Catch Me When I Fall by Westerhof Patricia Page B

interested in her opinions anyway. Though he made her think up answers, it was only to test her replies against his own answers, those he recorded in his notebook after hours, or days, or even weeks of hand-wringing reasoning. How she had loathed his assurance and his proprietary hold on the right answer. Yet she had stayed, and came back the next afternoon and the next one too. The problem was, once he posed a question, the crisis seemed not only possible but imminent; in this case, the house had blazed in her imagination, and she needed to hear his reasoning. So she’d given in. What would you do?
    Well, most kids would want to save their mothers. But that’s not right. Will had looked earnestly at Ellie, his mouth curling into a quick, grotesque grimace. This tick appeared whenever he got tense—it happened often at school, especially during recess and gym classes. The other kids called him Prune Face or Creepo.
    Ellie crouched down now and picked at some green-grey lichen with her pen. Was he tense when he answered his questions because he was second-guessing his reasoning or because he had to imagine the scenario as he talked through it? And what motivated all that worry, all that logic? Maybe it was living alone with anxious, doting parents. They were conservative, churchgoing people, a farming family who belonged to that Dutch Reformed Church on Third Lane. Maybe the certain answers of his faith made him feel there should be certain answers for everything. Or maybe it was simply Will’s intellect or an overactive imagination that prompted the reasoning. I’ll never know, she thought.
    Her eyes moved to a rippling pool between two rocks. For the first time since hearing the news, she sensed death’s permanence. It was a fleeting impression, like seeing the damage of a car wreck as you shoot past in the opposite direction, but she felt unsettled nonetheless. Magpies were squabbling in a poplar above her, and a cold breeze rattled the remaining leaves on an aspen tree nearby, a dry sound like nervous hands rubbing together.
    She stashed the notepad and pen in her backpack and climbed the narrow, sandy path toward her parents’ farmhouse. It had been her dreams, she realized, nightmares really, that kept her following him to the river all those days after school. So often that year she had tossed in her narrow bed, dreaming of accidents and disasters. If only she knew what to do, she could save her family, or herself, or the strangers on the sinking ferry, the children in the burning school. But always she was missing a crucial piece of information. At the end of each dream, she’d wake with the sickening awareness that people were dying because of what she didn’t know.
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    At her parents’ well-polished dining room table, Ellie read over her draft. Maybe I can do this, she thought. Describe Will in a way that’s based on truth, but lighter. The way she described her life in Toronto to her mother. Leave out all the uncomfortable bits.
    Maybe some people would chuckle if she recounted anecdotes of Will at driver’s ed., asking the kids during break, If you came around a corner and a child stood on the road in front of you and you had to choose whether to hit the child or drive off the road, which would you do? But then again, Ellie considered, maybe no one would. They would probably stare at her, numbed by the excruciating irony that Will, who took every precaution, who thought about every eventuality, was lying dead in the coffin in front of them.
    It was a freak incident, one the Alberta Alpine Club had already classified as “bad luck.” She felt vaguely comforted by this. On the way home from the airport her mother had said, “What I heard was that Will did everything right—stuck the wedges deep into the rock and attached the rope with those things that close around the rope. The weather was fine; they had all the right