During that time she and Arthur discussed marriage at length and decided against it. Reasons like resisting the patriarchy and his previous marital debacle were tossed around, but in truth, they were both skittish about commitment, the drift toward entrapment. Though she never found words to tell Arthur about Charlie or her parents, she suspected he knew she couldn’t stand to do any more losing.

Arthur had gone to private schools and had never held a job, something the closeted Marxist in him hated to admit, but after graduation he landed an office remodeling, then a small park and a community center. He soon developed a name, which he snidely claimed was the only thing one actually built as an architect. Then came the plaza in Copenhagen, and almost overnight Arthur was inaugurated as the high priest of plazas—the great facilitator of urban renewal and community. He was described as visionary, a “starchitect”—a word they had once only used with the tongs of irony. He designed increasingly significant structures: galleries, libraries, public buildings, first in Europe, then throughout North America, Asia, the Middle East. Arthur would do anything to get his projects built: spew flurries of pseudo-intellectual claptrap, employ the theories of far-flung psychoanalysts, the folklore of African hill tribes—anything to entice funders and investors. It was during this rise that she’d become pregnant, and Arthur did his utmost to hide his trepidation.

“What about your work?” he said. “Your next film?”

“I can come back to it,” she said.

After Will was born, Arthur tunneled deeper into himself. Increasingly, he preferred life rendered, sketched, blueprinted—better yet, modeled in balsa wood or viewed from a plane, high above the disappointing actuality of place. He applied the same aerial view to Will, reserving his energies for the greater questions: where he should go to school, in what neighborhood would they live. He spent more and more time away, at his drawing table, off in the stratospheres of theory. In truth, Arthur had never enjoyed people. Even Will he treated like a project he was overseeing, checking in every so often like a foreman in a white hardhat to ensure construction was on schedule. Then came their separation, the subway platform … but here she was rooting around again in the past, and with that her thoughts gained traction in the slapping of her last film in the take-up reel, the projector blasting pure, empty light on the collapsible screen, and for the first time in years Diane was battered with the sense that though the cupboards of her self had been abundantly stocked with determination and some modest store of talent, she’d made so little of these ingredients to set upon the table of her life. These six canisters of celluloid and one marvelous boy were the totality of her life’s output. Her mind writhed with specters of conversations she could’ve participated in, words she might have combined, films she could have cut together, the howling ghosts of ideas she would never have.

But maybe there was still time, she thought, rising to kill the projector. Her panic was lessening each day. Who was to say it wouldn’t continue? Perhaps by spring she could make it to the retrospective, at least the one in Toronto. And just so she’d have something to talk about, she could shoot something new. At home. Nothing grandiose. Maybe some time lapses of the sun swinging through rooms like a pendulum. Plants growing. Dust fuzzing the tops of books. Carpets speckling with lint. Will painting—if he ever did again. And these tapes she’d been recording during Relaxation Times, maybe she could work them in somehow, cut them up, cobble the better snippets into a voice-over. She’d pulled those unwanted filmstrips from the trash to make her first film; who was to say she couldn’t do it again with the trimmings of their life here? That settles it, she thought, dragging the box upstairs to her room. She’d ask Will to fetch her old Bolex from the basement when he got home. She only hoped it still worked.

15

The next Monday, Will asked Jonah to accompany him to the police station downtown. “I won’t let anything slip to MacVicar,” Will said, “But we need to see what he knows about Marcus.”

“Sounds like a solo mission,” Jonah said, flung laterally across the armchair in Cairo, eyes boring into the latest Thrasher. “It’s a fact they have great difficulty letting Indians leave that place.” He then reminded Will how Social Services can steal a kid from their parents any time they please, just uproot you from your house like a brown tooth. “They do it all the time,” he said. “They did it to Marcus. They tried to get me.” Jonah said Social Services nearly took him after Hosea went to jail for hunting deer within city limits. But his other brothers hid Jonah in the basement and said he moved up north. “I stayed down there for a month memorizing medical textbooks and eating tinned salmon.” Since then, Jonah’s little basement tent was the only place in the house he could sleep. “But they don’t only do it to Indians, Will,” Jonah said, lifting his eyes. “They do it to White kids, too, if their parents are messed up enough.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Will.

Jonah lowered his voice. “Look dude, I love your mom. I’d quit skateboarding in a second if I could live here and read and paint pictures all day, like forever, but I’m only saying. Be careful what you tell those people.”

“I’d like to see the constable,” said Will in a somber voice to the peevish officer standing at a long counter. “I have important information. Pertaining to a kidnapping …”

“Well, if it isn’t our little Jack London,” said MacVicar jovially when Will was admitted to his office. “How’s the leg, son? Back on the hockey rink yet?” In his coarse uniform MacVicar loomed tall and had a lean, muscular face like an astronaut. Will remembered his mother berating him in their doorway after Will’s wolf attack and now wondered if MacVicar had considered whisking Will away from his transparently deranged home environment.

“Constable, I need to know if you have any leads in Marcus’s disappearance.” MacVicar squinted.

“Marcus? The orphan boy who went missing?” said Will.

“Right. Right, we’re looking into it,” MacVicar said. “He wasn’t a friend of yours was he?”

“Yes, he was,” Will said. “And he’s been missing for months. Don’t you have anything yet?”

“Son, anything related to that case won’t go public before the investigation is concluded,” said MacVicar, his good cheer draining.

Will was instantly overcome with the tsunami of exasperation that so often accompanied his Outside interactions with adults. “This is bullshit …,” he murmured uncontrollably, crossing his arms, accidentally kicking the side of MacVicar’s steel desk.

“Look here,” MacVicar said, his face concrete, “Will, the only reason we’re talking right now is because I knew your family. My father worked with your grandfather Theodore and then your uncle Charlie down at those elevators, and I for one know you come from a good, hardworking family, so I’m cutting you some slack. But as I said: these particulars are confidential. And they’re going to remain that way, am I clear?”

Will sneered and turned his head to the window. He hated how in books children were always undiscovered geniuses or princes who inherited rolling green estates at the end. The Outside had laid bare his mother’s great lie: Will wasn’t even in the neighborhood of genius, and a soaring inventory of questions stonewalled his understanding. Just once Will wanted Outside things to go as smoothly as they always had Inside. This idea closed Will’s throat, and he unleashed a low, flabby sob.

The constable sighed and pushed forward a box of tissue. “Can I get you anything, son?” he said.

Will shook his head, unlatching a few more tears that dappled his shirt.