At that moment, Jonah dropped through Claymore’s arms, sidestepping him, then gracefully kicked him with a skateboard-hardened shin in the back of the knees, dumping the man to the ground.

Behind the woman burst in two of the Turtle Brothers, and they charged for Claymore, who cowered backward, away from Jonah as if he were a lit match bomb. “Look, I got no trouble with you Indians,” Claymore said, brandishing his palms.

“Indians?” said Enoch, the one with a black crew cut, short as the lip of a soda can. “I look like Gandhi to you, motherfucker?”

Claymore got to his feet, shaking his head like a chastised boy.

“Because we’re definitely not feeling all that nonviolent right now,” said Gideon, beads tied into tightly drawn pigtails and tattoos twining up his neck. “Get your ass outside, Doc,” he said to Jonah. “We won’t be requiring your services.”

The woman rushed over and untied Will’s hands and took him in her arms. While Titus and Jonah’s brothers bound the Butler and his men, she led the boys out from the elevator to where the Turtle Brothers’ van was parked. Silently, they sat on the torn vinyl seats, the boys rubbing their wrists while they waited. Will wasn’t sure if Jonah was shivering beside him because of fear or cold, and his mother put her arms around them, and they both leaned into her and shut their eyes.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Will said, still not quite able to look at her.

“I was worried,” she said with disbelief.

“How did you know where we were?”

“That terrible man came, and I told him where you were—for some reason I knew you boys would be in this elevator. But I got a bad feeling afterwards—I mean worse than usual—so I called Jonah’s house. But his phone still wasn’t working, so I walked there to find you. His brothers brought me here.”

“You went through the culvert?”

“Yes,” she said, exhaling, puffing the marigold-colored bangs from her forehead. “I realized that even though I’d already lost you, you could still use my help sometimes.”

25

Jonah had once told Will that if you drop a penny off a high building, like the ones in real Toronto or New York, it ends up falling so fast it can zip right through a person’s whole body from skull to feet before driving itself six feet into the pavement. Will took this bit of magic to mean that his mother was sort of right: everything was dangerous if it falls for long enough, even the littlest things. Will knew now that the worst calamities that happened Outside were unremarked, things that nobody noticed, like Icarus plunging into the water, or children who went missing without a soul looking for them. Outside was still chock-full of questions Will couldn’t answer, like how his uncle Charlie got the way he did, or his mother, or why Angela was doomed and other girls weren’t, or what had made Marcus push the Butler as brazenly as he did. And even though in the end Will hadn’t solved its mysteries, he still loved the Outside so intensely that he worried he could die of it.

According to the Turtle Brothers, Constable MacVicar never did make it down to the harbor to arrest Butler and Claymore where they’d left them, and nobody ever found all the Butler’s Neverclear. The rumor was that after they were through with him, whatever malevolence that Titus said had overtaken the Butler when he was hit by that loading boom had been reversed, or at least muted. They heard he dismantled his operation, and the following summer Jonah and Will saw him once while skateboarding near the harbor. He was wearing slippers on the sidewalk, staring blankly into the window of a vacant store, now just another of the damaged faces that the boys rocketed past. In Will’s “bullet ballets,” they always caught the criminal boss last, but seeing how the Butler didn’t exactly fall into that category, Will supposed that in the story of him and his mother, the real Outside bad guy was harder to pin down and definitely wasn’t something MacVicar could lock up in jail.

For a while Will had difficulty believing that Titus was his uncle. His mother said that it was actually some friend of theirs named Whalen who’d died in the accident at the elevators, not Charlie, but it made little sense to Will. Maybe it was because he’d never had any family other than his mother, so it wasn’t easy to scrounge up a room for Charlie in his mind. Will had already stuffed it with so much since he’d left the Inside, the whole family thing would have to wait until free space became available. Still, Will liked having him around. Somehow Charlie made the Inside fuller, less claustrophobic.

At his mother’s request, Charlie had moved into Toronto, where they set up a suite for him, at first so he could heal the three broken ribs that Claymore had given him with his shovel. But after that, he stayed. The basement wasn’t called Toronto anymore either. Now they called it “the Apartment,” or sometimes his mother called it “Charlie’s Crypt,” except never in front of him.

Charlie brought along his furniture from the workhouse, and Will’s mother had even started going down into the basement again. She and Charlie would sit at an old table where they’d drink tea and play cards for dirty pennies. Will often heard them laughing exactly the same laugh and remembering a million things from when they were young. Will and his mother ordered Charlie a water cooler that they could hear gurgling all the time like a big underground stomach. Now that he wasn’t in the elevator huffing grain dust and living on birds, his breathing had improved, and he was making more sense. When he read books to Will, what he said seemed more like something that a person could’ve written.

But it wasn’t all perfect. Sometimes Charlie didn’t come upstairs for weeks, which, for their house anyway, wasn’t overly unsettling. That is, until he’d start claiming items in their basement were trying to suffocate him, and he’d send up paranoid screeds scrawled on scraps of Will’s old masterpieces. Once Charlie dismantled the furnace in the dead of winter because it was recording his thoughts and sending them through the air ducts, pouring some kind of poison gas into their bedrooms that could hurt Will and his mother. But most of the time he was all right. In the spring, he used a net to pull hundreds of smelt from the creek, which stunk up the house when he fried them whole on his hot plate. In summer, he and Will built a new fence in the backyard, sinking the four-by-four cedar posts deep into the soil with a giant corkscrew that Charlie could turn one-handed. On the weekends he went off to collect cans and things he’d fix up, like radios and tools nobody wanted. Charlie had also put up some birdhouses he built near the fence, but whether they had traps in them was one of those things the family didn’t talk about, like how the Black Lagoon used to be. But when Will woke in New York in the morning, where he had a proper bed and even a dresser now, along with the soothing gurgle of the creek, Will heard the music of his uncle’s birds and it always made him feel like going Outside.

His mother still got the Black Lagoon—that didn’t go anywhere—but after she’d rescued him at the elevator it was like somebody had permanently turned down the volume. Will liked to imagine that her bravery that day had built at least a bit of a callus between her and the Outside. She was baking bread in the oven, into which she’d put a large flat stone Charlie had pulled from the lake. She even called her fear the Black Lagoon now, which always made him laugh, like when she swore, which sounded overdubbed and fake. Will and his mother went on a short walk once per week, lazy jaunts around the neighborhood, walking slow and careful under the trees, during which the sunlight went wild in her hair as if it were made of fiber optics, and Will held her hand, not because she needed it, but because it felt good.