The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  Within what was probably less than three minutes, I slid from the heights of fear to boredom. This is what a haunted house was: a place where nothing happens, so you have to make something up. It's the same impulse that makes us tell lies to a stranger sitting next to us on a plane, or pushes the planchette over a Ouija board to make it spell your dead cousin's name.

  Yet I stayed. I told myself this was foolishness, and knew that it was.

  The light outside the back deck of the house next door flicked on. It barely added any illumination to the room, but it was enough to change its chemistry, to hasten the draft that swirled through its space. Details— stray threads over the length of the sofa's piping, moisture stains seeping through the wallpaper—found more particular focus. And the messages on the walls, stay with me. i walk with you. It was enough to bring the fear back.

  Along with a formless shadow moving over the floor. One that, over the course of seconds, cohered into a human form lying on the rug. "Tina?"

  The shadow rose to its feet. Went to the window I'd first seen her face in. Performed the same act of pressing close to the glass, looking out. Except this time she turned.

  Her eyes a pair of glistening buttons. The glint of froth on her lips. Heather.

  I must have turned away. I must have found the back door, shouldered out into the cold.

  But even this was already a memory. I was past Ben's house and at the top of the Caledonia Street hill, breathless but still running, before I could say I'd seen anything at all.

  When I made it home my mother had two phone messages for me. One from Ben, the other from Sarah.

  I returned Ben's call first. He asked how my session with the coach went, if I remembered to turn on the tape recorder while talking with him, if he seemed any closer to confessing. It was a question I'd prepared an answer to.

  On the rest of the walk home, part of me argued that I should tell Ben what I'd seen in the window, that what was going on was out of our control, that we had awakened some long-slumbering presence with what we'd done and it would win any fight we might attempt to wage on

  it. It might not kill us if we went into the Thurman house again, but we wouldn't come out wholly alive either. In the end, though, I merely lied. "The bastard's still not saying anything." "Okay . . . okay. Okay," he said. "After the game. You and me."

  I called Sarah next. Faked a girl's voice and squeaked "Wrong number" when her dad answered.

  Sarah sat in the stands in her usual spot opposite the teams' benches. Offered me a good-luck wave during the pre-game warm-up, though I didn't look her way. Didn't wave back.

  When I came out of the dressing room for the start of the first period, she was gone.

  We lost. Coachless, tentative, winded. 5-1. Though even that makes it sound closer than it was.

  I scored our only goal. A Trev classic: an in-the-crease flip over their fallen goalie's shoulder, my stick a spatula tossing a rubber burger into the net. Not pretty, but it counted.

  The rest of the game is out of memory's reach now. I must have looked down the bench and locked eyes with Carl, or Randy, or Ben, but whatever their faces revealed was something I failed to take with me. It felt only like the end of things.

  Which, in a sense, it was. That night's loss turned out to be the final game of the Guardians' season. As for me, I never put skates on again.

  * * *

  [11]

  It takes some time—a minute? a half-hour?—to fully convince myself that I had not just seen a naked Tracey Flanagan attempting to escape out the front door of the Thurman house. So what had I seen? A reimagining of what I'd read in Ben's diary, surely, except for him it was Heather—a long-dead Heather Langham—who had been pulled back into the dark. It was nothing more than the power of suggestion.

  Still, I had to remind myself that Officer Barry Tate and his partner had just searched the place and found nothing. That what Ben had claimed to see was an impossibility. That hallucinations are on my Parkinson's symptom list ("Not long, but often quite weird," one doctor warned).

  Working my way through these arguments prevents me from calling the police. I don't do anything but have a shower, get dressed and call a taxi to take me over to Sarah's.

  But that's not to say that I don't return every five minutes or so to the image of Tracey Flanagan opening the Thurman house's front door. Or that I don't allow myself to wonder: Whose hands pulled her back?

  Sarah lives in a boxy, aluminum-sided place out by the fairgrounds, a structure shaped much like the house tokens in Monopoly. When I give the cab driver the address he calls it "the new part of town," which is how it was regarded even when I was growing up, even though all the properties were built in a rush immediately after the war. Aside from a few stabs at additions—a blown-out kitchen here, a carport there—it's a neighbourhood that looks about the same now as it must have in the late '40s, and serving the same purpose too: entry-level homes for the blue-collared, the secretarial and, more recently, the refugees of divorce.

  Sarah's is the nicest on its block. Perennials lining the front walkway, shutters freshly painted green, a vase of cut flowers displayed in the living-room window. I wonder, as I haul myself out of the cab, if they've been put there to welcome me. Me, as razor-burned and over-cologned as a teenager, and about as nervous too.

  Is this, as Randy had asked, an actual date? I'm surprised, clearing my throat and knocking at the door, how much I want it to be. Some nostalgic simulation of courtship might be just the thing, sweet and reassuring and laced with the suspense that comes with wondering if there will be a goodnight kiss at the end. I'm thinking the question will be answered by Sarah's choice of wardrobe, and I am hoping, as the door opens, for some show of leg or collarbone. But instead I am met by a kid. A boy I'd guess to be around eleven years old.

  "Is your mommy home?"

  "You mean my mom?"

  "If they're the same person, then yes."

  He stands there. Patiently absorbing my details, which at present include two fluttering hands at my sides that I attempt to subside by having one hold the other across my waist. If this trembly stranger at his door asking for his mother disturbs him in any way, he doesn't show it. In fact, he ends up standing aside and, with an introductory sweep of his arm, mumbles, "You want to come in?"

  It smells good in here. It's the flowers in the window, but also recent baking and perfume.

  "You're Trevor," the kid says, closing the door behind me.

  "That's right."

  "My mom's boyfriend."

  "From a long, long time ago."

  "That's just what she said. Except she had one more 'long.'"

  A teenage girl wearing train-track braces emerges from the kitchen with a plate of oatmeal cookies.

  "My babysitter," the kid says with a shrug, then takes a cookie. "These are good. You should try one, Trevor."

  "Don't mind if I do."

  "You want to see my room?"

  "I think I'm supposed to take your mom—"

  "She's still getting ready. She said I was supposed to entertain you."

  "Okay. Any suggestions?"

  "I've got Transformers."

  "Why didn't you say so?"

  His name is Kieran. Sarah's only child. The father supposedly lives out east now, though nobody really knows for sure. He doesn't show up even on the holidays he says he will, and he never sends the money from the jobs he says he's going to get. I learn all of this on the walk up the half flight of stairs to the kid's room.

  "Trevor?" Sarah calls out from behind the closed bathroom door. "I'll be out in three minutes."

  "Take your time. Kieran's giving me the tour."

  "Go easy on him, Kier."

  "He ate a whole cookie almost as fast as I did!" Kieran shouts with the excitement that might accompany the witnessing of magic.

  I sit on the edge of Kieran's bed and collect the toys and books he shows me, noting the cool sword of this warrior-mutant, the wicked bazooka of that mar
ine. Our conversation is sprinkled with off-topic questions ("Did you have soldiers when you were a kid?" from him; "Do you have friends in the neighbourhood?" from me), through which we learn what we need to know of each other. He is nearly breathless with pleasure at showing me his stuff, which is of course not really just stuff but entryways into a boy's world, his secret self.

  The kid's hunger for this—the company of a grown-up man in the house, shooting the breeze—is so naked it shames me. Shames, because it is something I too wanted at his age, but only partly, occasionally received. Though Kieran's case is worse than what I remember of my own. Companionship with a dad type has been missing so long in him he doesn't bother hiding it anymore. He isn't picky. Even I'll do.

  He asks about my shaking only once. "What's wrong with you?" is how he phrases it.

  "It's a disease."

  "Does it get worse?"

  "Yes."

  "It's not so bad right now."

  "No. It's bad. But what can you do?"

  He nods just as Randy or Carl would have. Because all of us know it: What can you do? His unhandsome circle of a face confirms this. There are a good many things he can do nothing about too.

  Sarah appears in the doorway. I am glad to see both collarbone and black-nyloned legs.

  "You think I could borrow Trevor for a few hours?" she asks.

  "Okay. But take this." Kieran drops a toy Ferrari, his favourite, into the palm of my hand. "You have to bring it back, though."

  "I promise."

  Kieran nods. Spins around to give his mother a kiss. As Sarah and I head downstairs and out the door he tells us to have a good time.

  "What about dinner?" I ask Sarah as we slip into her car.

  "They had pretty good hot dogs at the arena last time I was there," she says, pumping the gas until the Honda's engine coughs to life. "Mind you, that was over twenty years ago. Give or take."

  "You just went for the hot dogs?"

  "Course not. There was a cute boy who played right wing at the time."

  "Bit of a hot dog himself, if I remember correctly."

  "Nah. He was just a boy. And they're all hot dogs."

  The Grimshaw Arena hasn't changed much since the days we charged around its sheet of ice, cheered on by parents and sweethearts and fans who saw good value in a night out that consisted of a four-dollar ticket and seventy-five-cent hot chocolates. The tickets are double that now, and the stands, when Sarah and I find our seats behind the penalty box, feel dinkier than in my day There is still the cold of the place. A refrigerated air that huddles Sarah close to me for warmth.

  For most of the first period we just watch the game—surprisingly exciting, though the players are smaller than I was expecting, just a bunch of cherry-cheeked kids trying to look tough behind their visors—and eat hot dogs that, as Sarah recalled, aren't half bad. It feels to me not just like an old- fashioned date but like an old-fashioned first date: no low lighting, no alcohol. The opposite kind of thing I'd do with the girlfriends I dated during my Retox days, if you could call them dates. If you could call them girlfriends.

  At the intermission, we catch up on the last couple of decades of each other's lives in broad strokes. Sarah tells me about her "okay job" as assistant office manager of a contracting firm in town; the handful of women friends she goes out with once every other week to get hammered and "complain about our marriages, or how we wished we still had one;" how she feels that while her life isn't necessarily great, she's not miserable either, like she's "floating on this black ocean without sinking into it, y'know?" I talk about the deals I hustled to rise from restaurant manager to hedge-fund pusher to owner of my very own nightclub, where I would hire and fire and in the evenings feel ten years younger (and in the headachey mornings feel ten years older). I speak of the Parkinson's indirectly, referring to it as "this disease thing of mine," as though it's a vaguely ridiculous side project I'd been asked to be a partner in and now can't get out of.

  "Who's taking care of your nightclub while you're here?" Sarah asks.

  "It's not mine anymore. I sold it."

  "Why?"

  "I figure I'll need the money later, when this disease thing of mine gets worse."

  Sarah nods in precisely the same way that Kieran had earlier.

  "Kieran strikes me as a fine young fellow," I say.

  "That he is."

  "He tells me his dad hasn't really been in the picture for a while."

  "Kieran's father is a liar and third-rate criminal, among other things."

  "It must be a drag. For both of you."

  "Not for me. He's just gone. But Kieran doesn't fully understand that yet. He doesn't get how some people are just rotten."

  You mean me? I want to ask.

  And then the image of Tracey Flanagan returns. Standing blind on the threshold of the Thurman house's front door.

  "What about you?" Sarah asks.

  "Me?"

  "A family. Wife? Kids?"

  "No wife. No kids, either. As far as I know."

  "I suppose those were things you didn't want anyway."

  "I was preoccupied. Wilfully preoccupied."

  "Sounds kind of lonely," Sarah blurts, then rears back. "Oh my God. That came out wrong. I didn't mean to assume—"

  "Yes. I think I've been lonely. And not terribly happy either, though I never let myself slow down long enough to realize I wasn't. Until recently, that is."

  "Your illness."

  "That. And Ben. And coming back here. Seeing you."

  This last bit isn't flirtatious, it just comes out in the uncrafted way of the truth.

  The second period starts, and Grimshaw begins to pull away from the tough but unskilled Elmira boys, our forwards buzzing around their net but unable to put one away. It is the sort of game where things can go wrong: you're winning as far as the performance goes, but the scoreboard only shows the goals. It makes me think that this is what moving to the city from a small town is all about. It's not about the quality of life you live, but about putting up the hard numbers for all to see.

  "You ever feel like you missed out on something?" I ask. "Staying here?"

  "Missed out?"

  "The opportunities. Professional options."

  "No, you didn't mean that. You think the people you left behind were just too scared to go where you did."

  "I never saw it as leaving anybody behind."

  "No?"

  "Listen, I didn't—"

  "You think I was avoiding life by staying," Sarah says, icy as the Grimshaw Arena's air. "Did you ever think you were doing the same thing by leaving?"

  I'm thinking, for the minutes that follow, that this is pretty much it. We had both done our best to avoid the past, the vast body of unsaid thoughts between us, and now we had been shown to be fools. Sarah still wanted the answers she'd sought the winter we were in grade eleven, and I still couldn't give them to her. There was nothing now but to wait until the game's end—or earlier, if she decided to get up and leave—and return the buffering distance between us.

  But then she surprises me. She holds my hand.

  "Let me tell you what I know," she says, leaning close to my ear, so that I am filled by her voice. "Something happened to you when we were kids. Something awful. You think you escaped it, but you never did. You see me as one of the casualties, the cost of running away to the circus. But I don't need to know. I'm grown up, just like you. Borderline old, if you judge a thing by how you feel most of the time. We can talk about the serious stuff if you want, or not. But we're both way too banged up to worry about scratching the paint. Know what I mean?"

  Sarah leans away from me again, and the sounds of hockey return—the cut of skates, the thunder of armoured bodies against the boards—leaving me light in my seat. No tremors anywhere, no fight to remain still. I watch the game, but all of my attention, every sense available to me, is concentrated on the woman in the seat next to mine.

  "Close game," she says.

  "It only loo
ks that way."

  After the game, Sarah drives us back to her house, where she relieves the babysitter of her duties and offers me a drink in the living room. She turns on the stereo and cranks up the song the CD had been paused at the start of. "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran.

  "Remember this?" she says, passing me my scotch and dancing on her own in the middle of the room, the same cool, feline moves that stirred me as I watched her on the darkened gym floor at school dances. "It's terrible, isn't it?"

  "I like it," I say, not lying. "Is it going to wake Kieran up, though?"

  "Nothing wakes that kid up."

  I watch Sarah dance. Make a private request of my brain to not show me any scary pictures of Heather or Tracey or the boy or anyone but Sarah until the song is over. Just give me this. Allow the next three and a half minutes to be ghost-free.

  When she's finished she sits next to me on the sofa. Her skin pinkened, lips plumped. She is so different from the girl I remember. Yet those are the same freckles I once kissed.

  "Poor Trevor," she says. "It must be hard, being a mystery."

  "I'm not a mystery. There's just one thing I can't talk about."

  "That's what makes it so hard."

  She touches the back of my neck. Pulls me in. Her mouth warm and tasting faintly of vanilla.

  "We're going to have sex now," she says. "Aren't we?"

  "Lordy. Do you think we could?"

  We go up to Sarah's room. She draws the curtains and lets me watch her take her clothes off. When my shaking hands struggle with my belt buckle, she helps. And then she proceeds to help me in other ways too.

  It is a kindness. But maybe there is even some suggestion of a future in it—an unlikely, difficult, but not wholly impossible future. Something we both could live in, live through. I had assumed that, with my disease, there was nothing I could offer women anymore. But perhaps this was true only of those who saw me as I am now and could envision little more than the decline to come.