. “They didn’t say.”

“What do you mean they didn’t say?”

Her face darkened, and she began to shake, a fresh tide of Black Lagoon cresting in her, shoving her nearer to the shoals of permanent breakdown. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “I always knew you’d leave someday. Just be careful out there. That’s all I ask.”

“I will, Mom,” he said. “I promise.”