The Guardians (23 page)

    "Us,"
he said. "He's saying we have to guard against ourselves."

    Now
it was Randy's turn to snort. "Ooooh. That's deep,
Carl. You've just
blown my mind."

    Carl
just kept grinning. Trying to look like he was still able to kid around with
Randy as he always had. Sitting there, aware of our eyes on him, we saw how our
hockey brawler, our square-jawed tough who was alone among us in being able to
fool liquor store clerks about his age, had lost twenty pounds overnight.
Chilled and frail, hugging his arms across his chest like one of the
wheelchaired ladies who lined the halls of Cedarfield Seniors Home.

    I
wondered if Todd Flanagan detected anything strange about us as he made his way
over to our table. Todd was a Guardian too. I could only hope he was writing
off our oddness to nerves about that night's game two against Seaforth.

    "Morning,
ladies," he said.

    Todd
was blue-eyed and dark-haired ("black Irish," as my father called his
family, though I never knew what this meant) and essentially decent, though he
fought hard to keep up his minimum obligations in the bullying and mockery
departments. I always thought he'd rather have been our friend than his
senior-year teammates', but such transgression between grades was unthinkable.
What also set Todd apart was that he was a dad. An eighteen-year-old father to
a daughter born at the beginning of the season. We envied him—not for this, but
for his girlfriend, Tina. A tight-sweatered vixen whose brief career in
boy-trading had been cut short with the arrival of Tracey, the drooling,
howling bundle she sometimes brought to games.

    "Anybody
seen the coach?"

    "No,"
Ben said, taking another gulp of my muddy hot chocolate. "Why?"

    "Laura
called me this morning."

    "Laura?"

    "His
wife
dickwad. Said he didn't come home last night. Wondered if he was
hanging out with somebody on the team."

    "All
night
?"

    "I
know. It's weird."

    "He'll
turn up," Carl said. "Has the coach ever missed a game?"

    Todd
shook his head. "Seaforth pussies," he said half-heartedly before
backing away.

    Over
morning classes, news of Laura Evans spotted in the principal's office was
circulated in different versions, from her showing up with a pair of cops to
her bawling uncontrollably until the school nurse gave her a pill. We didn't
believe any of these stories necessarily. But what we did know was that the
coach's absence had now been officially reported. Combined with Heather
Langham's disappearance, it was a story that had nowhere to go but into wilder
and wilder speculations. Primary among these was that Heather and the coach had
run off together. The other theory concerned a more macabre take. A monster who
had crept into Grimshaw to claim its teachers, one by one.

    "I
hope he takes Dandruff Degan next," I remember Vince Sproule saying.
"Save me asking for an extension on my cartography assignment."

    Among
the Guardians there was an added concern about whether that night's game could
go ahead without the coach. There was a critical, morale-sapping difference
between the man behind the bench being reported missing and him coming down
with the flu. Nothing actually wrong was known to have happened. And yet the
mystery about his absence, the foreign whiff of the uncanny that had drifted
over Grimshaw's imagination, seemed to undermine the importance of a hockey
game, even if it was the playoffs.

    But
without a coach to call it off, and without any evidence of adultery or more
serious wrongdoing to bring before league officials, the game was an at once
unbelievable and unstoppable event shadowing our day. For us, the four
Guardians who knew where the coach was, the idea of lacing up and charging
around the ice in just a few hours made us almost as sick as thinking of how he
had got there.

    It
wasn't until I saw Sarah waiting for me at my locker that I realized I'd been
running from her all day. Taking different routes between classes, avoiding the
cafeteria at lunch, pretending I didn't see her on the one occasion she waved
over the heads of other students at the far end of the hall. But now there was
no escape. Nothing to do but try to work up a smile and taste her grape
ChapStick with a kiss.

    "You
sick or something?" she asked. "Because you look a little on the
pukey side, gotta say."

    "Just
nervous about tonight's game."

    "Nope.
Try again." She came in for another hug, which allowed her hand to cup my
crotch. "So tell me," she whispered against my ear, "what's
going on here?"

    "There's
nothing going on."

    "You
think I'm dumb?"

    "You're
the opposite of dumb."

    "And
what's that?"

    "Smart?"

    Sarah
pulled back a few inches so I could see her face.

    "I
love you, Trevor," she said. And though I tried to say it back, it
wouldn't come.

    I
remember this exchange so clearly now for a reason I hadn't expected when I
first summoned it to mind. It wasn't the worry I had that Sarah would figure
out what we had done. It was a flash of knowledge.

    What
was happening in the Thurman house had already drawn a line between Sarah and
me, and though it didn't stop me from loving her, it was draining the idea of
forever
from our love.
There will be others,
I thought for the very
first time as I kicked my locker shut, spun the lock and started away, lying
that I had to get to a team meeting.
She is only a girl among girls.
It
was cruel, however private a thought it remained.
Soon, a whole day will
pass when you don't think of her once.
Thoughts whose meanness was all the
harder to bear because their truth placed them out of reach, beyond forgiving.

    My
turn to visit the coach was scheduled to follow the last bell of the day, and I
was late already. At that time of year, losing fifteen minutes can mean a lot
when it comes to light, the after-school dusk easing ever closer to night. It
made my walk to the Thurman house feel longer. And when it came into view, it
was halfway to losing the vulnerable details—the bubbled paint, sagging
porch—that in daylight denied it some of its power. The house preferred
darkness for the same reason old whores do. It allowed for the possibility of
seduction.

    The
between-class report from Randy, who'd gone in before me, told of a coach whose
mental condition was deteriorating faster than his confinement alone should
have given rise to. Ben had tried giving him a pen and piece of paper on which
to write whatever he needed to say that he couldn't say aloud, and the coach
had simply signed his name at the bottom and told Ben to fill in the rest any
way he wanted. He hadn't eaten the food we delivered to him. He wasn't
complaining of the cold, or of being falsely accused, or even of being lashed
to a post in a sunless cellar. What he kept saying was that he wasn't alone in
there.

    This
was what kept me frozen on the sidewalk. I pretended that I was making sure
nobody was looking before I crept along the hedgerow, but in fact I was
wondering how much money I had left in my account from a summer of pool
cleaning, and if it would be enough for a train ticket to Toronto.

    
He's
not alone in there
.

    As if
on cue, there was the sound of a distant train whistle, beckoning me. Followed
by a flash of movement in one of the side windows.

    Pale
skin. A blur of long, tossed hair from a head twisted from side to side. A
blink of struggle.

    It
was the impulse to help, to save—it was a
woman
I'd seen—that crunched
my feet onto the frozen grass. Sliding under cover of cheek-poking branches.
When I drew square with the house I fell to my knees.

    It was
the same window where I'd noticed the hopeless
fuckt
the night we
discovered Heather Langham's body. The word still there, a legible blue against
an interior of black.

    Up
the hill of Caledonia Street, the streetlights were flickering to life, one by
one. That's what I'd seen. Not a woman but the bulb in the streetlight behind
me popping to brightness.

    Yet
even with this mystery solved, I stayed where I was. The twilight, the dirty
panes, the lightless interior: even if something was there, anything that could
be observed through the window would be obscured if it showed itself again. It
made me squint. There was the sense that, above all, the house wanted me to
stick around, to witness. Better yet, to come inside.

    Which
I wouldn't do. What difference would it make? The coach wasn't going to tell me
anything if he hadn't already told Randy or Ben. And they were coming by later
for another visit anyway. It needn't be me going in there now, alone.

    I
crawled out from under the hedgerow. Rose to my feet, started sidestepping back
toward the sidewalk.

    That
was the right thing to do. Here's the wrong:

    I
looked back at the window. And saw a woman's

    face
come to the glass.

    I
fell back against the branches. If the hedge hadn't been there I would have
collapsed, but it held me up, pinned to its nettles like a plastic bag blown
against a fence.

    When
I looked at the window again, there was only an orb of streetlight. And the
fuckt.
Though wasn't the
t
slightly smudged from the moment before?

    I
started toward the back of the house, adding details to the face I'd seen. A
woman. That was all I had to start with. Along with the idea that she was in
desperate fear. And that she was naked. That she wasn't alone.

    Tina
Uxbridge.

    I'd
been thinking of her ever since Todd had come by our table in the cafeteria. In
the back of my mind I'd been flipping through my (partly made-up) mental
snapshots of Tina hip-swinging down the school's hallways, Tina breastfeeding,
Tina and Todd and the different ways they might have gone about conceiving
their daughter. The truth is, I'd pictured her, dwelled on her, before. Because
she was pretty and I was sixteen. Because I was a sixteen-year-old boy.

    I
opened the back door.

    For a
time I stood in the kitchen, listening. I think I half expected to hear the
coach's voice, cackling my name from the cellar or pleading for release. The
house's quiet should have brought relief, but didn't. I was waiting and
listening. Which meant something else was too.

    And
then it
told
me it was.

    We're
waiting.

    The
faintest whisper, no louder than a midge's wings.

    I
didn't go down to the cellar to check on the coach. He might have escaped,
might have been dead, I didn't care. His fate meant nothing to me as I shuffled
down the hall and came to stand just inside the living room. It was the woman I
needed to see.

    There
was the
fuckt
on the window. The smudged
t.

    The
house had wanted me to watch. And all there was to see was the way the shadow
of the backlit tree limbs tried to nudge a beer can over the rug. Yet I stayed.
Wishing for the woman or any other dead thing not to appear, and impatient for
it at the same time.

    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.