Then he gestured gravely to the kitchen. “That woman in there has had enough distress in her life,” he said. “She doesn’t deserve any more grief from you. Look, I know you lied to me in my office. Your mother hasn’t left this place for years. But if she slips any further down, I’ll have to ask Social Services to step in, Will. And I don’t want that. Which means your job is to prevent me from making that call. Do I make myself clear?”

Will mumbled something to get him out the door, then retreated to New York. He lay on top of his comforter on his back, his room darkened by blankets he’d plastered over his windows, studying the ghostly pages torn from Thrasher that wallpapered his room as completely as they did his imagination.

Some time later came a soft knock on his door. With his head buried in the pillow, Will felt the bed cant under her weight. “You don’t have to go to school today,” she said from beside him. “You can stay home with me. I’ll slow-cook us a lasagna.”

“Sure,” he said, his voice muffled.

She snapped on his bedside lamp and let out a tiny cluck when she saw the scars on his arms that he’d forgotten to cover with a long-sleeved shirt. “Oh, honey,” she said, turning his elbow, “do they hurt?”

“They’re fine,” he said. “Scars don’t hurt Mom. They’re healed.”

“They don’t look fine,” she said.

Suddenly he couldn’t tolerate her hands on him. He tore away and rolled to his side. “It’s just skateboarding,” he said.

“But you’ll ruin your career in elbow modeling,” she joked, but Will didn’t laugh, because there was still guilt stashed somewhere in it.

“My skin is mine to ruin,” he said. “Or did you only loan it to me?” He reached and angrily clicked off his light, wreathing them in near darkness.

“Will,” she began again after a while, “when you didn’t come home last night, I called Jonah’s place and no one answered.”

“I told you their phone was broken.”

She took a deep breath, then drew back her elastic and let it go. “And the constable mentioned you’d been down to visit him at the station? Down at the harbor?” she said, her voice gaining in pitch. “Asking about the boy who had … who had disappeared? Is that true?” She sobbed out the last word.

Will said nothing.

She wept then for some time, the bed jiggling like the ride you put coins in at the mini-mall where he and Jonah skateboarded at lunch. He could sense her soggy face hung above him, as dangerous to behold as a solar eclipse.

“How am I supposed to trust you now that you broke your promise?” she said, regaining some composure. “After you’ve been lying to me about where you and Jonah go all day?”

“Not nearly as much as you’ve been lying to me, Mom. Like why you’re so afraid of the harbor? But you know what? It’s fun down there. I like it.”

“It was dangerous then, and it still is, Will,” she said. “Maybe worse.”

“That’s where Charlie died, right? Of a heart attack? Right? Constable MacVicar told me he died in an accident.”

She shut her eyes. “Oh, Will,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

He scoffed. “And there’s nothing wrong with my heart, is there?”

He watched her take five slow breaths. “It was a metaphor,” she said.

“A metaphor for what?”

“Our family, Will. The Cardiels. Your grandfather, your uncle, me—we don’t have the best luck. I wanted to tell you that you need to be especially careful, but didn’t know how …”

“My friend Angela,” Will said, “she’s actually going to die, Mom, like for real. There’s nothing anyone can do. And you know what? She’s not even scared. She enjoys the time she’s got left.”

“Will—”

“So what. I’ve lied to you like crazy since I’ve been going Outside. I’ve nearly died more times than I can count. And there are going to be more. There. Now we’re even.”

They sat again in silence, and Will fought against synchronizing his breathing with hers, waiting to breathe in when she breathed out.

“I feel so far away from you now,” she said, her voice emptied out.

“That’s how it’s supposed to be, Mom,” he said.

“I suppose so,” she said. “Just please let the constable do his job. That’s all I ask. You work on growing up. That’s dangerous enough.”

Will waited until Relaxation Time to go spelunking into the most neglected cupboards of Paris for dusty-lidded cans that his mother wouldn’t notice missing: beets, herring, coconut milk, water chestnuts (whatever those were), fruit cocktail comprised mostly of soggy, tasteless pears, as well as a bag of uncooked oatmeal and some past-stale hunks of bread she kept for croutons.

“Are you going back to the harbor?” she said while he was putting on his skateboard shoes, an unimpressive sternness to her voice.

“Aren’t you supposed to be ‘relaxing’ right now?”

“I asked you a question, Will. Did you hear me?”

“I’m going out,” he said, swinging his upturned palm at the door as though to indicate the whole world.

She started shaking, then stiffened, and drew her hands to her hips. “Will, I forbid you to leave this house.”

“Okay sure, Mom. And I forbid you to stay home.”

“I’m serious.”

“Or what?” he said, stepping backwards through the open doorway.

Her anger opened into a pleading look like a flower blooming. “I don’t know what will happen to me if you go,” she said pitifully.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, taking another step back.

She started walking toward him, arms outstretched, stepping onto the tile landing. “Don’t go, Will.”

“You’re going to have to come get me,” Will said with another backwards step down the stairs, which he knew she thought was dangerous but actually wasn’t at all.

She minced forward, slippers shushing on the tile, unsteady as a woman with no handhold on a speeding train. For a moment Will cheered her on, promising himself that if she could only step Outside now, he wouldn’t need to go back to Pool 6. She would fix everything. The same way she berated store managers on the phone. He pictured a whole new life beginning for them: sitting in those white-tableclothed restaurants he’d whizzed past downtown, watching the rain hit her coat as they walked under trees, him reassuring her that lightning never hits you, even if you dare it to. But as he watched, her face constricted as though she’d received devastating news, and she quivered and slowed before stopping, still two feet back from the opening. When tears flashed in her eyes and her body shook, conquered, Will turned and walked away. Because nothing would ever change. She’d always be this way, and it was a waste of precious Outside time to wait for her.

Tears are salty water, he thought as his skateboard roared over the sidewalk beneath him like an entire pack of wolves growling at once. Like sweat. And who ever heard of a person sweating too much. It was good for you. Natural. Maybe people were born with a finite amount of tears Inside them, and all a person had to do was let them all fall, and then they’d be free.

He found the Wheezing Man sitting up in his pallet bed with an enormous book split in his lap.

“You want me to spritz us with a passage?”

“Okay,” said Will, unshouldering his bag. Despite the man’s limited mobility, Will remained leery of getting too close.

The Wheezing Man began to read, but the words and sentences he produced seemed too confused and unrelated to one another to be published in any book. From the spine, Will noted that this volume was supposed to be about shipbuilding and various lakeboats, yet the man talked mostly of dark clouds and steel cables, about people weeping for years and animals giving birth in a river. After a while he switched to another book that was supposed to be about the Napoleonic Wars, except he held it upside down. He managed to say the word blood ten times in one sentence, pausing only to recapture his wheezy breath or to draw slow, careful slugs of water from a tall glass that he sat down carefully like a fine jewel.