He knew now how selfish it was to leave. His body wasn’t only his. Because they were twins, his uncle Charlie’s body had been partly his mother’s too. And Will couldn’t wound her like that again. To be her guardian he would need to protect his body and his heart. As much as it pained him, he would have to leave all the tantalizing mysteries of the Outside unsolved.

Marcus would have to find himself.

Relaxation Time

Charlie. At once a dreadful curse and a holy utterance. Unfortunately for Diane, saying it to Will for the first time, coupled with the sight of his little thigh splayed open, had unbolted a door in her mind.

Yes, she’d lied. But how else could she explain to Will that the reason he had no extended family—no cousins, uncles, or grandparents—was that he descended from a long line of people who died tragically, usually absurdly, with no sense to be made of any of it? That their family tree was one of misshapen branches, bare, leggy—“Good for climbing,” her father often joked. That historically, the Cardiels were God’s crash-test dummies, extras in the action film of history, a people destroyed by what they did. They expired in mine collapses, boat capsizements, log-boom mishaps. They took absurd, Looney Tunes–style falls from the buildings, scaffolds, granaries, and bridges that they’d just constructed. Their sons were the first shot out of the landing boats, the ones collapsed at the lip of the trench, the ones who died in a hail of soil from a shell landing twenty feet from the group of soldiers charging their way to glory. A people terminated in tragedies so senseless they got their own newspaper stories simply because others needed to be reminded that life was only loaned.

Perhaps it was all due to some doomed combination of recklessness, fragility, and rotten luck, or perhaps there was a self-destruct mechanism embedded in the Cardiel line, a kind of discontinuation of the species strategy—she couldn’t say—but Will’s grandfather Theodore had managed to last longer than most.

He grew up on a barley farm outside Burlington, and after his parents were simultaneously cut to ribbons by the diesel-powered thresher they’d borrowed riskily to purchase, his family fell destitute. Theodore enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Navy when he was eighteen, and only in the last week of flight school was it discovered he couldn’t discern red from green. Because the cockpit buttons were color coded, he was hastily taught to cook and dropped in the galley of a transport ship, where his duties entailed frying breakfasts and pumping up each sailor’s daily rum ration from oak casks below. Shortly after, Theodore’s ship collided with a friendly destroyer in a fog north of the Isle of Man. As black water poured into the galley, Theodore stripped his uniform and smeared himself head-to-toe with sausage grease. He bobbed in the North Atlantic for six hours, praying the ship diesel splayed on the surface wouldn’t ignite, before some Norwegian mackerel fishermen hoisted him out and wrapped him in a red woolen blanket ruined instantly by the grease.

After the war, a shipmate found Theodore work on the docks in Oakland, loading grain boats with willow shovels in order to prevent sparks that could ignite the gases from the grain and blow the entire elevator to the Midwest. Theodore never spoke of it, but Diane knew her father had been to prison around this time: an assault—some said serious, and some said a drunken punch he’d landed with more calamity than he intended—but shortly after his release he met their mother, Iola, who’d worked in the courthouse.

The couple married and moved to Canada, where Theodore secured better employment on the Lakes in Thunder Bay. On principle he chose the largest grain elevator, the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool 6, where he unblocked clogged conveyance chutes and hoppers. “Walking down the grain,” as it was known—the riskiest job on the harbor, because of the constant threat of live burial. Before he lowered himself into the bins, Theodore would empty his pockets into a tin can—wallet, keys, snapshot of his wife—because if things shifted, if moisture or air pockets were hidden in the grain, a man could be swallowed instantly, his safety cable snapping like a string of spit. “Grain is neither solid nor liquid,” her father often said, “so there’s your problem.”

After three years, during which frantic coworkers had thrice dug out Theodore’s buried and nearly asphyxiated body, each time cutting him nastily with their spades, he was hired as the foreman of an unloading crew. From then on, he minded and coaxed the enormous hydraulic rig that grasped railcars and flipped them over to evacuate them of grain, as many as eight per shift. Theodore was fair and well regarded and men drew straws to work beneath him. If ever the mechanism seized, he did not send the youngest man, as was custom, but climbed into the hydraulics himself, which were, as the saying went, “enough to turn a boy to a man, and a man to a sausage.”

By this time he and Iola remained childless, and fellow workers left bottles of rye and foul herbal mixtures on their steps, along with cryptic incantations regarding their combination. Iola wrote home to learn that sterility ran in her family and was mutely devastated.

Then one Saturday morning, while doing her shopping, Iola fell down some concrete steps outside Eaton’s and spent a month in traction with a snapped pelvis—her “wishbone,” she later called it. The story went that shortly after her release, Theodore took her on a weekend trip to Onion Lake, where that night in September, after a blistering hour in the sauna, Theodore carried Iola, who still could not bear her own weight, and set her in the frigid water. Iola then declared her intent to swim across the small lake and back. Upon her return, he waded out to meet her in the water.

After the twins arrived and Theodore returned to work, the men on his crew quipped: “Finally got the cork out, that right, Theodore?” But any linger of needling about his wife ceased eight years later when Iola, distracted by a crying boy who’d been left outside a tavern by his father, was struck by a right-turning delivery truck that had lost its footing on the ice.

Then, when the twins were sixteen, just a month after Charlie had rejected Theodore’s offer of a position at Pool 6, their father fainted—the elevator management claimed it was a bad heart; the union claimed it was overwork; Theodore’s close friends blamed the grain dust—and fell into the space between the wharf and a docked lakeboat he’d been trimming. The boat was to capacity with rye and sitting low in the water, so when the gentle waves eased the boat to the wall, Theodore, a man who had survived the North Atlantic, numerous burials in grain, and ten lives’ worth of peril, died in a smudge, like nothing at all.

The morning after the funeral, Charlie woke early, took up his father’s work clothes, cinching them with twine and rolling the cuffs. “There’s no other way to earn good money in this damn place,” he said, the wrathful resolve he’d gathered after Iola’s death now doubled. “We’ll put you through university first. Then I’ll follow.” Diane couldn’t bear to tell him then that, aside from a vague longing to be an illustrator or an artist of some sort, she had no inclination to attend university and pictured herself staying in Thunder Bay, with Whalen, perhaps working in his office. “Trust me, I know how this works,” Charlie said as he left that day. “If we have money, this place can’t keep us.” When he reported at Pool 6, his father’s men let him stay, purely out of uneasy pity.

After school Diane brought Charlie’s supper, as she had her father’s, staying long enough to watch him—an oiled bandanna over his nose and mouth like a train robber—descend into the dark grain bins, dangling from his safety line like human bait. She would watch the hole, counting softly to herself with held breath, until he emerged in a blast of coughing and, after that subsided, a whoop. Over the next few weeks, thick envelopes arrived from the universities to which Charlie had applied, but he dropped each in the trash, unopened.