by Andrew Pyper
After this, the diary returned to its record of soups Ben had for lunch for a few days. No sightings of the boy, no shooing visitors off the Thurman property. And then the final entry:
September 20, 2008 This just happened.
It is the end of things, I know. Forgive me. I have done my best but I am tired now, so tired it's almost impossible to write this, to
push the pen over this paper. I am tired and alone and I want only to
be with him, to comfort him. It's funny. It's so stupid, but it's taken until now to realize how much I've missed my father.
Forgive me
+ + + + +
Another message on my window tonight.
I had been keeping watch on the house, and turned away only long enough to get the glass of water I'd left by the bed. But when I sat down again it was there:
daddy's waiting
I slid the window open. The night smelled of lilacs and carnations. Not a good smell, though. Flowers left too long in dry vases.
He was sitting on the front steps. Stooped, elbows propped on his knees. He had been waiting He looked even more tired than me. Like he'd been running and had just stopped and was trying to remember what he'd been running from.
My father stood when he saw me. I can't exactly say what expression he wore. It was defeat, among other things. And sadness. So lonely it made him look hollow.
He turned and walked into the house. Like he'd been called in for bed. Like it was the end of a long, long day.
Forgive me.
Later that same night, Randy called to tell me Ben was gone.
* * *
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 14
We watched them come.
A lone police cruiser at first. The officer's shirt straining against the bulge around his waist. When he came out he wasn't wearing his cap anymore.
We stood together. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of Ben's house, his mother out on a grocery run. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit who must have been the coroner finally emerged with the black bags laid out on gurneys—one, and then the smaller other—we held our breaths.
We remember all this, though still not everything.
And some of the things we remember may not have happened at all.
The letter, amazingly, was Randy's idea.
We were sitting in the Ford before school, no more than twenty minutes after Carl and I had witnessed the coach blow the side of his head off. I suppose the two of us must have been exhibiting some symptoms of shock, but I can't recall any tears or stony stares into space. Maybe this was because everything, as they say, was happening so fast. And we had each other. The most horrific events remained an inch within the bounds of the manageable so long as there was at least one Guardian to share them with.
We quickly agreed that hoping it would all go away was no longer an option. Neighbours might have heard the firing of Carl's revolver. Or perhaps someone passing by saw the coach in one of the windows. Or maybe someone other than us—a junkie kicked out of his room at the Y, young lovers looking for a wall to screw against—had smelled the morgueish taint in the house's air and knew it to be more than a poisoned rat. In any case, Heather Langham and the coach would soon be found, if they hadn't been already. And the likelihood of their trails leading to us, one way or another, was high, unless we could prevent an investigation from starting in the first place. A story that made sense out of what we knew to be senseless.
They were both teachers, seen to be friendly, sharing books in the staff lounge. One night, a shared flask, an empty house. But something had gone wrong—the blows to Heather's skull showed that, along with her hasty burial. A day or two passed, long enough for the coach to be pushed all the way over the edge, and he returned to the scene to do himself in. Some version of a narrative like this happened all the time, if not in Grimshaw then in some other hicksville they flashed the name of at the bottom of the screen on the supper- time news.
Two problems, though. One: the police had to see it this way. Two: if we were going to go in this direction, we had to start now.
That's when Randy mentioned the letter. He pointed out that, if we wanted it to look like a murder-and-then-a-later-suicide, a confession from the coach was the way to go. The trick was that it would have to appear as though it were composed when he was still alive.
Ben pulled out his wallet and unfolded a piece of paper from its slot.
"We'll use this," he said.
It was the paper the coach had signed but otherwise left blank. A confession he challenged us to fill in ourselves. Which is what we did.
We went to Carl's apartment. There was an electric typewriter under his sofa that we plugged in, and we typed what we hoped would be taken as the coach's admission of guilt:
321 Caledonia
We folded it into thirds, deciding against an envelope. As an afterthought, Carl typed URGENT on the outside.
Our first idea was to drop it off at police headquarters. But Carl, who'd been inside the cop shop more than the rest of us, remembered they had security cameras at the front and back doors. We were stumped for a minute after that, until I suggested leaving it at the Beacon offices. No cameras there, and there was the possibility of someone in its sleepy newsroom coming across a piece of paper marked URGENT and going to the trouble of reading it.
This was how Ben (who nominated himself, and who somehow seemed right for the task) came to run the three blocks from Carl's to slip the folded paper into the mail slot next to the front doors of The Grimshaw Beacon.
When Ben met up with us again, he said, "My mom's out shopping. Then she's getting her hair done."
"So?" Randy said.
"So we can watch from my place."
One of us probably should have pointed out that this was an unnecessary risk. Besides, spying on the authorities as they arrived at the Thurman house to push the soil off Heather Langham and elbow the bedroom door open to the coach's bloody spatters—it might make us feel even more guilty than we already did.
But we started over to Ben's house without discussion. The thing is, we wanted to see. To observe others go inside and come out changed.
We got away with it. The family-destroying trial, the humiliations of prison. There was none of that for any of us. We were free.
But getting away with the sort of thing we did can ruin a man. It can ruin four of them.
Here's another thing I know: there are people who have got away with things all around you. Mothers and fathers, the fellow who helps lift your stroller onto the bus, the ball of rags you walk by when it asks for change. You might work with them, play beer-league ball with them, sleep with them. Good guys. And you'd never know they were one of us.
Few in town knew Heather Langham when alive, but in death, she was treated like a favourite daughter. After her body was returned to the aunt and uncle who had raised her, Grimshaw organized a memorial service in the Municipal Hall auditorium that ended up drawing a standing-room-only crowd of earnest snifflers and speech-makers. By the end, the framed photo of Heather they'd set on a chair at the front had been encircled by bouquets, wreaths, dolls and teddy bears, as though the mourners were undecided whether to treat her as a fallen soldier or a stolen child.
A couple of rows near the front had been reserved for her students, who were asked to play at the end of the service a piece of music she'd taught us. This was how Carl, Randy, Ben and I, along with a dozen other honkers and tooters, came to grind our way through "The Maple Leaf Forever" before one of Grimshaw's largest-ever public audiences. Somehow, our ineptitude only magnified the moment's poignancy.
The coach's farewell couldn't have been more different. A patchy gathering at McCutcheon's Funeral Home that we all attended—the four of us, that is, not the whole team, though among the few other players who came I recall Todd Flanagan, apologizing for the baby-formula stains on his blazer. I don't remember who delivered the eulogy. Perhaps there wasn't one. There were no p
hotos of the deceased, no open casket; the coach's ashes were collected in an urn that, as Randy whispered to me, looked a little like the Stanley Cup.
The only other attendee I specifically recall was the coach's wife, Laura. Maybe it was the circumstances of her husband's death, or maybe she was too broken to manage the weight of the moment, but even she was dry-eyed. Locking and unlocking her fingers and checking her watch as though nervous about missing her train out of town, which perhaps she was, as none of us ever saw her in Grimshaw again.
After Miss Langham and the coach were found, it was impossible for even the most rabid fans to conceive of the Guardians continuing any further in the playoffs. The league announced the team's withdrawal from what remained of the season, giving Seaforth a bye to the next round (where they were justly trounced by the elbowing, tobacco-farmer sons of the Woodstock Wolves).
Somewhere in there Sarah broke up with me. Or I broke up with her. I can't remember a definitive moment when we both walked away knowing it was over, perhaps because such a moment never happened.
Eventually, she started seeing other guys. Roy Kimble, Dougie Craft, Larry Musselman. Likable guys I would have been happy to hang out with had I not known they were taking Sarah Mulgrave out to the Vogue or a bush party, which forced me to loathe them instead, see them as slippery smooth talkers who Sarah, being a girl, couldn't see as the preppie liars they were.
We still talked from time to time. Painful exchanges in the school hallways or out by Nicotine Corner, where she would stop to ask how I was doing as I chainsmoked before heading in, late, for class. She asked about my mom and dad, and I asked about hers. She told me she missed me, and I said it was for the best. But all I remember thinking was You were mine once, over and over.
The next two and a half years of high school passed in a numbed procession of skipped classes and rec-room parties and daydreams of escape. We were perfecting our normal acts.
Every day we undertook another exercise in the impossible. We slouched, listened to the Clash and tried to pretend it never happened.
We did our best to fill the widening gaps within ourselves with distractions, building bridges that might find their way to the other side. For Carl, this meant drugs. More of the pot he'd been dulling himself with even before he first went into the Thurman house, but afterward supplemented with speed, acid, coke (even then finding its way into the hinterland). He soon assumed Randy's place as our dealer, serving half the student body as well, a job that introduced him to out-of-town distributors and mules, legitimately dangerous men we'd sometimes meet sitting at his kitchen table. To us, he looked so young compared to them as he confirmed the weight of baggies on his scales, handing over rolls of cash we knew to have been earned from other kids' driveway shovelling and part-time dishwashing. We worried about him. But I think the same things that worried us frightened us as well, and so we watched Carl's descent from an especially great distance.
It was Randy who seemed the least damaged among us. He went about cementing his reputation as the school's goofball, the floppy-eared puppy who enjoyed confounding success with the ladies. He even returned to playing hockey the following year, doodling around the net and getting rubbed into the boards as he had before. Randy was Randy. This is what you'd say when he fell onto somebody's glass coffee table at a party or accepted a dare to run bare-assed down Huron Street on a Friday night. Randy the jester, our fool.
As for me, I committed myself to perfecting the teenage-boy cloaking device: sullenness, distance, a refusal to articulate any preferences or plans. I fell out of any clubs or hobbies, and just scuffed around. Daydreaming about all the shiny disguises money could buy.
Ben was the first of us to break, and we noticed it within days of Heather Langham's memorial service.
Whenever we'd call him or drive by in Carl's car to pick him up he'd say he had something he had to do, a chore or family engagement that required him to stay home. After a time, he abandoned these excuses altogether and simply said he didn't feel like going outside, though he welcomed us to hang out with him in his attic bedroom, which we increasingly had to do if we wanted to see him at all. Within weeks, it took all of Ben's strength to make it to school and home again three days out of five, the other two written off as sick days with signed letters from his mom.
"Somebody has to watch," he told me once. Ben was seated in what was now his spot, a wooden, colonial- style chair with curled armrests situated so that he could look directly out the window.
"Watch what, Ben?"
"The house."
"Have you seen something?"
"Once or twice. Something in there wants out, Trev. And we can't let it."
There was Ben's we again. The trouble was, this time, he was on his own.
More and more, Ben would spend his time sitting in his chair, staring out at the Thurman house. He told us it required his full concentration to keep its windows shut, the doors closed.
"It's like what the coach said," he told us. "There's some things you have to guard against."
"Fine," Carl said. "So why's it have to be you?"
Ben looked at the three of us. For a second, the strange intensity that had become fixed over his features was relaxed, and he managed half a smile. There was love in it. Love and madness.
"Because you're all going to leave, and I'm going to stay," he said.
For what remained of our high-school days, Ben faded from the sweetly dreamy boy we had known into a silhouette, a shadow in an attic window backlit by the forty-watt bulb in the Ken Dryden lamp by his bed. Sometimes, when I missed him but didn't want to ring the doorbell and have Mrs. McAuliffe, shivery and lost, let me in, I would stand a half block from his house and watch him up there. He rarely moved. And then, all of a sudden, he would launch forward and grip his hands to the window frame, his eyes squinting at some imagined movement within the Thurman house. How many times had he repeated this useless call to attention over the years between then and the day he looped a rope over the support beam in his ceiling, tied the other end around his neck and stepped off one of the folding chairs we'd used for epic coffee-fuelled poker games in his basement?
Even then, I wondered what particular corner of hell would turn out to be mine.
* * *
[14]
I wake up before dawn, so that it feels as though I haven't slept at all. Which perhaps I haven't. My dreams—if they were dreams—were a confusion of questions. Carl. Tracey Flanagan's whereabouts. The boy. The missing Dictaphone. Along with Sarah, who while a source of some comfort has been tainted in my mind by merely being so close to these other mysteries. It's like those nightmares where you, say, catch your brother in the middle of taking an axe to the neighbour's dog: you know it's not true, it's impossible, it never happened. And yet, the next time you look at your brother—or the neighbour's dog-—he's been altered. A piece of him pulled into the world of night thoughts.
I work myself out of bed, fighting the collected hours of stiffness. Every muscle a hardened cord that must be warmed, then stretched, then retrained.
I'm finally standing when I see it.
A word I recognize through the hand it is written in even before I read its letters. The same tight, furious, misspelled scrawl we'd all seen drawn into the Thurman house's living- room window over two decades ago.
fuckt
A fingernailed threat cut through the dust. And written not on the outside of the glass, but on the inside.
Sleepwalking. Is this another Parkinson's symptom, one of the rarer ones to be found near the bottom of the list? How about sleepwriting?
I shuffle over to the window and wipe away the boy's graffiti with a balled-up T-shirt. When I'm done, it leaves the house across the street in greater clarity. I don't watch it for long for fear of seeing the awakened thing I can feel moving through its rooms.
To avoid any direct view of the house, I return to sit on the edge of the bed. It's still early. The house, the town outside, everything still. The
re is time to kill before Mrs. McAuliffe gets up and I can get into the shower without disturbing her, so I have another go at Ben's journal. More pages of his take on nothing.
I turn another crinkly page and come across something so unexpected I wonder if I am in fact awake at all.
A Post-it Note. On it a message dated two months before Ben died.
TREVOR—
If you have read this far, you deserve to know.
Look behind the vent under the bed. Read only if you feel the need to.
Otherwise, burn it all and don't look back.
PS. Don't go in. No matter what. Don't go in.
The grille easily pulls away on the first tug. I stick my hand in and feel around the duct, sliding under the bedframe far enough to slip my arm down all the way to the elbow. I pull out a soft bundle.
It's another diary. This one bound in pliant leather, slim and easily folded into a roll, bound tight by a strip of silver Christmas ribbon. I untie it and open the cover to find not more pages of Ben's handwriting, but clippings and smudgy photocopies. No notes, no accompanying explanation.
The first is a story cut from a tea-coloured page of The Grimshaw Beacon.
GRIMSHAW YOUTH VICTIM OF GRISLY ATTACK
ELIZABETH WORTH
Born January 27, 1933. Died November 12, 1949.
Tragedy visited the home of foster parents Paul Schantz and his wife, May, this past week when one of their charges, Elizabeth Worth, was found murdered in the home. Miss Worth was only sixteen years old.
"We loved her so much. She was a lovely child, so bright and kind. We have some difficult young people come through these doors from time to time, but Elizabeth wasn't one of them. It's heartbreaking to know she had the best of her life ahead of her," commented Mr. Schantz, who has been running the foster-care facility at 321 Caledonia for the past several years since purchasing the property from James Thurman in 1941. Prior to Miss Worth's passing, Mr. Schantz and his wife (who have no offspring of their own) had four children from four separate birth families under their care.
