The Guardians (22 page)

    "No
doubt about it."

    "You
think that's got something to do with you wanting us to take a look in
there?"

    "How
do you mean?"

    "The
mind, the way it works sometimes. It can get rolling along certain tracks and
not want to stop," Barry says, touching his now neatly trimmed moustache
as though it was helping him find words. "What happened to Ben, and now you're
staying in his house and everything. Could be that you're just a little
spooked."

    "I'm
spooked silly, to tell you the truth. For me, this whole town is crawling with
ghosts. I'm
forty years old
, for Chrissakes."

    
"I
hear
that."

    Barry
coughs, though between men, it is a sound to be understood as a kind of muted
laugh.

    "Okay.
I'll try to clear some time in the afternoon," Barry says, pulls the door
open a foot more.

    "Thank
you."

    I get
to my feet. It takes longer than I'd like.

    "My
dad had the Parkinson's too," Barry says.

    "No
kidding?"

    "Sorry
to mention it. It's just—"

    "It's
getting hard not to notice, I know. How's your dad doing?"

    "He
died four years ago."

    I nod.
We both do. Then I make my way down the hall to where Randy waits for me by the
exit.

    Once
we're outside he says, "That was Hairy Barry Tate, wasn't it?"

    "Certainly
was."

    "What
were you two talking about in there?"

    "Hockey.
He played for the Guardians too. A Kitchener guy broke his wrist."

    Randy
shakes his fist skyward, raging at heaven in his not bad Charlton Heston voice.
"Damn
those Kitchener guys. Damn them to
hell"

    Randy
walks me back to Ben's, offers to hang around as I "alphabetize his
Archie and Jugheads
or whatever you're doing up there." I tell him
there's little point in both of us being bored senseless.

    "Any
plans for tonight?" he asks. "Sounds like you're pretty close to
wrapping up. Could be our last evening in town to check out the culinary
offerings."

    "I'm
grabbing something with Sarah, actually."

    Randy
bugs his eyes out. "Are we talking date?"

    "She
mentioned we might go to the Guardians game."

    "That's
as close to 'Come up and see my etchings' as you get around here."

    "She's
just being nice."

    "I
could go for some of that kind of nice."

    Up in
Ben's room, I tape up some of the boxes I've been tossing stuff into, marking
them "Books + Mags" and "Hockey" and "Misc." I'm
not sure if there's much point to even this basic sorting—what is Betty going
to do with it once I'm gone, other than let it rot in the basement or drop it
off at the Salvation Army to be piled into their Pay What You Can bin?—but it
gives me the idea that I'm helping, bringing some kind of expertise to the job.
A job I'm nearly done now. The closet empty, the clothes bagged, the room
emptied of knick-knacks and clutter. Randy was right: there's no reason we
can't be on the train out of here tomorrow.

    I
pick Ben's diary off the bed. I've already decided this will be the only
keepsake I will take with me. Not because I feel any special warmth from the
thing—the Ben who authored it wasn't the Ben I knew—but because it can't be
left behind.

    I sit
in his chair by the window and I've just opened it up when a Grimshaw Police
cruiser rounds Church Street and eases to a stop. My first instinct is to hide.
I slide off Ben's chair to kneel on the floor, nose pressed to the sill so that
I'm able to peer down at the street.

    Barry
Tate and his roly-poly partner step out of the car and stand on the sidewalk.
For a time they stare up at the Thurman house with their hands on their hips,
speaking to each other in words I can't make out, though their tone seems
doubtful, as if wondering aloud if they have come to the right address.

    Barry
makes his way to the front door first, tries the handle and, finding it locked,
starts around toward the rear, his partner following. After five minutes, they
have yet to reappear.

    I
slip down and let my back rest against the wall. Open Ben's diary again. For
another dozen pages there is his continued notation of wasted hours and days.
Over time, it becomes so repetitious I play the game of scanning for the
flavours of soups he heats for his lunches. A prisoner's menu of split peas,
minestrones and chicken noodles.

    Among
the banal details, there are occasional episodes of Ben making sure that none
entered the house. Shouting down at kids making bets over who had the guts to
open the front door and place both feet over the threshold. Threatening to
phone their parents, pretending he knew their names. Another entry told of a
"half-drunk girl" being led by her boyfriend around the side of the house
at night. Ben rushed downstairs, ran across the street to the back door in time
to haul the girl out of the kitchen, telling her she didn't know how bad a
place it was, how much danger she was in just being there. She ran away crying,
whereupon the boyfriend suckerpunched Ben in the mouth.

    Sometimes,
when older high-schoolers had slipped inside, Ben called the cops. The diary
would note how many trespassers were hustled out by the officers, who seemed to
arrive later and later with each report Ben called in; the police would have
let the Thurman house go unmonitored were it not for the McAuliffe head case
who was conducting a permanent stakeout on it. Not that Ben cared what they
thought. His duty was to keep the empty house empty.

    Then
there's a longer entry. June 22, 2002. The date underlined in red ink.

    Something
today.

    Just
after noon the door handle turned. I have seen it rattle before. But this time
it turned: a slow circle, like the person doing the turning was figuring out
how it worked. Or didn't want to be seen doing it.

    Then
the door swung open. It was Heather.

    Blinded
by the daylight, terrified. Filthy. No clothes.

    Then
the door slammed shut again.
Slammed
. If anyone had been
listening—anyone other than me—they would have heard the wood cracking the
frame. The click of the lock
. . .

    Voices
from the street pull me from the page. It's Barry Tate and his partner, the
former finishing up an anecdote that brings a chortle from the latter's chest.
Before they reach the cruiser Barry looks up to the window. He doesn't seem
surprised to see me here, my chin resting on the sill. In fact he waves. And I
wave back.

    "Nothing,"
he says, or at least shapes his mouth around the word without speaking it. Then
he shrugs.

    I
watch the two of them take their time getting into the car, enjoying being out
of the office. Even once the engine's started they linger, taking notes. Then,
having run out of excuses to let the clock run on, Barry shifts into drive,
rolls up Caledonia and out of sight.

    I'm
watching the front door by coincidence. Or I'm watching it because I was
directed to, just as Ben was on the twenty- second of June, 2002. Either way,
within a heartbeat of Barry Tate's cruiser rolling away, the doorknob turns.

    The
motion is tentative. And there is part of me even in this moment that
recognizes that this is merely an echo of Ben's hallucination, my own imagining
of an earlier imagining. It's why I let the doorknob turn a full circle without
looking away.

    A
click.

    And
then, before I can turn away, the door swings open.

    A
young woman. Naked and shaking, her hair a nest of sweat- glued clumps. She
tries to run, to attach the motion of pulling the door to her first step of
escape into the daylight, but her limbs are too unsteady, and she wavers
dizzily on the threshold.

    It
isn't Heather. It's the woman from the photos Randy showed me, the one I tried
not to let myself see, to memorize, though I was too late in that. Just as I am
too late to close my eyes against the dirt-blackened hands that come down on
Tracey's shoulders and pull her back into the house before the door slams shut.

    The
morning after we left the coach overnight in the Thurman house, we waited for
Ben at our table in the cafeteria, drinking the watery hot chocolate spat out
of a machine that made even worse tea and chicken soup. There was little talk.
We were boys of an age when sleep came easy, and were new to the emptiness that
followed a night spent troubled and awake.

    When
we saw Ben through the window making his way across the football field we knew
that he had found no more sleep than the rest of us, and that his visit to the
coach had not gone well. He looked like he was reprising his role as one of
Grimshaw's founding fathers in the annual school play: stooped, bent at the
knees, arms rigid at his sides.

    "You
think he's dead?" Randy asked, and for a moment I thought the question
concerned Ben himself. But of course Randy was asking about the coach. Whether
he had survived the night's cold.

    And
then, as Ben entered the cafeteria and started our way, a second interpretation
of Randy's question arrived. Had Ben going alone to see the coach had a purpose
other than eliciting a confession? Was he now the coach's killer, just as the
coach had been Heather Langham's?

    Ben
sat, reached for my hot chocolate. As he swallowed, he raised his brow as
though impressed by its wretchedness.

    "We
should bring the coach some of this," he said. "If he figures it's the
only breakfast he's going to get, he'd say anything."

    It
took what felt like five full minutes before any of us realized Ben had just
told a joke.

    Eventually,
Ben told us he'd gone into the house just before dawn. The coach was
"okay, physically." He wasn't admitting to any crimes, though. In
fact, the only things he was saying weren't making much sense at all.

    "How
do you mean?" I asked.

    "I
don't know. It might be an act."

    "Is
he pissed off?"

    "More
like he's scared."

    Ben
noticed some other kids, a bunch of grade niners, looking our way. He directed
a stare back at them so intense it made them scuttle off to mind their own
business.

    "He
kept saying he'd had an interesting conversation last night. Then he's looking
over his shoulder, like I'm not even there."

    "What
else?"

    Ben
thought for a moment. "He said we would have to be guardians."

    "We
are."

    "I
don't think he meant the team. He kind of switched personalities again—not a scared
kid anymore, but himself, more or less. He got, I don't know,
fatherly
on
me."

    "What'd
he say?"

    "Some
bullshit."

    "What
bullshit?"

    '"You
have to keep watch.'"

    "What's
that supposed to mean?"

    "You're
asking me?"

    "Sounds
like he's losing it," Randy said.

    "It's
pretty cold in there," I said. "Maybe he's hypothermic."

    "Or
possessed," Randy said, and mock-barfed, Linda Blair-style.

    Carl
was the only one who laughed. A sharp snort that reminded us he was there.

    "Don't
you get it?" he said. "It's a warning."

    "About
what?"

    
Carl
looked around the table.
He's going to tell them,
I thought.
He's
going to say there's a boy in the house who can talk inside your head if you
give him half a chance.