4

A week later, on a day he knew was Sunday because the newspaper came fatter, Will took the deepest breath of his eleven-year life.

“I think I’m maybe going for a walk,” he said.

“Sure, just let me rinse the blender,” she said running the sink, “and we’ll set up the Ye Olde Strolling Course around London—”

“No,” he said.

“—we could even paint some fresh scenery to put up, like Westminster Abbey or something—”

“Mom.”

“—I’ve got that nice crepe paper you didn’t use for your masterpieces—”

“Outside.”

His mother stopped rinsing, as if Zeus himself had pointed his lightning-powered remote control at her and pressed Pause.

“Out? There?” she said, half-laughing while also breathing distastefully, as though the air itself had spoiled. He could already see the Black Lagoon looming behind her, like a train that had jumped its rails.

“Yeah,” he said. “Out there.”

She set the blender down carefully, as one would a set mousetrap, then braced the heels of her palms on the counter and threw her head back to examine the ceiling as though hunting for a fresco of helpful words painted there. Then she turned and leveled a pleading gaze, her cheeks lavender welts. “You don’t have a coat,” she said, a shrill warble to her voice.

“It’s summer,” Will said, in his mind a vision of Other Will crashing into the woods shirtless and surviving fine.

“Exactly!” she said lifting and dropping her arms as though he’d just agreed.

They waited, a gunfighters’ silence between them, while her face pulsed, her mouth a razored line. Water sucked through the drain, and her green irises made small ticking motions as though they had second hands trapped inside each of them.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Will?” she said, her face gone suddenly raw and flabbergasted as a spanked child’s.

She’d surprised him with his name. She never invoked it, because of course she was talking to him. The only time he ever encountered it was when he signed his masterpieces, and it always looked strange, both too insignificant and too grand. Will broke away and commenced readying himself for the journey, unsure what it all involved exactly.

In the corner of his eye, her thin frame commenced juddering like a shuttle flaming into the atmosphere. She snapped her elastic a few times. Then a few more. This was how it started.

Her phobias were numerous: lightning, fire, electricity, water, accidents, vehicles, animals, the Outside, people. Except it was worse than fear. When the Black Lagoon came, when its bear trap was sprung upon her heart, her eyes went swimmy and blotted with white noise like channel zero on TV. Her body vibrated, convulsed, and burst with sweat, before buckling as if miniature charges had detonated in each of her major joints. Will recalled a thunderstorm and power outage weeks back that had caused her to collapse and pant on the candlelit floor for an hour. But worst of all, during a major episode, it was as though she’d forgotten him completely, as though the Black Lagoon had evicted him entirely from her mind—and this was what terrified him most.

Now she sat in a chair and entombed her face in her hands, silent tears ripping through her fingers and down her forearms. He felt the old rising of guilt, then beat it back. He ransacked himself for the true reason for publicly declaring this walk instead of just creeping out during Relaxation Time again, and all he could drum up was the word Adventure. It appeared in plenty of his books and upon the worn sleeves of his VHS movies, though he never lingered on it long enough to appraise its true meaning. He adored the sound of it, a thing to say with wide, mystified eyes. Anyway, it was only a walk. She had to allow it, if only because no forbiddance she could utter would not sound insane.

As if she’d read his mind, his mother seemed to metabolize her fear into a kind of sad surrender, leaning on the drywall beside the closet, while he searched for a coat in the vortex of clothing and masterpiece materials. All he found were tiny jackets he’d long outgrown, goods they’d ordered and never unpackaged. When he extracted a pair of canvas shoes a third his size, he experienced a tattered memory of watching them shuffle and scrape along the scalding pavement of a big city.

“These will work fine,” he said, pulling his slippers over his socks while she regarded his feet as one would twin ticking bombs. She followed him toward the landing.

“Wait,” she said, pulling the oatmeal-hued sweater she’d knitted herself up over her head. He let her yank it down over his Helmet with a pop. Fully suited, he made his way to the door. She tried to follow but stalled a few feet back.

“How about you go exploring like you used to in the basement?” she said, sleeve-wiping a few tears from her cheeks. “We’ll pretend I’m the Queen, and you can go forth, into the wilds, and report your discoveries back to me?”

“Hmmm …,” he said. “Do I have to write anything?”

“No, it can be an oral report.”

“Is there a time limit for the speech?”

“How about … one minute?”

Will hated writing. But a spoken report wouldn’t be overly demanding, even if a minute was an eternity to talk uninterrupted. He snapped a salute and stood tall.

“Do … do, you want to bring a snack—I mean supplies?” she asked shakily.

“I just had a smoothie,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “Remember?”

“Oh, you aren’t going out front?” she said, one of those suggestion-questions that he’d only recently begun to classify.

“Actually, I might go see what the creek looks like … not sure … I’ll figure it out,” he said, tacking on this final uncertainty to emphasize a notion he couldn’t put into words. He watched it reanimate something in her face—her eyes egg-soft in the middle.

“But keep to our neighborhood, okay?” she said with a forced breeziness. “And be very, very careful near that creek.”

“How do I look?” he asked when he was finally Outside, pirouetting in the white blare of sunlight.

She peered through the doorway, still six feet back from the threshold, eyes flashing in the shadows like a burrowed animal. He’d never before looked on his mother from any distance, and it struck him now with a sudden force that she was beautiful. Her sharp chin, her coal-dark eyebrows and gilded hair that she cut herself by collecting a ponytail atop her head and shearing it crudely like a rope, hair that would sometimes channel morning sunshine from the window in Paris and turn so radiant to behold he could scarcely stand it.

“You look good, honey,” she said, her mouth a tight tremble. “Bright.”

He passed through the back hedge into the woods where Other Will had disappeared weeks earlier and gained his first glimpse of the creek that for years he’d heard from his window, feeble compared with the mighty river that roared through his imagination. Rusty-tinged water poured over gray rocks, jutting like foul teeth. After failing to spot any fish, Will decided to follow it upstream.

From behind, the houses adjacent to his looked small and vulnerable, like the underbellies of turtles or someone with their glasses off. Their fences only extended so far, so he figured that keeping to the bank wasn’t trespassing.

The air was fresh, exhilarating, dangerous as he remembered. A set of thin poplar lined the creek, their silver-dollar leaves whizzing in the breeze. Tiny birds zipped through the branches like paper airplanes with brains, and deadfall lurched with fluffy caterpillars and crunchy beetles. Reaching out into the bewildering distances for the first time, his eyes burned, and he was forced to lower them every few steps to rest them. Will plucked a waxy green leaf from a bush, stuck it in his mouth, and chewed, then gagged and spat the horrid, bitter mulch into the grass. Examining them now up close, Will decided he didn’t care much for trees. Too showy, too unruly, too large—things that had a shape and didn’t at the same time.