by Andrew Pyper
I can't hear Randy anymore, but those are the words his already swelling lips are working around. It's not the fire that frightens him; it's not even death. It is the immensity of his loneliness opening wide inside of him.
I charge again. Driving my palms into Randy's throat. It pushes him over the linoleum edge and down the cellar stairs. For a moment he is a writhing outline against the dark. And then, without any sound of impact, he's gone.
I stand over Tracey, staring down at her as though trying to understand what she is.
Go!
I bend and lift Tracey over my shoulder. Hold her there, caught in an Atlas pose. Unable to step forward or back, disoriented by the smoke, the dizziness that came with lifting her.
NOW!
My knees start to fold, but I lean into it, turning their failure into a hopscotch march. The back door frame has already collapsed, forcing me through the kitchen, then into the hallway. The walls busy with fire. There is nowhere to turn where the heat doesn't take burning swipes at our skin. Tracey's hair swaying over my back.
Halfway down the hallway I stop. It's the cramping muscles, what feels like some kind of cardiac episode. It makes it impossible to carry her another foot, but in fact it is only the sort of thing that would be difficult for me even under the most uncomplicated circumstances.
But I got Tracey out of the crawlspace. Somehow I managed that. I got her out.
And if I did that, why can't I do this?
So I jerk ahead, waist first, a statue with one last, unhardened part. Lurch toward the front door.
This is me. I'm doing this. And with this thought comes a dangerous elation. Not yet. If I get out of here, I can sit on the curb and laugh my guts out. Just not yet.
I open the door with a single twist of the knob. A rectangle of smooth night appears. Then the cool air on my face, the porch steps groaning under my weight as I make my way down and tumble onto the lawn. Tracey Flanagan rolling off my back to lie on the grass, face up, eyes open and blinking. She looks as surprised by the stars as by the fact she is alive.
Then she turns my way. A shared recognition between us, as though we have known each other for uncountable years.
Randy.
I'm already working my way to my feet, crawling back up onto the porch.
The heat again. A line between the autumn night and the fire so defined it feels like passing into a different world altogether. Walking through something as solid as brick or stone.
The fire has encircled me now. I'm not sure if I'm in the hallway, the kitchen, or if I took a wrong turn into the living room. There is nowhere to go even if I had the capacity to move, which I don't. The brief reprieve from symptoms has already passed, leaving me rigid and faint.
He is only an outline in the smoke at first, unmoving and featureless. But with a single step forward he is more real than he has ever appeared to me. Oblivious to the fire, the lick of hair caught in his eyelashes and jumping with every blink. Coming to stand so close that even through the sulphurous air I can smell the rank, burnt-sugar sweetness of him.
Stay with us.
The boy holds my hand. On his face an expression of mock relief, a mimicry of Carl's features when we held hands in the Thurman kitchen the first night we left the coach alone in the cellar. But unlike Carl's, the boy's hand is cold, and his grip is meant not to comfort but to hold me in place. To keep me in the fire forever.
I fight him. Or I tell myself I must try to fight him, to wrench myself free. To not listen. But all my body allows is a brief spasm, just another of the symptoms that have no purpose or strength. So tired now the disease is all that's left. That, and the boy.
Stay.
And I will. Perhaps I never had a choice. If home is the place you spend most of your grown-up life working to forget, then this is mine.
Overhead, the sound of timber giving way. I look up in time to see a sheet of plaster breaking free of the ceiling before it crashes onto me, pinning me flat to the floor.
I had felt the heat before this—had been thickly swimming in it, drowning in it—yet only now do I lend it my full attention. It's because I'm burning. Trapped beneath what might be half a ton of century-old debris, the original nails and mouldings and support beams of the Thurman house. Still conscious, still within the reach of pain, but all of it to disappear soon.
The fire breaks a window. The high tinkle of glass atop the low growl of flames.
Then the boy is tugging at my arms. Apparently it's not enough for me to slowly burn to death. He wants to dislocate both of my shoulders too. When I don't move, he tugs again, and again.
Some part of me shifts. Yet other parts feel as though they are being left behind. Limbs torn from their sockets.
I open my eyes and work to turn my head to an angle where I might see who has put his hands on me, but the smoke has left me blind. If I am expecting to see any living thing it is Randy, horrifically burned. Randy, who seeks to pull me against him so that the two of us might be fused by fire.
The hands lift me up, throwing me onto narrow but strong shoulders that carry me through the haze before tossing me into the air. There is a new pain to go along with the previous ones. Sharp teeth biting my skin in too many places to count, like being attacked by a swarm of yellowjackets.
And then the ground. Sudden and cool, and me rolling through the grass, clothes smoking and, if I'm not hearing things, some part of me sizzling. I keep tumbling in order to extinguish any live flames I've lost the ability to feel.
Now when I open my eyes there is the sky, the stars distinct, hovering close. Licks of flame reach out from the upper floor, as though the house is claiming the night for itself. It draws my sight to the shattered living-room window. The same window where fuckt had once been drawn in dust. The window I'd been thrown out of. What felt like stings in fact the cuts of glass teeth.
Then, through smoke so dense it is like another part of the wall, the boy leaps out. Landing on the ground with a thud, his body crumpling. His clothes, his hair, his skin blackened by smoke. His eyes the only colour—worn denim blue—that he lets me see.
"Trevor?" the boy says, but not in the boy's voice.
Carl grabs me by the ankles and, leaning back, drags me through the grass and away from the house. All of it ablaze now, the fire elbowing windows and bringing the ceilings down with oddly gentle crashes, as though the floors and walls have been cushioned by the heat.
When we make it to the sidewalk Carl lets go and sits next to me, the two of us able to do nothing more than watch the Thurman house flare and spit. I have a dim awareness of others around us—a clutch of bathrobed neighbours, a dog barking with the excitement of being outside, leashless, in the night.
No firetrucks or police yet, though their sirens join the undercurrents of sound. The murmuring witnesses, the yielding wood frame, the hissing voices rising up out of the smoke.
An ambulance arrives first. Stopping in front of the McAuliffe house, where we watch as the paramedics tend to someone lying under blankets on the front porch. Tracey Flanagan, who is able to sit up and tell them who she is.
Then Carl is pulling me close to him. His face appears freshly washed, streaks of white cut into the ash down to his jaw. But as he kneels with me I see that they are tears. Abundant, unstoppable.
There is nothing to do but what we have done all our lives, whether in our dreams or in our Grimshaw days. We watch the Thurman house and wait for it to show us how it is unlike other houses, how it is alive. The fire towering over its roof like a crown. The headless rooster still, as though, after decades of indecision, northeast was its final determination.
I suppose it's possible that someone else sees him other than us, though I hear no shriek from the onlookers behind us. So maybe it is only Carl and me who see Randy in the upstairs window. The bedroom where the coach died. Where Roy DeLisle stood over Elizabeth Worth's body, excited and proud, wanting to show someone the remarkable thing he'd done.
Randy is star
ing down at us with the false calm of someone trying to hide his fear. A soldier doing his best not to worry his family as the train pulls away, taking him off to war.
He takes a half step closer to the window frame and he isn't Randy anymore. He is the boy. Roy DeLisle as we have had to imagine him—a kid like us, looking like us. A kid expert at playing the same normal act we have played all our lives.
For a moment, Randy's face and the boy's face switch like traded masks, so that, behind the curtain of smoke, their differences are slight, almost imperceptible.
Randy.
The boy.
Randy.
The boy.
They could be the same person, except one is terrified by whatever is to come, and the other is oblivious to the fire that swallows him. In fact, he may even be smiling.
* * *
[18]
Where do hospitals buy their paint? Is it wherever the leftover stock goes, the tints that the buying public have deemed too depressing or nauseating to use in homes where people actually live? Or is there thought to be therapeutic value to heartbreaking palettes, a motivation for patients to fake wellness enough to be discharged early if only to escape the pukey turquoises and hork-spit yellows?
These are among the deep considerations I ponder over my days in a semi-private suite in Grimshaw General. The bad news—aside from the walls, the institutional wafts of bleach and vegetable soup—is that the fire touched me in a number of spots, which has left me counting down the last minutes to my every-four-hours pain meds. The good news is that I know my roommate.
That it is Carl and not a stranger I have to hear stifling farts and watching Friends reruns and moaning as the nurses change his dressings on the other side of the curtain makes the time pass less awkwardly, if no less slowly. And of course, when we're alone, we pull the curtains back to talk.
Carl had taken a cab to the train station but not boarded the 5:14 when it pulled in. He couldn't say exactly why he decided to stay, other than "Something felt wrong, or was about to go that way." So he had gone to the place where wrong things were most likely to occur, keeping his eye on the back door of the Thurman house from his vantage point behind the see-saw. He had seen Randy enter in the late afternoon and then, some hours later, come running around from the side. He hadn't wanted to get any more involved than that, only to see who came out and when.
But then he had noticed the smoke. Soon afterward, going around to the front of the house, he had found Tracey Flanagan on the lawn and carried her to the McAuliffes' porch, banging on the door and telling Betty to call an ambulance. When he asked Tracey how she'd got out of there, she said my name.
"It's like each of us had a job to do," I tell Carl. "I went in to find Tracey, and you went in for me."
Carl fluffs his pillow, sits up straight, turns on Jeopardy! "Well, that's just the way it turned out. I see only what's right in front of me, you know what I'm saying?"
But of course he could see more than that. It's why he'd spent the cash I'd given him on cigarettes instead of a train ticket, why he'd smoked the lot of them while keeping his eye on an empty house. I didn't need to hear Carl admit to his belief in fate. It was more than enough to know that an absence of over twenty years and all the damage he had endured in that time had not slowed his run from the safe side of Caledonia Street to the other, to me.
We have no shortage of visitors.
On the less pleasant side, there are the police, who want to know everything and are frustrated by how little we offer them.
Carl and I stick to similarly vague stories. That is, the truth— minus the boy. We were just old pals who were concerned for Randy's emotional state following the suicide of a mutual friend, and figured he might try to harm himself.
"Why there?" each questioner asks. "Why that house?"
"Because it's haunted," we tell them.
In the end, their curiosity could take them only so far, as Tracey Flanagan's life had been saved, after all. The only crimes that were known to have been committed were done by Randy, and he was gone now. Other than the suspicion that we knew more than we were saying, the police had no charge they needed to lay, so they moved on, wishing us swift recoveries in ironic tones.
Betty McAuliffe brings us corn muffins and homemade raspberry jam, which save Carl and me from the frightening "scrambled eggs" and "oatmeal" that would have otherwise had to pass for breakfast. She tells us of her plans to sell the house. It's too big for her alone, and she doesn't relish the prospect of months of noisy bulldozers and nail guns across the street. There are some one-bedroom apartments she fancies over on Erie Street, overlooking the river. It is all she needs.
"So long as you boys drop in sometimes," she says, enticing us with ham sandwiches and a Thermos of good coffee, though she doesn't have to sweeten the deal to elicit promises from us.
Todd Flanagan comes by to say hello, but within seconds his rehearsed words abandon him, his gratitude and relief leaving him mute. So I do the talking for both of us. I tell him that it was an honour to be able to get Tracey out of there, that it was likely to turn out to be the most proud moment of my life. Then I tell Todd that his daughter struck me as smart enough and brave enough to recover from this, that my money is on her turning out fine.
He embraces me. Pins me against my pillow for a long hug I'm sure Todd has never given another man in his life, just as I am unused to receiving one.
It's not the only love I receive from the Flanagan family during my stay. Tracey opens her arms to me when the doctors deem her well enough to permit select visitors, and when I bend down to her, I am rewarded with cheek kisses.
"My dad was right," she says.
"About what?"
"He always said you were good."
She smiles at me, and I recall her telling me how Todd thought I was a pretty decent hockey player back in the day. I'm not sure I could stand on blades today, let alone skate around the rink. But I pulled this girl out. Me, the disease guy, Mr. Shakes. I pulled her out.
"I can see you're starting to like this hero stuff," Carl says when I return to our room. "Don't bother denying it."
Why would I deny it? A guy whose only boasts up until now were owning a disco for a while and having a decent wrist shot when he was sixteen?
So I'll take it. You're goddamn right I'll take it.
I look forward to Sarah and Kieran coming by more than just about anyone else. They're twice-a-dayers, bringers of chocolate and celebrity magazines ("It's all they've got down in that crappy store") and flowers.
The kid finds the whole bandages-and-IV business pretty interesting, and I can feel my stock rising in his estimation, my banged- up condition helping him to see me as an aging but furious warrior from one of his video games, rather than a middle-aged guy who used to date his mom in the unimaginable depths of history
"I still owe you that car you lent me," I tell him when his mom has stepped out of the room. "The Ferrari."
"You remember that?"
"A promise is a promise."
Kieran nods his mother's nod. Tells me I can keep it.
Carl is here the whole time, of course. We don't talk in detail about the big questions, about Randy and how he'd fallen prey to the boy's invitations. I tell him about finding Roy DeLisle's bones in the crawlspace, how they were likely turned to ash in the fire, which would leave us the only holders of the last chapter of his regrettable biography. I also share my theory that it was Paul Schantz who put him there, and his quiet is answer enough.
Believe it or not, we spend most of the time laughing. Not gales of barroom hilarity, but the chuckles that come from old jokes retold, stories of childhood embarrassments and foolishness.
The doctors say Carl and I will be out of here soon. I offer Carl the use of my condo, tell him he can stay as long as he wants. Which is when he tells me that his boyfriend, Adam, is arriving in Toronto in a couple of days. That they're planning to get a place of their own in the city.
"Boyf
riend?"
"It's been twenty-four years, Trev."
"I guess people change over that much time."
"No, they don't," Carl says, and rises onto an elbow to whip his pillow at my head. "They just become more of what they always were."
* * *
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 16
I have to believe that we weren't alone.
I have to believe that some of the things all of us did when we were young were strange. So strange that in recollection they strike us as the products of distorted dreams. Later, we may work to untangle these dreams, dismiss them, grapple with their meanings so that we might "move on." Or, more usually, we do our best to ignore them, to discount them as that-which-never- actually-happened. But they did. The bullying and being bullied, the greater or lesser perversities, the violence done to others and to us—all of it real.
And why did they happen at all? The imagination, The boundless possibility that goes with being a child, the brief period of ignorance before coming to understand that everything we do comes with a coat.
This will be my final entry. Not only because my memory of what happened to us over the winter of 1984 has found its end but because I will soon be unable to manage what I am doing now: sitting alone in a room, turning a recorder on and off, speaking aloud in a voice that anyone other than me might understand.
Right now, for instance, I'm in Sarah's room, sitting on the edge of her bed. It's where I slept last night, huddled against her warmth, my limbs calmed by the happy exertions of our keep-it-simple lovemaking. Why would I ever leave? Because there are only so many more days of my being capable of returning another's embrace, of being a man as most of us understand it. Soon I will be reduced to a human to-do list and little more. Sarah says that I'm welcome to stay, that Kieran would be thrilled if I did, that the three of us can face whatever's coming our way together if we're honest enough about it. She's a tough nut, as my mother used to say. Yet toughness might not be enough in my case. I'm losing myself, piece by piece, and there's no getting it back. It's likely to be the kind of process best left to me and professionals and Carl visiting now and again.
