“Butler must be hiding it around the city in the gas tanks of abandoned cars!” Will said hoarsely, now feeling as if his mother had duct taped a few dozen hand warmers to his belly.

“Okay, so Marcus was stealing hoses for the Butler. Then he got the idea to take the map so he could use it to find the Butler’s stashes of Neverclear and sell it himself. Something like that would generate enough money to kiss Thunder Bay good-bye forever.”

“Maybe it worked. Maybe Marcus did it?” Will said, still recovering.

“Then why is the Butler still offering a reward?” said Jonah. “No, the Butler and the Bald Man must’ve remembered where this one was without the map, or we would’ve seen them do this weeks ago.”

“But if all those Xs are cars with Neverclear stashed in them—”

“—it means there are gallons and gallons of this stuff out there,” Jonah said. “Which means the Butler still really, really wants it.” Jonah cinched the straps of his backpack.

“Shit,” Will said, swearing credibly for the first time, but still too afraid to enjoy it.

Relaxation Time

With Will back at school and afterwards riding his skateboard out who-knows-where—she was mentally replaying his promise to avoid the waterfront thirty or forty times per day—Diane had been forced, under threat of starvation, to answer the door herself. While signing for a large, heavy box, she made the mistake of glancing over the courier’s shoulder, out into the white radium glow of the pavement, at the brown delivery truck chuffing in her driveway, and the desolate infinity of it threw up a squall in her chest. But she felt her knees hold, and no icy sweat broke over her like that first time it came while she was shoveling the driveway.

Triumphantly, she dragged the box through the hall into the kitchen. Normally she left packages in the entranceway for Will to open when he returned, but the heft of this one intrigued her. She fetched the key from its hiding place, unlocked the knife drawer, and removed a small paring knife. After carefully splitting the tape, she lifted a stack of film canisters from the box, each entombed painstakingly in foam, all battleship gray or mint green—six in total. Next she unearthed a newly minted hardcover book, published by the National Film Board, entitled Diane Cardiel: A Filmography. Inside were lushly published still images from her films and many essays, including one called “The Constructedness of Public Space in the Age of Anxiety.” Folded into the book was a letter from the director of the NFB, stating that they’d reissued her entire filmography two years ago but had been unable to locate her. Until a former student of his named Penny Gustavson, who was now an elementary school teacher, had recently informed him that Diane was living back in Thunder Bay. Perfect timing, he said, because the NFB was mounting a running retrospective in Toronto and Montreal next spring and would like to invite her to speak. “I understand, however,” he added tactfully toward the end, “that travel may be problematic.”

A retrospective? Weren’t those for the dead, or at least the near dead? It struck her that she was now widely regarded as a relic, an oddity. But had she been away that long? Long enough for the mildew of enigma to grow upon her? Even if she could make it there, somehow, people would ask what she’d been doing all this time, what work she’d done. “Oh, hiding in my house, watching my son paint,” she’d be forced to say. Of course she’d write the director to say she couldn’t go, but as she turned the book in her hands, she couldn’t avoid feeling some blush of pride at the crisp handsomeness of it, and at the care and delicacy the director had exhibited in his letter, which seemed intended for a person much more eccentric, fragile, and important than herself.

While reboxing the canisters to hide them in her closet, Diane noticed that Jonah and Will had left the 16mm projector set up in Cairo. Though it was nearly time for her usual 10:30 Relaxation Session, she found herself threading her first film—The Sky in Here—into the take-up reel. She made tea, snuffed the room’s lamps, drew the curtains, and coaxed the projector into a clatter.

As the film played, Diane sat quietly, her mind not so much absorbing the images as turning inward to reconstruct the person who’d shot this film, who’d synced the sound and spoke the now precious-sounding voice-over, astonished by how foreign to herself she’d become. After the first film ended she loaded another, watching them in the order she’d created them, fascination creeping into her, each film a missive from a dark region of her self she’d left unconsidered for so long.

She had such feeble command of the period after she’d watched them pull the first tatters of her brother’s body from the lake. Oh, how did she ever survive it? In the days following, she’d cried with such force she learned to navigate their house by feel, a grief so fierce and depleting her whole body felt like a turned-out pocket.

When she gathered the strength, she phoned Whalen’s house and spoke to his father for the first time. He said his son hadn’t been home since the accident, and he begged Diane to tell him where he was.

The number of the funeral home sat on her table for a week. Arranging her brother’s burial was the kind of task that grief should impel a person to do, but she couldn’t lift the receiver without fear of screaming into it, and was too proud to ask her father’s old coworkers for help.

There was still no sign of Whalen. The truth came out about how they’d been swindling the Native crew, and though Whalen’s father claimed he hadn’t laid eyes on his son since the night of the accident, the common belief was that to avoid scandal he’d changed Whalen’s name and packed him off to a university dorm somewhere back east, his head now buried in a law book. On some level she’d been preparing for Whalen to abandon her all along. As she suspected now she would have done herself had Charlie made it to university, and they lost the thrill of secrecy, left only with backgrounds and lives that could never be properly woven together.

It came then to Diane that with both Charlie and Whalen gone, and with no real ties to Thunder Bay left, for the first time in her life she was completely free to do as she pleased. She could leave, tonight, and though she wouldn’t have Charlie to answer her questions or roll up his sleeves and fight her battles, she also wouldn’t have him watching over her and correcting and interrupting and sucking the light from every moment either. It pained her to say it now, but a long-crushing weight had come off her chest, and while she hadn’t known it at the time, her brother’s accident assembled inside her a kind of engine of courage.

She packed a bag, locked the house, and walked along the creek to the highway. For months she hitchhiked south and west through a series of uncelebrated American roads. During that time she slept beneath interstate overpasses, drank from eaves troughs, ate wild raspberries and plates of all-day breakfast she’d treat herself to. She had sex with an unhappily married civil engineer who smelled like Whalen in a long aqua-colored car, then a few others as easily as talking to them. She rented weekly-rate motel rooms in a few insubstantial towns, inventing new names for herself in each one. It was during this period she’d made all of her life’s most monumental mistakes, seizing every possible occasion to endanger her mind and body, as though Charlie’s death had stripped her of the capacity to fear for her own safety. But like a plant that benefited from rough treatment and neglect, she felt more herself than she ever had in Thunder Bay.

From a pawn shop she bought a Nikon camera and a 50mm lens. She preferred photography to sketching: the immediacy, the immersion of seeing, the endless hunt for the perfect subject. She shot empty taverns, derelict train cars, abandoned bicycles, crude underpass graffiti, broken people milling around Greyhound stations, all of it—she wouldn’t realize until later—somehow touched by decay.