The Guardians (25 page)

    "Who's
taking care of your nightclub while you're here?" Sarah asks.

    "It's
not mine anymore. I sold it."

    "Why?"

    "I
figure I'll need the money later, when this disease thing of mine gets
worse."

    Sarah
nods in precisely the same way that Kieran had earlier.

    "Kieran
strikes me as a fine young fellow," I say.

    "That
he is."

    "He
tells me his dad hasn't really been in the picture for a while."

    "Kieran's
father is a liar and third-rate criminal, among other things."

    "It
must be a drag. For both of you."

    "Not
for me. He's just
gone.
But Kieran doesn't fully understand that yet. He
doesn't get how some people are just rotten."

    
You
mean me?
I want to ask.

    And
then the image of Tracey Flanagan returns. Standing blind on the threshold of
the Thurman house's front door.

    "What
about you?" Sarah asks.

    "Me?"

    "A
family. Wife? Kids?"

    "No
wife. No kids, either. As far as I know."

    "I
suppose those were things you didn't want anyway."

    "I
was preoccupied.
Wilfully
preoccupied."

    "Sounds
kind of lonely," Sarah blurts, then rears back. "Oh my God. That came
out wrong. I didn't mean to assume—"

    "Yes.
I think I've been lonely. And not terribly happy either, though I never let
myself slow down long enough to realize I wasn't. Until recently, that
is."

    "Your
illness."

    "That.
And Ben. And coming back here. Seeing you."

    This
last bit isn't flirtatious, it just comes out in the uncrafted way of the
truth.

    The
second period starts, and Grimshaw begins to pull away from the tough but
unskilled Elmira boys, our forwards buzzing around their net but unable to put
one away. It is the sort of game where things can go wrong: you're winning as
far as the performance goes, but the scoreboard only shows the goals. It makes
me think that this is what moving to the city from a small town is all about.
It's not about the quality of life you live, but about putting up the hard
numbers for all to see.

    "You
ever feel like you missed out on something?" I ask. "Staying
here?"

    "Missed
out?"

    "The
opportunities. Professional options."

    "No,
you didn't mean that. You think the people you left behind were just too scared
to go where you did."

    "I
never saw it as leaving anybody behind."

    "No?"

    "Listen,
I didn't—"

    "You
think I was avoiding life by staying," Sarah says, icy as the Grimshaw
Arena's air. "Did you ever think you were doing the same thing by
leaving?"

    I'm
thinking, for the minutes that follow, that this is pretty much it. We had both
done our best to avoid the past, the vast body of unsaid thoughts between us,
and now we had been shown to be fools. Sarah still wanted the answers she'd
sought the winter we were in grade eleven, and I still couldn't give them to
her. There was nothing now but to wait until the game's end—or earlier, if she
decided to get up and leave—and return the buffering distance between us.

    But
then she surprises me. She holds my hand.

    "Let
me tell you what I know," she says, leaning close to my ear, so that I am
filled by her voice. "Something happened to you when we were kids.
Something awful. You think you escaped it, but you never did. You see me as one
of the casualties, the cost of running away to the circus. But I don't need to
know. I'm grown up, just like you. Borderline old, if you judge a thing by how
you feel most of the time. We can talk about the serious stuff if you want, or
not. But we're both way too banged up to worry about scratching the paint. Know
what I mean?"

    Sarah
leans away from me again, and the sounds of hockey return—the cut of skates,
the thunder of armoured bodies against the boards—leaving me light in my seat.
No tremors anywhere, no fight to remain still. I watch the game, but all of my
attention, every sense available to me, is concentrated on the woman in the
seat next to mine.

    "Close
game," she says.

    "It
only looks that way."

    After
the game, Sarah drives us back to her house, where she relieves the babysitter
of her duties and offers me a drink in the living room. She turns on the stereo
and cranks up the song the CD had been paused at the start of. "Hungry
Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran.

    "Remember
this?" she says, passing me my scotch and dancing on her own in the middle
of the room, the same cool, feline moves that stirred me as I watched her on
the darkened gym floor at school dances. "It's
terrible
, isn't
it?"

    "I
like it," I say, not lying. "Is it going to wake Kieran up,
though?"

    
"Nothing
wakes that kid up."

    I
watch Sarah dance. Make a private request of my brain to not show me any scary
pictures of Heather or Tracey or the boy or anyone but Sarah until the song is
over. Just give me this. Allow the next three and a half minutes to be ghost-free.

    When
she's finished she sits next to me on the sofa. Her skin pinkened, lips
plumped. She is so different from the girl I remember. Yet those are the same
freckles I once kissed.

    "Poor
Trevor," she says. "It must be hard, being a mystery."

    "I'm
not a mystery. There's just one thing I can't talk about."

    "That's
what makes it so hard."

    She
touches the back of my neck. Pulls me in. Her mouth warm and tasting faintly of
vanilla.

    "We're
going to have sex now," she says. "Aren't we?"

    "Lordy.
Do you think we could?"

    We go
up to Sarah's room. She draws the curtains and lets me watch her take her
clothes off. When my shaking hands struggle with my belt buckle, she helps. And
then she proceeds to help me in other ways too.

    It is
a kindness. But maybe there is even some suggestion of a future in it—an
unlikely, difficult, but not wholly impossible future. Something we both could
live in, live through. I had assumed that, with my disease, there was nothing I
could offer women anymore. But perhaps this was true only of those who saw me
as I am now and could envision little more than the decline to come.

    Sarah
could see this too, but also other things. She could see a past.

    Funny
what the memory holds and what it decides it can do without. Like a drunk
fisherman, it guts some of the least edible fish and tosses its prize catches
back into the deep.

    For
instance, I can distinctly remember the smell of the pay phone receiver I put
to my lips in the mezzanine of the arena after our second and final playoff
loss to Seaforth, but not why I said nothing when a voice at the other end told
me I'd reached Grimshaw Police dispatch and asked, "What is the nature of
your emergency?" I didn't speak, didn't move. Just breathed in the
receiver's ingrained traces of mustard, Old Spice and whisky sweat.

    Perhaps
the question posed too great a challenge. What
was
the nature of my
emergency? A kidnapped coach? ("Who kidnapped him?" "We
did.") A missing teacher's buried body? ("Who buried her?"
"We did.")

    But
no matter which of these crimes I had rushed from the dressing-room showers to
confess, it was over for me. And I was surprised. I thought it was more likely
to be the clownish Randy, the volatile Carl or— before his recent
transformation—the meditative Ben who would break first. In fact, I was
counting on one of them to tell.

    Here's
the thing: I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. We were all good kids. And now
it was time for our essential natures to take control again. So I got dressed
before everyone else, pulled a dime from the pocket of my jeans and dialled the
cavalry.

    I
remember that perfectly well. Just not why it didn't end there.

    But
the memory can lie too. Hide things away. Occasionally, it can lie and hide
even better than you.

    Because
there's Ben. Eyeing me through the crowd of disappointed fans lingering beside
the trophy cases.

    
We
can't,
his look said
.
I want this to end too. But right now,
you have to put the phone down
.

    I
opened my mouth to speak to the dispatcher. To put words to the nature of my
emergency.

    
They'll
send us to jail
.
Ben started toward me, his face growing in detail
as he approached
.
A grown-up biker-gang-and-rapist jail. We'll be their
girlfriends in there. For years. And when we get out, we'll be fucked all over
again
.

    I
returned the receiver to its cradle.

    "Sarah
not home?" Ben said, lying for us both.

    I
remember dropping my equipment off after the game, telling my parents I was
going over to Ben's house and walking along to the McAuliffes' with a bad
feeling. I'd had bad feelings about what was going on since our first hot-box
meeting, when it was decided something had to be done. But that night, the
ragged nerves took a turn into full-blown illness. Light-headed, tingly-toed. I
had the idea that the Thurman house wasn't haunted as much as it carried
contagion, and I was showing the first signs of infection.

    This
idea was followed by another. A premonition of the life ahead that turned out
to be largely true. Feeling sick, worrying about becoming sick, fighting and
carrying sickness: this is what it meant to grow up, grow old.

    By
the look of Ben's blotched cheeks when I met him under the railway trellis,
he'd caught the virus too.

    "It
has to happen tonight," he said.

    When
Ben opened the door to the cellar, I couldn't tell if he heard the voices down
there or if it was only me. A whispered conversation (too soft to make out any
words) between the coach and someone else. No, not a conversation—it was too
one-sided to be called that. The coach murmuring with excitement, and his
audience offering only a hissed
Yes
in response.

    But
how could I have heard all that within the few seconds between Ben's opening
the cellar door and placing his boot onto the first step, its protesting creak
instantly silencing whoever was down there? Because I'd been hearing them
before
the door was opened. Whatever the coach was saying had been growing
louder in my head from the moment we'd stepped onto the Thurman house's lot. A
few seconds more and I might have clearly made out the words.

    We
turned on our flashlights and started down. There was a smell I hadn't detected
on previous visits. A sweetness. It reminded me of the orange I had left in my
lunch box over Christmas holidays, and it turned my stomach.

    Our
lights found the coach at the same time. His teeth, in particular. Bared in a
comic exaggeration of mirth.

    "Come
closer," he said.

    With
his attention on Ben alone, I took the revolver out of the workbench drawer and
came forward to aim it at the wall two feet off the coach's side. (It is harder
than you'd ever guess to hold a gun steady on a man's chest. The snout keeps
slipping off its target, resisting, like trying to press two magnets of the
same charge together.) Now the coach watched me. Still showing me those teeth
of his, but with his head back, so a red throat glistened in my flashlight beam
as well.