For a while Will had difficulty believing that Titus was his uncle. His mother said that it was actually some friend of theirs named Whalen who’d died in the accident at the elevators, not Charlie, but it made little sense to Will. Maybe it was because he’d never had any family other than his mother, so it wasn’t easy to scrounge up a room for Charlie in his mind. Will had already stuffed it with so much since he’d left the Inside, the whole family thing would have to wait until free space became available. Still, Will liked having him around. Somehow Charlie made the Inside fuller, less claustrophobic.
At his mother’s request, Charlie had moved into Toronto, where they set up a suite for him, at first so he could heal the three broken ribs that Claymore had given him with his shovel. But after that, he stayed. The basement wasn’t called Toronto anymore either. Now they called it “the Apartment,” or sometimes his mother called it “Charlie’s Crypt,” except never in front of him.
Charlie brought along his furniture from the workhouse, and Will’s mother had even started going down into the basement again. She and Charlie would sit at an old table where they’d drink tea and play cards for dirty pennies. Will often heard them laughing exactly the same laugh and remembering a million things from when they were young. Will and his mother ordered Charlie a water cooler that they could hear gurgling all the time like a big underground stomach. Now that he wasn’t in the elevator huffing grain dust and living on birds, his breathing had improved, and he was making more sense. When he read books to Will, what he said seemed more like something that a person could’ve written.
But it wasn’t all perfect. Sometimes Charlie didn’t come upstairs for weeks, which, for their house anyway, wasn’t overly unsettling. That is, until he’d start claiming items in their basement were trying to suffocate him, and he’d send up paranoid screeds scrawled on scraps of Will’s old masterpieces. Once Charlie dismantled the furnace in the dead of winter because it was recording his thoughts and sending them through the air ducts, pouring some kind of poison gas into their bedrooms that could hurt Will and his mother. But most of the time he was all right. In the spring, he used a net to pull hundreds of smelt from the creek, which stunk up the house when he fried them whole on his hot plate. In summer, he and Will built a new fence in the backyard, sinking the four-by-four cedar posts deep into the soil with a giant corkscrew that Charlie could turn one-handed. On the weekends he went off to collect cans and things he’d fix up, like radios and tools nobody wanted. Charlie had also put up some birdhouses he built near the fence, but whether they had traps in them was one of those things the family didn’t talk about, like how the Black Lagoon used to be. But when Will woke in New York in the morning, where he had a proper bed and even a dresser now, along with the soothing gurgle of the creek, Will heard the music of his uncle’s birds and it always made him feel like going Outside.
His mother still got the Black Lagoon—that didn’t go anywhere—but after she’d rescued him at the elevator it was like somebody had permanently turned down the volume. Will liked to imagine that her bravery that day had built at least a bit of a callus between her and the Outside. She was baking bread in the oven, into which she’d put a large flat stone Charlie had pulled from the lake. She even called her fear the Black Lagoon now, which always made him laugh, like when she swore, which sounded overdubbed and fake. Will and his mother went on a short walk once per week, lazy jaunts around the neighborhood, walking slow and careful under the trees, during which the sunlight went wild in her hair as if it were made of fiber optics, and Will held her hand, not because she needed it, but because it felt good.
Once during their walk Will asked what it was like having her brother back. “He’s completely different,” she said. “Yet he’s the same. But watching the people you love get hurt is part of the deal, I’m learning. That’s the mistake I made with you, honey. And somehow, despite getting hurt, Charlie managed to hold on to the kindest parts of himself. It’s the only way we can survive what the world will do to us.” When she saw him losing interest, she finger-poked his ribs. “But the good news for you is: he’s very brave about changing lightbulbs.”
Another time they walked all the way to a thrift store, where she donated her old Relaxation Machine. “I’ve got a new one,” she’d said to the clerk, patting the Bolex that now hung constantly at her side, which she’d bring on their walks to shoot things that caught her interest. After that, Will urged her to venture again outside their neighborhood, downtown, or the culvert again, but she refused. “Trust me,” she said. “Our street is enough danger for me.” So he let it drop. They were going to Toronto on an airplane for something to do with her films the following fall, so he’d just have to trust her.
People Outside say someone is “losing it” when they get scared, but Will wasn’t so sure. It was more like his mother had been securing something during all that time Inside, clutching at it, like those people on TV stuck in a blowing tube, trying frantically to catch the money fluttering around them, except the bills were actually pieces of her. Even though it didn’t look pretty, from now on Will had to trust that she’d catch at least a few of them.
Jonah did get sent to Templeton, but he and Will were going to the same high school next year if he kept his marks up, so it wasn’t the end of the world. By now Jonah could recite his medical books backward, but Will hadn’t told his mother yet that they were both taking a year off after grade twelve to move to real San Francisco and skateboard professionally for a year before Jonah started med school. Will hoped for her sake that the Black Lagoon would be gone by the time that happened, but if it wasn’t, she’d have to build some more calluses.
Angela was doing better, and Will often skateboarded to the hospital for visits. When her breathing permitted, they’d wedge the door of her room shut with one of her vibration machines and lower her bed flat. Then Will would take off his shoes, and they’d lie for a while and kiss and clamp their pelvises together and stroke each other’s hair while listening to the whooshing and beeping of the hospital.
All that summer, Will and Jonah filmed themselves skateboarding with the new Bolex they earned working for Titus. They met some other skateboarders downtown who’d ventured forth from their own neighborhoods and driveways: a Chinese kid who bruised easily and had to hide both his bruises and his skateboard from a strict father who taught chemistry at the college; an only-child girl whose father was the city’s best hockey coach; a motor-mouthed Irish kid who used to be a soccer prodigy but quit when his mother died, Even the Belcourt Twins had returned from up north and somehow had acquired skateboards, though they were more interested in opportunistic mischief and hash smoking than doing actual tricks. But despite their outward differences, Will had observed that skateboarding was a contagion a certain species of kid was susceptible to. That they’d all had something go wrong in their lives: divorces, deaths, diseases, deficiencies, accidents, nutty relatives stuffed in a basement somewhere—expectations that didn’t fit reality; dark, unplanned swerves of fate; falls their families had taken. Each kid with their own personal Black Lagoon that skateboarding somehow rendered less terrifying.
Will and Jonah were by far the best skateboarders in Thunder Bay, which wasn’t saying much, but it was something. Though Will could see the true reverence the others reserved for Jonah. The way their jaws loosened as they looked at him sidelong. The way they sat down when he arrived, embarrassed they didn’t move with anything close to his exactness and grace. While Will’s style was jerky—he did strange things with his right hand, an involuntary bird claw with the fingers—Jonah was ever more elegant, languid, full of feline poise, all lithe power and confidence. He sizzled down Thunder Bay’s rough streets like water poured over hot rocks, skating with a complete, evident joy—a free person, open to the air, unleashed upon the world.