Though everyone said her reckless brother excelled at the job, soon he was hacking late into the night, often to the point of retching, his face a withered sky-blue. Their doctor formally diagnosed his asthma and recommended another line of work, a recommendation that Charlie curtly returned to the doctor. Charlie soaked his bandanna with liquids of all kinds: soapy water, vinegar, herbal tinctures, and, for a time, gasoline. He took pills he bought from a grain inspector on the harbor named George Butler and drank three pots of strong coffee every day from his father’s thermos and got some relief.

A year blinked past. Diane continued to see Whalen at night, and after narrowly graduating from high school, she was secretly delighted to be denied by all the universities Charlie had urged her to apply to. Mostly because Charlie was so concerned about money, she took a job at a store near the lake called Pound’s that supplied work clothing and boots. She missed the elevator and nearly perished of boredom behind the long rough-planked counter, sick with worry about Charlie’s safety. “Remember,” she warned in their shared Theodore imitation, “the grain is both like water and like a wall, and you never know what it’s going to decide today.”

Often in the evening when the twins were walking home, committed drunks who’d collapsed in hedges or slumped against parked cars made I now pronounce you jabs under their breath. But Charlie had grown into a man still unable to abide ridicule or deflect insult, friendly or otherwise. He’d spit on the ground and square off with anyone, wrapping his legs around a big man while striking at his soft parts and riding him to the ground like a tranquilized animal. And not only those in the switching yard or on the walk home: each week new lakeboats arrived, yielding fresh crews—Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Brazilians, Americans, Portuguese—to misunderstand and swing blindly at. Twice Charlie returned home with his nose again grotesquely broken, nostrils nearly inverted, though it healed each time straight as a rifle sight. But things only worsened when he came of age and took up drinking in earnest. She’d often ask Whalen to pry the pint glass from his hand and drag him from the tavern to start his shift.

Then early one morning, Diane snuck home from a rare night with Whalen in a hotel to find a pantless man unknown to her slumped unconscious at their kitchen table, snoring obscenely, the ham sandwich he’d made uneaten before him, their good chopping knife loosely clutched in his hand. She put on her pajamas, then woke Charlie, who gently extracted the knife from the man’s hand and, so as not to damage the cupboards, scooped him up like a child, ferrying him onto the lawn, where he proceeded to beat him for some duration. “We’ll get a new house,” Charlie said afterwards, breathing hard. “Up the hill. Away from the taverns. Beyond stumbling distance.”

The following week, her brother began working nights with Whalen on the car dumper, something Whalen had arranged to help them both earn extra money. On payday Charlie set aside half the hefty wads he’d pull from his canvas coat, then would scamper off for grain alcohol–fueled weekends by the harbor. Between this and the late nights at the elevators, Charlie wasn’t sleeping at all, perhaps because of the pills he was taking for his asthma. He’d slink home days later, unshaven, thin, eyes red as wild strawberries, breathing in gasps with a gray pallor, his shoulders twisted with guilt. Always he fell mute when she questioned where he’d been.

But over time the money piled in her bureau, and soon they had the down payment for a house up the hill that backed the creek. Before they moved in, she arranged their meager things as best she could, and Charlie couldn’t stop shaking his head when he saw their new home, because it looked so good. But his contentment didn’t last. He started working night shifts on top of his regular days. With no time to spend his wages in taverns, Charlie was quickly paying down their house, with the intention of setting her up comfortably before he left for Queen’s University, where he’d already been accepted for admission the following year. “I’ll be a lawyer before you know it,” he said confidently.

That week she overheard some workers at Pound’s grumbling about what Whalen and Charlie were doing at night at Pool 6, how even if he was Theodore’s son, it wasn’t right, yet no one would explain the implication in detail.

When she asked Whalen about it one night in his car, he said they’d hired a crew to work nights when the elevators sat idle. “How come you’re making so much from it?” she asked, and he dragged a finger down her spine, setting her to shiver, and said, “It’s an Indian crew from a reserve up north. And they’re real good workers too. Charlie’s big idea was to pay them a third of normal wages, while telling my father the crew is white. We pocket the difference ourselves.”

“Doesn’t sound fair,” she said, doubting Theodore would’ve approved of such a scheme.

“Oh, come on,” Whalen said. “Those poor people are starving up there on those reserves. They’re grateful for the opportunity. And the extra work is doing Charlie good. When he’s gone, we’ll finally be able to walk down the street together.” Whalen had always been more leery than she had of Charlie discovering their relationship and had always kept a strict policy of using only notes stuffed into her letterbox to set their next meeting. After Whalen disappeared the night Charlie died, Diane often wondered whether the secrecy was more a convenient excuse than it was born of any real concern for her brother.

The last night she saw her brother alive, she watched him ready himself for work after inhaling his dinner. He said the ice was coming earlier in November than it ever had, and with it came a frantic rush to load the season’s last lakeboat before it was ice-locked until spring. She followed him to the door, thinking how after many years at Pool 6 he still looked so unlike other men his age, already bent and puffy with alcohol saturation, fights, and accidents. Other than his lungs, Charlie remained curiously unmarred by life—his eyes shining like polished copper above his sleek, crooked mouth.

She thanked him for all his hard work and passed him the sandwiches she’d packed. “You and Whalen better hurry if you want that boat loaded before the freeze” was the last thing she ever said to her brother.

How foolish she’d been to think he would stand as the exception to the Cardiels’ tragic legacy—that he’d escape their oversized helping of accident and woe. So in some sense, she hadn’t lied when she’d offered up Will’s spotty immunization record as proof his heart was malformed. It was a metaphor, truer than any fact she could ever teach him. Because the truth was that every second of every life was lethally dangerous. Especially in Thunder Bay. Especially for the Cardiels. Especially for Will.

And to anyone who would disagree, her only defense would be: What is raising a child except lying? It begins with the first shhhh … everything is going to be … and only gets worse from there.

10

“Want to go for a walk?”

Jonah. Eye-level with the window in New York. The Outside, embodied, peering in.

Will had been up late painting while his mother read mysteries in San Francisco. When he’d heard feet scraping on the shingles, Will’s murmuring heart had spasmed and nearly quit. He’d been convinced it was the Bald Man—his best guess for who’d left the boot prints in his yard—and was about to take a T-ball swing at his face with the fire poker when he recognized the voice.

“Now?” Will said, watching liquid waves of heat flee into the night.

“Sure, now,” said Jonah, eyes darting sidelong, his face caramel-smooth in the low light. “I need your help.”

“I can’t …,” Will said, one hand over his heart, the other setting the poker down discreetly on his desk.