Catch Me When I Fall by Westerhof Patricia Page A

stone. It sank at once, the little plop like a scalding jar of preserves sealing itself tight.
    She glanced at her bulky sports watch. Four hours till Will’s funeral. Four hours to write the eulogy the minister had asked her to deliver. He’d phoned yesterday afternoon, almost as soon as she’d arrived at her parents’ house.
    â€œI know you haven’t kept in touch with Will,” he’d said, his voice warm, “but Will’s mom said you were his closest friend when you were children.”
    â€œI guess so. I don’t know what I’d say though—I haven’t seen him in about eight years.”
    â€œJust share a few of the good memories,” the minister said.
    Ellie had laughed a short, harsh laugh. “Okay.”
    Now she took a pen and a pad of lined paper out of her leather backpack. She doodled a tiny maze in the margin. What to say? The only thought in her head was, How ? How could Will, of all people, die in an accident? Rock climbing, her mother said when she phoned with the news. Impossible, Ellie had thought. Impossible.
    The watch, waterproof and shockproof, jutted from the pink cashmere sleeve of her sweater, the enormous black face covering the top of her slender wrist. I could begin with the watch, she thought. I could say I bought this watch because of Will. I wanted a delicate gold watch or a silver one with a pearl-beaded band. But when I went shopping, I heard Will’s voice in my head warning me that I might fall in . . .
    Her eyes moved upstream and focused on the jagged rocks and steeper bank there. She remembered the spring she and Will were thirteen. She was afraid his growing peculiarity and unpopularity were contagious. So, though they were in the same eighth-grade class and rode the school bus together from their neighbouring farms, she ignored Will at school and avoided him on the bus. But, after school, when the bus lurched to a stop halfway between their long driveways, she and Will would clamber off, cross the road, and scramble down the path to the river, putting off the chores awaiting them at home.
    On those afternoons at the river’s edge, Ellie jumped from rock to rock while Will paced on a shale outcrop a safe distance from the water, watching her. She recalled the narrow face and alert green eyes, his plaid cotton shirts and his jeans—the wrong brand. And in his back pocket, she remembered with a queasy shiver, he kept a notebook circled shut by a fat rubber band. An ordinary little lined notebook that travelled with him everywhere.
    It’s uncanny—yesterday on the plane to Edmonton and then the two-hour drive in the back of her parents’ car, she kept trying to picture Will but couldn’t—at least not clearly. But here on the shore it was like he was with her. She could see him pull out the notebook. Hear his voice—cracking that spring, beginning to deepen, a bit nasal. Intense. When he found the right page, he’d read her a question, a new one each afternoon, all concerning potential calamities. If your house was burning and your mother and your baby sister were asleep, and you only had time to rescue one of them, which should you choose?
    Both , she had said.
    Will had sighed and waited. He always gave her time to think about the questions. While she thought, he took off his glasses to clean them or to adjust the safety strap. If he turned his head, Ellie could see the dented line in his hair from the strap.
    I’d scream and wake up my mom so that she could run and get Sandra from her crib.
    But what if your mother couldn’t hear you? Will would say . What if your house was really big?
    Ellie remembered her anger rising. Her home, a grey stucco farmhouse, was average-sized, and Sandra’s room with its crib and rocking chair was right next to her parents’ bedroom. Will’s scenario couldn’t happen, at least not in her house. But then, Will hadn’t really been