The Guardians (33 page)

    Few
in town knew Heather Langham when alive, but in death, she was treated like a
favourite daughter. After her body was returned to the aunt and uncle who had
raised her, Grimshaw organized a memorial service in the Municipal Hall
auditorium that ended up drawing a standing-room-only crowd of earnest
snifflers and speech-makers. By the end, the framed photo of Heather they'd set
on a chair at the front had been encircled by bouquets, wreaths, dolls and
teddy bears, as though the mourners were undecided whether to treat her as a fallen
soldier or a stolen child.

    A
couple of rows near the front had been reserved for her students, who were
asked to play at the end of the service a piece of music she'd taught us. This
was how Carl, Randy, Ben and I, along with a dozen other honkers and tooters,
came to grind our way through "The Maple Leaf Forever" before one of
Grimshaw's largest-ever public audiences. Somehow, our ineptitude only
magnified the moment's poignancy.

    The
coach's farewell couldn't have been more different. A patchy gathering at
McCutcheon's Funeral Home that we all attended—the four of us, that is, not the
whole team, though among the few other players who came I recall Todd Flanagan,
apologizing for the baby-formula stains on his blazer. I don't remember who
delivered the eulogy. Perhaps there wasn't one. There were no photos of the
deceased, no open casket; the coach's ashes were collected in an urn that, as
Randy whispered to me, looked a little like the Stanley Cup.

    The
only other attendee I specifically recall was the coach's wife, Laura. Maybe it
was the circumstances of her husband's death, or maybe she was too broken to
manage the weight of the moment, but even she was dry-eyed. Locking and
unlocking her fingers and checking her watch as though nervous about missing
her train out of town, which perhaps she was, as none of us ever saw her in
Grimshaw again.

    After
Miss Langham and the coach were found, it was impossible for even the most
rabid fans to conceive of the Guardians continuing any further in the playoffs.
The league announced the team's withdrawal from what remained of the season,
giving Seaforth a bye to the next round (where they were justly trounced by the
elbowing, tobacco-farmer sons of the Woodstock Wolves).

    Somewhere
in there Sarah broke up with me. Or I broke up with her. I can't remember a
definitive moment when we both walked away knowing it was over, perhaps because
such a moment never happened.

    Eventually,
she started seeing other guys. Roy Kimble, Dougie Craft, Larry Musselman.
Likable guys I would have been happy to hang out with had I not known they were
taking Sarah Mulgrave out to the Vogue or a bush party, which forced me to
loathe them instead, see them as slippery smooth talkers who Sarah, being a girl,
couldn't see as the preppie liars they were.

    We
still talked from time to time. Painful exchanges in the school hallways or out
by Nicotine Corner, where she would stop to ask how I was doing as I
chainsmoked before heading in, late, for class. She asked about my mom and dad,
and I asked about hers. She told me she missed me, and I said it was for the
best. But all I remember thinking was
You were mine once,
over and over.

    The
next two and a half years of high school passed in a numbed procession of
skipped classes and rec-room parties and daydreams of escape. We were
perfecting our normal acts.

    Every
day we undertook another exercise in the impossible. We slouched, listened to
the Clash and tried to pretend it never happened.

    We
did our best to fill the widening gaps within ourselves with distractions,
building bridges that might find their way to the other side. For Carl, this
meant drugs. More of the pot he'd been dulling himself with even before he
first went into the Thurman house, but afterward supplemented with speed, acid,
coke (even then finding its way into the hinterland). He soon assumed Randy's
place as our dealer, serving half the student body as well, a job that
introduced him to out-of-town distributors and mules, legitimately dangerous
men we'd sometimes meet sitting at his kitchen table. To us, he looked so young
compared to them as he confirmed the weight of baggies on his scales, handing
over rolls of cash we knew to have been earned from other kids' driveway
shovelling and part-time dishwashing. We worried about him. But I think the
same things that worried us frightened us as well, and so we watched Carl's
descent from an especially great distance.

    It was
Randy who seemed the least damaged among us. He went about cementing his
reputation as the school's goofball, the floppy-eared puppy who enjoyed
confounding success with the ladies. He even returned to playing hockey the
following year, doodling around the net and getting rubbed into the boards as
he had before. Randy was Randy. This is what you'd say when he fell onto
somebody's glass coffee table at a party or accepted a dare to run bare-assed
down Huron Street on a Friday night. Randy the jester, our fool.

    As
for me, I committed myself to perfecting the teenage-boy cloaking device:
sullenness, distance, a refusal to articulate any preferences or plans. I fell
out of any clubs or hobbies, and just scuffed around. Daydreaming about all the
shiny disguises money could buy.

    Ben
was the first of us to break, and we noticed it within days of Heather
Langham's memorial service.

    Whenever
we'd call him or drive by in Carl's car to pick him up he'd say he had
something he had to do, a chore or family engagement that required him to stay
home. After a time, he abandoned these excuses altogether and simply said he
didn't feel like going outside, though he welcomed us to hang out with him in
his attic bedroom, which we increasingly had to do if we wanted to see him at
all. Within weeks, it took all of Ben's strength to make it to school and home
again three days out of five, the other two written off as sick days with
signed letters from his mom.

    "Somebody
has to watch," he told me once. Ben was seated in what was now his spot, a
wooden, colonial- style chair with curled armrests situated so that he could
look directly out the window.

    "Watch
what, Ben?"

    "The
house."

    "Have
you seen something?"

    "Once
or twice. Something in there wants out, Trev. And we can't let it."

    There
was Ben's we again. The trouble was, this time, he was on his own.

    More
and more, Ben would spend his time sitting in his chair, staring out at the
Thurman house. He told us it required his full concentration to keep its
windows shut, the doors closed.

    "It's
like what the coach said," he told us. "There's some things you have
to guard against."

    "Fine,"
Carl said. "So why's it have to be you?"

    Ben
looked at the three of us. For a second, the strange intensity that had become
fixed over his features was
relaxed, and he managed half
a smile. There was love in it. Love and madness.

    "Because
you're all going to leave, and I'm going to stay," he said.

    For
what remained of our high-school days, Ben faded from the sweetly dreamy boy we
had known into a silhouette, a shadow in an attic window backlit by the
forty-watt bulb in the Ken Dryden lamp by his bed. Sometimes, when I missed him
but didn't want to ring the doorbell and have Mrs. McAuliffe, shivery and lost,
let me in, I would stand a half block from his house and watch him up there. He
rarely moved. And then, all of a sudden, he would launch forward and grip his
hands to the window frame, his eyes squinting at some imagined movement within
the Thurman house. How many times had he repeated this useless call to
attention over the years between then and the day he looped a rope over the
support beam in his ceiling, tied the other end around his neck and stepped off
one of the folding chairs we'd used for epic coffee-fuelled poker games in his
basement?

    Even
then, I wondered what particular corner of hell would turn out to be mine.

    I
wake up before dawn, so that it feels as though I haven't slept at all. Which
perhaps I haven't. My dreams—if they
were
dreams—were a confusion of questions.
Carl. Tracey Flanagan's whereabouts. The boy. The missing Dictaphone. Along
with Sarah, who while a source of some comfort has been tainted in my mind by
merely being so close to these other mysteries. It's like those nightmares
where you, say, catch your brother in the middle of taking an axe to the
neighbour's dog: you know it's not true, it's impossible, it never happened.
And yet, the next time you look at your brother—or the neighbour's dog-—he's
been altered. A piece of him pulled into the world of night thoughts.

    I
work myself out of bed, fighting the collected hours of stiffness. Every muscle
a hardened cord that must be warmed, then stretched, then retrained.

    I'm
finally standing when I see it.

    A
word I recognize through the hand it is written in even before I read its
letters. The same tight, furious, misspelled scrawl we'd all seen drawn into
the Thurman house's living- room window over two decades ago.

    
fuckt

    A
fingernailed threat cut through the dust. And written not on the outside of the
glass, but on the
inside.

    Sleepwalking.
Is this another Parkinson's symptom, one of the rarer ones to be found near the
bottom of the list? How about sleepwriting?

    I
shuffle over to the window and wipe away the boy's graffiti with a balled-up
T-shirt. When I'm done, it leaves the house across the street in greater
clarity. I don't watch it for long for fear of seeing the awakened thing I can
feel moving through its rooms.

    To
avoid any direct view of the house, I return to sit on the edge of the bed.
It's still early. The house, the town outside, everything still. There is time
to kill before Mrs. McAuliffe gets up and I can get into the shower without
disturbing her, so I have another go at Ben's journal. More pages of his take
on nothing.

    I
turn another crinkly page and come across something so unexpected I wonder if I
am in fact awake at all.

    A
Post-it Note. On it a message dated two months before Ben died.

    
TREVOR—

    
If
you have read this far, you deserve to know.

    
Look
behind the vent under the bed. Read only if you feel the need to.

    
Otherwise,
burn it all and don't look back.

    
PS.
Don't go in. No matter what.
Don't go in
.

    The
grille easily pulls away on the first tug. I stick my hand in and feel around
the duct, sliding under the bedframe far enough to slip my arm down all the way
to the elbow. I pull out a soft bundle.

    It's
another diary. This one bound in pliant leather, slim and easily folded into a
roll, bound tight by a strip of silver Christmas ribbon. I untie it and open
the cover to find not more pages of Ben's handwriting, but clippings and smudgy
photocopies. No notes, no accompanying explanation.

    The
first is a story cut from a tea-coloured page of
The Grimshaw Beacon.

    
Born
January 27, 1933. Died November 12, 1949
.

    
Tragedy
visited the home of foster parents Paul Schantz and his wife, May, this past week
when one of their charges, Elizabeth Worth, was found murdered in the home.
Miss Worth was only sixteen years old.

    
"We
loved her so much. She was a lovely child, so bright and kind. We have some
difficult young people come through these doors from time to time, but
Elizabeth wasn't one of them. It's heartbreaking to know she had the best of
her life ahead of her," commented Mr. Schantz, who has been running the
foster-care facility at 321 Caledonia for the past several years since
purchasing the property from James Thurman in 1941. Prior to Miss Worth's
passing, Mr. Schantz and his wife (who have no offspring of their own) had four
children from four separate birth families under their care.