The Guardians (24 page)

    Along
with a formless shadow moving over the floor. One that, over the course of
seconds, cohered into a human form lying on the rug. "Tina?"

    The
shadow rose to its feet. Went to the window I'd first seen her face in.
Performed the same act of pressing close to the glass, looking out. Except this
time she turned.

    Her
eyes a pair of glistening buttons. The glint of froth on her lips. Heather.

    I
must have turned away. I must have found the back door, shouldered out into the
cold.

    But
even this was already a memory. I was past Ben's house and at the top of the
Caledonia Street hill, breathless but still running, before I could say I'd
seen anything at all.

    When
I made it home my mother had two phone messages for me. One from Ben, the other
from Sarah.

    I
returned Ben's call first. He asked how my session with the coach went, if I
remembered to turn on the tape recorder while talking with him, if he seemed
any closer to confessing. It was a question I'd prepared an answer to.

    On
the rest of the walk home, part of me argued that I should tell Ben what I'd
seen in the window, that what was going on was out of our control, that we had
awakened some long-slumbering presence with what we'd done and it would win any
fight we might attempt to wage on

    it.
It might not kill us if we went into the Thurman house again, but we wouldn't
come out wholly alive either. In the end, though, I merely lied. "The
bastard's still not saying anything." "Okay . . . okay.
Okay,"
he said. "After the game. You and me."

    I
called Sarah next. Faked a girl's voice and squeaked "Wrong number"
when her dad answered.

    Sarah
sat in the stands in her usual spot opposite the teams' benches. Offered me a
good-luck wave during the pre-game warm-up, though I didn't look her way.
Didn't wave back.

    When
I came out of the dressing room for the start of the first period, she was
gone.

    We
lost. Coachless, tentative, winded. 5-1. Though even that makes it sound closer
than it was.

    I
scored our only goal. A Trev classic: an in-the-crease flip over their fallen
goalie's shoulder, my stick a spatula tossing a rubber burger into the net. Not
pretty, but it counted.

    The
rest of the game is out of memory's reach now. I must have looked down the
bench and locked eyes with Carl, or Randy, or Ben, but whatever their faces
revealed was something I failed to take with me. It felt only like the end of
things.

    Which,
in a sense, it was. That night's loss turned out to be the final game of the
Guardians' season. As for me, I never put skates on again.

    It
takes some time—a minute? a half-hour?—to fully convince myself that I had not
just seen a naked Tracey Flanagan attempting to escape out the front door of
the Thurman house. So what
had
I seen? A reimagining of what I'd read in
Ben's diary, surely, except for him it was Heather—a long-dead Heather
Langham—who had been pulled back into the dark. It was nothing more than the
power of suggestion.

    Still,
I had to remind myself that Officer Barry Tate and his partner had just
searched the place and found nothing. That what Ben had claimed to see was an
impossibility. That hallucinations are on my Parkinson's symptom list
("Not long, but often quite weird," one doctor warned).

    Working
my way through these arguments prevents me from calling the police. I don't do
anything but have a shower, get dressed and call a taxi to take me over to
Sarah's.

    But
that's not to say that I don't return every five minutes or so to the image of
Tracey Flanagan opening the Thurman house's front door. Or that I don't allow
myself to wonder: Whose hands pulled her back?

    Sarah
lives in a boxy, aluminum-sided place out by the fairgrounds, a structure shaped
much like the house tokens in Monopoly. When I give the cab driver the address
he calls it "the new part of town," which is how it was regarded even
when I was growing up, even though all the properties were built in a rush
immediately after the war. Aside from a few stabs at additions—a blown-out
kitchen here, a carport there—it's a neighbourhood that looks about the same
now as it must have in the late '40s, and serving the same purpose too:
entry-level homes for the blue-collared, the secretarial and, more recently,
the refugees of divorce.

    Sarah's
is the nicest on its block. Perennials lining the front walkway, shutters
freshly painted green, a vase of cut flowers displayed in the living-room
window. I wonder, as I haul myself out of the cab, if they've been put there to
welcome me. Me, as razor-burned and over-cologned as a teenager, and about as
nervous too.

    Is
this, as Randy had asked, an actual date? I'm surprised, clearing my throat and
knocking at the door, how much I want it to be. Some nostalgic simulation of
courtship might be just the thing, sweet and reassuring and laced with the
suspense that comes with wondering if there will be a goodnight kiss at the
end. I'm thinking the question will be answered by Sarah's choice of wardrobe,
and I am hoping, as the door opens, for some show of leg or collarbone. But
instead I am met by a kid. A boy I'd guess to be around eleven years old.

    "Is
your mommy home?"

    "You
mean my
mom
?"

    "If
they're the same person, then yes."

    He stands
there. Patiently absorbing my details, which at present include two fluttering
hands at my sides that I attempt to subside by having one hold the other across
my waist. If this trembly stranger at his door asking for his mother disturbs
him in any way, he doesn't show it. In fact, he ends up standing aside and,
with an introductory sweep of his arm, mumbles, "You want to come
in?"

    It
smells good in here. It's the flowers in the window, but also recent baking and
perfume.

    "You're
Trevor," the kid says, closing the door behind me.

    "That's
right."

    "My
mom's boyfriend."

    "From
a long, long time ago."

    "That's
just what
she
said. Except she had one more 'long.'"

    A
teenage girl wearing train-track braces emerges from the kitchen with a plate
of oatmeal cookies.

    "My
babysitter," the kid says with a shrug, then takes a cookie. "These
are good. You should try one, Trevor."

    "Don't
mind if I do."

    "You
want to see my room?"

    "I
think I'm supposed to take your mom—"

    "She's
still getting ready. She said I was supposed to entertain you."

    "Okay.
Any suggestions?"

    "I've
got Transformers."

    "Why
didn't you say so?"

    His
name is Kieran. Sarah's only child. The father supposedly lives out east now,
though nobody really knows for sure. He doesn't show up even on the holidays he
says he will, and he never sends the money from the jobs he says he's going to
get. I learn all of this on the walk up the half flight of stairs to the kid's
room.

    "Trevor?"
Sarah calls out from behind the closed bathroom door. "I'll be out in
three minutes."

    "Take
your time. Kieran's giving me the tour."

    "Go
easy on him, Kier."

    "He
ate a whole cookie almost as fast as I did!" Kieran shouts with the
excitement that might accompany the witnessing of magic.

    I sit
on the edge of Kieran's bed and collect the toys and books he shows me, noting
the cool sword of this warrior-mutant, the wicked bazooka of that marine. Our
conversation is sprinkled with off-topic questions ("Did you have soldiers
when you were a kid?" from him; "Do you have friends in the
neighbourhood?" from me), through which we learn what we need to know of
each other. He is nearly breathless with pleasure at showing me his stuff,
which is of course not really just stuff but entryways into a boy's world, his
secret self.

    The
kid's hunger for this—the company of a grown-up man in the house, shooting the
breeze—is so naked it shames me. Shames, because it is something I too wanted
at his age, but only partly, occasionally received. Though Kieran's case is
worse than what I remember of my own. Companionship with a dad type has been
missing so long in him he doesn't bother hiding it anymore. He isn't picky.
Even I'll do.

    He
asks about my shaking only once. "What's wrong with you?" is how he
phrases it.

    "It's
a disease."

    "Does
it get worse?"

    "Yes."

    "It's
not so bad right now."

    "No.
It's bad. But what can you do?"

    He
nods just as Randy or Carl would have. Because all of us know it: What
can
you do? His unhandsome circle of a face confirms this. There are a good many
things he can do nothing about too.

    Sarah
appears in the doorway. I am glad to see both collarbone and black-nyloned
legs.

    "You
think I could borrow Trevor for a few hours?" she asks.

    "Okay.
But take this." Kieran drops a toy Ferrari, his favourite, into the palm
of my hand. "You have to bring it back, though."

    "I
promise."

    Kieran
nods. Spins around to give his mother a kiss. As Sarah and I head downstairs and
out the door he tells us to have a good time.

    "What
about dinner?" I ask Sarah as we slip into her car.

    "They
had pretty good hot dogs at the arena last time I was there," she says,
pumping the gas until the Honda's engine coughs to life. "Mind you, that
was over twenty years ago. Give or take."

    "You
just went for the hot dogs?"

    "Course
not. There was a cute boy who played right wing at the time."

    "Bit
of a hot dog himself, if I remember correctly."

    "Nah.
He was just a boy. And they're
all
hot dogs."

    The
Grimshaw Arena hasn't changed much since the days we charged around its sheet
of ice, cheered on by parents and sweethearts and fans who saw good value in a
night out that consisted of a four-dollar ticket and seventy-five-cent hot
chocolates. The tickets are double that now, and the stands, when Sarah and I
find our seats behind the penalty box, feel dinkier than in my day There is
still the cold of the place. A refrigerated air that huddles Sarah close to me
for warmth.

    For
most of the first period we just watch the game—surprisingly exciting, though
the players are smaller than I was expecting, just a bunch of cherry-cheeked
kids trying to look tough behind their visors—and eat hot dogs that, as Sarah recalled,
aren't half bad. It feels to me not just like an old- fashioned date but like
an old-fashioned
first
date: no low lighting, no alcohol. The opposite
kind of thing I'd do with the girlfriends I dated during my Retox days, if you
could call them dates. If you could call them girlfriends.

    At
the intermission, we catch up on the last couple of decades of each other's
lives in broad strokes. Sarah tells me about her "okay job" as
assistant office manager of a contracting firm in town; the handful of women
friends she goes out with once every other week to get hammered and
"complain about our marriages, or how we wished we still had one;"
how she feels that while her life isn't necessarily great, she's not miserable
either, like she's "floating on this black ocean without sinking into it,
y'know?" I talk about the deals I hustled to rise from restaurant manager
to hedge-fund pusher to owner of my very own nightclub, where I would hire and
fire and in the evenings feel ten years younger (and in the headachey mornings
feel ten years older). I speak of the Parkinson's indirectly, referring to it
as "this disease thing of mine," as though it's a vaguely ridiculous
side project I'd been asked to be a partner in and now can't get out of.