by Andrew Pyper
But you never know. You really don't.
I should stop now. Such considerations are getting close to overstepping the bounds of a memory diary, and I should colour within the lines I started out with.
So what's left to remember? Everything and nothing, if you know what I mean (and if you have piled on enough years to feel like your life is coming in for a landing rather than taking off, then I'm willing to bet you do). Anyway, I'm done with all that now. If the keeping of this diary has taught me anything, it's that the past is an anvil, or maybe a grand piano, the kind of thing that, in the cartoons of my youth, drops from the sky to flatten you into a pancake. And I'm too tired to try to stand up again after it does.
Except for this:
I seem to recall saying, sometime back near the beginning, that every town has a haunted house. But what do I know of every town? What I really meant, I think, is that there is a haunted house in every boy's life. A place where all the wants he is not yet old enough to act upon or even understand can be rehearsed or hidden away. A place he fears because he can sense its endlessness, how it reaches back into the pasts of other boys before him, as well as his own.
When I started this I thought I was recording a secret history, or maybe a kind of ghost story. I was wrong. It is a confession. I entered the Thurman house each time believing I was trying to do good, whether it was rescuing Heather Langham, or finding Tracey Flanagan, or saving Grimshaw from the darkest aspect of itself. But like the fireman who runs into the burning building upon hearing a baby's cry within, I really entered the red-brick shell on Caledonia Street not because of Heather or Tracey, or to protect future innocents from the likes of the boy, but because if it wasn't me, it would be one of the men next to me, my friends. I did it for love, in other words.
But if this remains a story of hauntings, has it ended, as such stories are supposed to end, with the restless spirits at peace? What lesson is to be drawn from a cautionary tale where the maimed survivor wouldn't alter any of the steps that led him into the one place he was forbidden to go? What kind of confession does this make when, even as I'm sorry for so much of what I've done, I still feel lucky to have been with my brothers in the doing of it?
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Maya Mavjee, Kristin Cochrane, Susan Burns, Nita Pronovost, Nicola Makoway, Shaun Oakey, Anne McDermid, Monica Pacheco, Martha Magor, Sally Riley, Dan Levine, Peter Robinson, Kate Mills, Chris Herschdorfer—
Thank you.
