“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.”

That night after she dropped asleep in his arms in San Francisco, he got up and stashed the fire poker under his cot in New York. One thing he’d learned thus far was that the border between the Inside and the Outside wasn’t as impermeable as she liked to believe. He knew that sooner or later, the Outside would want in.

When Christmas break was over, his mother called the school secretary and said Will was going to need more time to recuperate, months, years—the doctors weren’t sure. After that they slipped back into the old routine. She ordered fresh art supplies, Will rolling in the desk chair to meet deliverymen at the door, the acrylic tubes still cold in their hands. She ordered Will any food he wanted, even tortilla chips, the choke equivalent of the A-bomb.

She lowered his easel, and he painted while seated with his Helmet on, cranking out a series in the old style—abstract whirls and smears of gold and purple—more to soothe her nerves. He spent more time titling his works than painting them:

• Sailing a Sea of Wolves

• The Surprising Nutritiousness of Jam

• Canadian Ninja I: Strikeforce Cobra

• Canadian Ninja II: Sais Extra Large

• Zeus vs. Jesus: Thunderbolt Rotisserie

• Boy, Eleven, Riddled with Spears, Survives Unscathed

He watched his hunched schoolmates with pity as they passed his house in the dark mornings. The only Outside people he missed were Jonah, Angela, and of course Marcus. But even after their ice sliding and fight with the wolf, Jonah still wouldn’t talk to him. One night Will located Angela’s number in the phone book, fantasizing about having her over for smoothies and playing her some of his Sound Collages or his Philip Glass–style compositions on the organ (repeating three-note motifs that went on for as long as his fingers could manage) before they’d retreat for some cuddling in New York. But he never called.

Soon his leg grew unbearably itchy, but strong enough to perform his old duties: laundry in Toronto, changing bulbs, writing checks for deliverymen—filling the gaps left by the Black Lagoon. He found his mother weeping less, no longer distracted by a sound he could not hear, like a dog whistle or what was good about jazz music.

He retained his limp past the point he needed, and when he finally allowed it to fall away like training wheels unbolted from a bicycle, he felt her grow tense. But still he made no attempt to leave. Overall, his life Outside had mostly been a disappointment. He hadn’t found Marcus or joined any boy gangs or used his genius to solve any mysteries. He’d found only questions piled upon questions, with no connections or sense to it—just Black Lagooned people fumbling around in the dark, alone.