Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Your ancestors mind you filleting yourselves up like this?” Titus said later when they were heating some cans of beans on the woodstove.

“Who?” said Jonah.

Titus shook his head. “Your”—he strained to produce the correct word—“parents,” he said.

“Father? Is that you?” Jonah said, eyes turned upward with his hands clasped at his neck, scanning the filthy rafters as though communing with angels. “Am I going to be all right?”

“Roger that,” said Titus. He put his head down. “How about you, Icarus Number One?” he said, almost too quiet for Will to hear.

“My mom doesn’t like me skateboarding. Or coming down here. But it’s my choice.” These days she was scarcely leaving San Francisco, and the boys had even stayed over at Pool 6 again twice more and she never said anything. Will figured she was too Black Lagooned to check his room at night. “Anyway, that’s her problem,” said Will. “My mother cares too much. About everything. She’s basically psycho.”

Titus stared at the ground for a while with his jaw set and embers burning beneath skin. “That’s not a thing to say,” he said flatly as he rose. “My pins are twinkling, Icaruses. Think I’m fixing to pay my taxes.” He hobbled to his bed and zipped himself into his sleeping bag.

At times the boys would stifle laughter when the randomness of Titus’s utterances landed in the realm of the comic, yet sometimes a switch flicked inside him and his moods took dark swerves, his hissing voice assuming a too-loud, desperate quality, the way people speak when they’re wearing headphones. At these times the very same words became frightening, portentous.

While Titus slept, they’d searched every inch of the workhouse for clues: the hexagon boots, handwriting that matched the sign, any trace of Marcus — yielding nothing. But despite its desolation, Will preferred the elevator almost more than he did Jonah’s house. Maybe it was because his uncle and grandfather had both worked and died here that Will felt some manner of bone-deep connection to it. Or maybe it was because there was nobody to tell them what to do or to worry about them. MacVicar had said that boys frequented these abandoned places — old mills, mines, and derelict cabins — because they needed to be alone. Which was probably the only thing he’d ever been right about. Because, Will was discovering, the Outside’s most forgotten areas were both the perfect places to hide and the perfect places to grow up.

It was loosed upon her now. Like that day on the subway platform, floodgates blown open, her thoughts a maze with no openings or exits.

Her son returned home each day from school smelling like Theodore and Charlie had after work: grease, sweat, sawn lumber, and grain — the only explanation was that her fear was inventing this. But canned food had been disappearing faster than she could order it. Perhaps Will was donating it to a shelter or some organization that ministered to the poor. Though she doubted it. She’d even found the bread knife tucked in his backpack. But what could she do? Forbidding him hadn’t worked. If he ran away, she couldn’t even go out and look for him. She’d have to rely on MacVicar, whose track record for locating children wasn’t legendary.

All her tricks to deactivate thinking had failed, like old clunky jokes that nobody laughed at anymore. The elastic. Will’s artwork. Her guitar. She could no longer read. Not even page-turners. Certainly not mysteries. It was like trying to soak up water with a piece of plastic wrap. The terror was as ceaseless now as her heart beating.

She’d tried to appease her spiraling thoughts, reason with them, flee from them, but her methods had betrayed her in the end. Fear had been festering inside her, and all her efforts to contain, quell, and suppress it had only incubated and nourished it.

So it came to this. It would be no permanent thing. Not like the basement. She simply felt safe in her room. She’d been wearing the same malodorous robe for a week, unwashed dishes tucked under her bed, a greenish frizz around the dregs of vegetable soup, toupees of blue floating in unfinished yogurt cups. She’d carted the phone to her night table to order groceries. With Will gone, she convinced the regular deliveryman to accept a key so he could place the bags far enough inside the door that she could reach them. She’d innovated a method to get to the washroom or retrieve packages without falling into a hole, which involved drinking half a bottle of codeine cough syrup — luckily they delivered these by the case — and darting for the door.

But it wouldn’t be permanent. Eventually fear would release her, would retreat as it always had before, and she’d be bold enough to again roam her own house as freely as her son now roamed the outside world.

That night, panting in her bed with no Relaxation Apparatus or other means to defend herself, she was accosted with the sense that there were parts of the story she’d been leaving out. The night before Charlie died. She remembered walking at Whalen’s request up the hill in a bedlam of sleet to his house. His father was away on business, so he brought her inside. They sat in his dressed-up parlor on separate chairs. He made no move to embrace, blaming the dusty work clothes he already had on, identical to Charlie’s, but she could see now that this was an excuse, that the private world between them had already started to close.

Whalen said that according to the crew who worked the day shift that morning, there’d come an odd pinging from one of the cables that held the grain cars aloft while they were flipped, like the high strings of ten violins plucked once. There’d been a heated debate over whether the entire counterweight mechanism had lowered an inch. Whalen said he’d told Charlie, but her brother wasn’t worried. “He’s determined to get this boat loaded before the freeze,” Whalen said. “He said it’s the only way he’ll get the money to take care of you when he leaves for school next year.”

Whalen took her hand and kissed her, and she told him she’d try. On her walk home she realized that with no engineer in Thunder Bay, they’d have to call one in from Duluth to check the cable. And even with an engineer, changing a cable of that gauge meant two days of downtime. If those two didn’t unload that boat tomorrow night, for another entire year she’d be bringing Charlie’s suppers, enduring his angry tirades, listening to his sad wheeze, all while sneaking around with Whalen as the secrecy of their meetings poisoned them for good.

She returned home and said nothing to her brother about the cable. The next day, she thanked him for all his hard work and packed him two of his favorite sandwiches. “You and Whalen better hurry if you want that boat loaded before the freeze,” she said, her eyes fixed on his dust-covered boots.

Yes, she’d done her part to doom Charlie, she admitted this now while weeping into her sheets. But please let her not fail Will. Let her not be selfish like she’d been that night. Her son was too full of life, too robust, too valuable, to be taken from her. But too valuable not to be.

How was it that to give a child life was to, on the very same day — even before you could lay eyes upon their slick, purple bodies — have already given them their death?

Whether it was because Titus had beaten his infection or was eating regularly or drinking unblighted water, or simply that the boys had grown accustomed to his pureed speech patterns, Will couldn’t say, but he was making more sense. “I been out of people practice,” he offered once when Will was fixing him a sandwich on his mother’s freshly thawed bread, which Titus always requested. “I got a hard time sticking words into things, sticking things into words.”